Liberty ship demolition derby

What if Cinderella's castle at Disneyland really were a castle? Filled with teenagers and dwarves ready to defend it from assault with all-American arsenals? Via the tabloid weirdness of Drudge Report, busy minting the clicks on pages full of advertisements exploiting fears of imminent gun confiscation in advance of the labor camp roundups, we learn that a group of self-styled patriots is planning to do something just like that in the "American Redoubt" of northern Idaho, building a thousand-acre fortress chartered as a right-libertarian alternative subdivision. "The Citadel" proposes to take the social isolation of the gated community, inject it with equal doses of California commune and survivalist compound, and charter an armed country club for voluntary exiles to fortify the adversarial reality they have in mind when they think of the American dream. Who knew the Ruby Ridge lifestyle could become the basis of a real estate development pitch?

"The Citadel Community will house between 3,500 and 7,000 patriotic American families who agree that being prepared for the emergencies of life and being proficient with the American icon of Liberty — the Rifle — are prudent measures. There will be no HOA. There will be no recycling police and no local ordinance enforcers from City Hall."

And from the FAQ:

"One of the primary reasons for a lease paradigm versus private property inside the walls is our desire to make the community for Patriots only.

"The model will be similar in many ways to that of Disneyland. It is walled, gated, private property with controlled access. People pay to enter and agree to the rules because they see value in doing so. It is all based on a voluntary agreement between the owners of the property and those who want to come inside."

The website for the Citadel lays out a dark, counter-utopian piece of architecture fiction—the design for a right-utopian community on a corporate model, situated in the evergreen interstices of American socio-geographic reality. The corporation would acquire the the land, and charter the rules of the community within the bounds of applicable U.S. and Idaho law. Residents would lease, rather than own, their homes (all of which, the site advises, would be made from poured concrete), and would enter into a membership agreement with a pretty intense list of the chores involved in fertilizing the orchard of liberty and keeping Thomas Jefferson's hair on fire, including:

"Two: Every able-bodied Patriot aged 13 and older governed by this Agreement shall annually demonstrate proficiency with the rifle of his/her choice by hitting a man-sized steel target at 100 yards with open sights at the Citadel range. Each Resident shall have 10 shots and must hit the target at least 7 times.

"Three: Every able-bodied Patriot aged 13 and older governed by this Agreement shall annually demonstrate proficiency with a handgun of choice by hitting a man-sized steel target at 25 yards with open sights at the Citadel range. Each Resident shall have 10 shots and must hit the target at least 7 times.

"Four: Every able-bodied Patriot of age within the Citadel will maintain one AR15 variant in 5.56mm NATO, at least 5 magazines and 1,000 rounds of ammunition. The responsibility for maintaining functional arms and ammunition levels for every member of the household shall fall to the head of household. Every able-bodied Patriot will be responsible for maintaining a Tactical Go Bag or Muster Kit to satisfy the Minuteman concept..."

And so on. Basically, an entire communal fiefdom organized around the idea of the Second Amendment as a constitution unto itself, expressing a dark, anti-communitarian, anachronistic thread of our culture that our current dysfunctional politics is only managing to stoke. But one can also wonder whether this project might portend more than the resurgence of the Bo Gritz Zeitgeist.

I've been interested for some time in speculations about how the increasing obsolescence (and literal bankruptcy) of the post-Westphalian nation state as the business model of our political reality would lead to a proliferation of experiments in micro-sovereignties—carving out private geographic space for socio-political experimentation that mirrors the way network culture cultivates such communities in virtual space. Things like the Honduran charter cities experiments and the ship-borne libertarian "seasteading" plans funded by Peter Thiel and others are examples that have gotten traction and publicity in the past year. In the pre-Civil War U.S., state governments frequently authorized experimental private communities, from the Mormon settlement of Nauvoo, which was sanctioned by the legislature as an essentially autonomous political island within the state of Illinois, to the unexpectedly strange-looking predecessors of the modern business corporation—creatures of private bills chartered for specific purposes with whatever rights they could persuade the state to give them. When you remix these kinds of precedents in the network's tumbler of political diversity, the possibilities are intriguing (and, as this example shows, potentially scary—or at least fertile territory for cranks).

By way of timely example, Drudge also links today a story from the Times of Israel that Bashar Assad is now living with his family on a warship off the Syrian coast and taking a helicopter to work, giving us a fresh new stake on the idea of seasteading. One imagines the Alawaite Baathist regime, following its imminent deposition, existing as a floating post-sovereignty, roaming the oceans with rent-a-cop Russian naval escorts until the money runs out. Shahs of Sunset meets the Love Boat with a healthy dose of Ballardian cozy catastrophe.

I just wrote a story for Rick Klaw's upcoming Texas science fiction anthology about an investment banker who is in the business of mergers and acquisitions between countries (and other political subdivisions) rather than companies. The idea, to me, has a curious plausibility in a world of emergent experiments in localized sovereignty. The network has already destabilized the old geopolitical order. It seems inevitable that it will begin trying to remake our polities in its own image—an infinitely diverse archipelago of self-invented political realities, many if not most of which will seem crazy to their neighbors. How will the social organization of network culture interact with the tactile realities of geography as the principal determinant of political identity? To what extent can we create functioning polities, founded on authentically consensual social contracts, that transcend the boundaries of the lands on which we live?

During the September 2012 attack on the U.S. Consultate in Benghazi, consular official Sean Smith was also hanging out in the smoke-filled rooms of Eve Online, where he had started an intergalactic diplomatic corps. For a decade now, Professor Ed Castronova has been documenting the emerging political economy of virtual worlds—including the exchange rates with real-world currencies. The new socio-economic realities we constitute through our screens have acquired indisputable reality. As our contemporary idea of community becomes more like a Facebook group than town meeting, surely it's just a matter of time that these disparate realms of the identity we invent and the identity we inherit figure out ways to converge? Some of them may even leave the drawbridges open.

R.I.P. Steven Utley, 1948-2013

Damn it all to hell. I was just winding down for the night when I saw the awful, wretched news that Steven Utley had passed away. Words can't express how angry this makes me. Hell, I didn't even know Steven was sick. I saw him at Armadillcon (that's a photo from a previous Armadillocon to the right--Chris Roberson's on the left, Steven is on the right) this past summer and he looked healthy and in good spirits. We passed in the hall several times on the way to different events, but promised to catch up with each other later on and chat. Of course, we never did. Now I'm kicking myself. Lawrence Person's posts sum it up:

I just received word from Jessica Reisman:

Molly let me know that Steve passed last night at about 10:40 pm, eastern. His family was with him.

I’ll miss him.

As will we all.

Utley announced to his friends that he had been diagnosed with Type 4 cancer in his intestines, liver, and lungs, and a lesion on his brain on December 27, 2012. On January 7, he sent out an email saying that he was losing his motor skills and designated Jessica as his literary executor (and hopefully she’ll be able to get some of his swell stories back in print). On the morning of January 12 he slipped into a coma and died that night.

Steven was one of the original members of the legendary Turkey City Writers Workshop. I became a fan of Steven's maybe 20 years ago at a Monkey House party in College Station, during some AggieCon or other. Perusing the bookshelves (they've got great bookshelves at the Monkey House) I came across a copy of Lone Star Universe, the anthology Steven co-edited with George W. Proctor. I was besmitten. I mean, that Texas-centric anthology spoke to me, and I vowed to put together another myself, come hell or high water. And I almost managed to pull it off a time or two, but Cross Plains Universe and now Rayguns Over Texas have pretty much taken the wind out of those sails for good. Still, I got Steven to sign my copy at Armadillocon 30 (as well as his collection Beasts of Love) so it's all good.

I first "met" Steven online, in the late 90s, on comic book message forums, believe it or not. I can't remember what we talked about, but we exchanged quite a few messages back and forth. Then I began tracking down his other fiction, having only read the magnificent "Ghost Seas" in Lone Star Universe previously. His story, "Custer's Last Jump," co-written with frequent collaborator Howard Waldrop, is as brilliant (and outrageous) an alternate history romp as ever I have read. But what is truly amazing is that during my tenure as fiction editor at RevolutionSF.com from 2002-2005, Steven became my most-frequent contributor, sending me both classic works for reprint and original pieces. This is particularly amazing, considering the fact that I paid him "all the prestige he could eat." But I made sure to assign the best illustrators to his stories, so that's something. I was fortunate enough to publish several installments of his classic Silurian cycle, including "Another Continuum Heard From!" which takes a skewed look at voting rights when they come into conflict with the technicalities of time travel. It makes for a poor memorial, but here is a comprehensive list of every Steven Utley story I published while at RevSF. It is the best that I can do:

Abaddon
The Age of Mud and Slime
Another Continuum Heard From!
Chaos and the Gods
Getting Away
Little Whalers
My Evil Twin
Pan-Galactic Swingers

The Future of the Confederacy, i.e.: Now

Seating within the gravestones

I seem to be doing a poor job of writing about the future on this blog. And let's face it, there's nothing quite as mired in the past as the Confederate States of America.

Opposing units, artillery vs. skirmishers

Regular readers might remember a post I wrote about nineteenth century Austin city marshal Ben Thompson. He was a larger than life gunfighter with a body count to rival the worst outlaw. But he was largely forgotten by history, presumably because he had a boring name and was never photographed in a cowboy hat.

If I were a journalist, I would have
asked what those gold neck sashes
were for, but I'm not,so I didn't.

I have written about him several times, mainly because he embodied the same paradoxes as Austin's current police force, in that he was apparently well-meaning and consistently charitable to others, but he was also prone to acts of state-sponsored injustice (he once arrested a woman for wearing slacks) and unchecked violence (he routinely avoided homicide charges by invoking 'self-defense').

Presumably on the strengths of my multiple posts on Ben Thompson, the organizers of the Ben Thompson grave re-dedication offered me a press pass to the event. I accepted, largely because they promised a twenty-one musket and cannon salute, but also because no one has ever offered me a press pass before and how could I turn that down? The ceremony took place at a city-owned cemetery, so I assumed it was an official event.

At that time it hadn't sunk in that the press release for the event used the word 'Confederate' six times.

Taken as a whole, the event was about 90% Confederate. Thompson's great-granddaughter spoke and she was the only one who mentioned the parts of Thompson's life that fell outside of the Civil War. The rest of the program included a notorious Republican politician praising the “military tradition” of the Confederacy, masonic Confederate rites, and a truly awesome musket/canon fusillade.

I arrived right as the ceremony began. While on my way to the event I worried that I would have trouble finding Thompson's grave in the rather large cemetery. I needn't have worried, all I had to do was follow the gay colors of four Confederate flags of various designs, a Texas flag, and, almost as an afterthought, the US flag.

This guy would be the
coolest steampunker
at the con

You would think that there was no point in having a press pass at an open event with about forty people, but I'm glad I registered because my press pass came with a swag bag. The contents included such treasures as invitations to join Confederate groups, a commemorative wooden coin from a company called Rebel Trucking, and tourist brochures for Giddings.

The master of ceremonies, a bearded officer in the gray, called the ceremony to order with a pledge of allegiance to the US flag, the Texas flag, and the array of Confederate flags. I guess that's the appropriate order. I don't know the words to the latter two, and everyone else in the crowd was mumbling so I may not have been the only one. The MC saluted the flags, but as I have never served in the military, either real or re-enacted, I merely doffed my hat. Have you ever been in a situation where you take your hat off during the pledge of allegiance to the US flag, and the next thing you know, you find yourself with your hand over your heart while everyone around you pledges their allegiance to the Confederate flag? It's awkward.

Texas Land Commissioner talks
about Military Tradition

An errant gust blows away the wreath
 and Jerry Patterson leaps instantly
into action

Politician and man of action

We'll let the opening prayer pass without comment and move straight to the speech by Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson. Coincidentally, I had actually written a profile piece on the man about a year ago. I
suspect that Patterson attended the event for the explicit purpose of having his picture taken in front of the Confederate flag. For those of you not from Texas, land commissioner is a not particularly high-profile post, probably about the fifth most powerful office in the state's executive branch (governor being about third or fourth). Commissioner Patterson has earned a name for himself by taking principled stands on issues where either the CSA or firearms play a prominent role. For instance, he's the reason why there's thousands of acres of quail and varmint hunting opportunities out by Big Bend, and as a holder of the Texas public hunting lands permit, he's earned my vote for just that reason.

A widow lays her black rose while the land
commissioner watches, bemused.

Patterson arrived late, missing the opening prayer (which we will NOT comment on), but when the wind blew away Ben Thompson's wreath, he leapt off his folding chair to grab it and return it to its rightful place. That's exactly the sort of level-headed can-do attitude that one expects of a public official when chaos strikes.

The next element of the ceremony was the laying of flowers by the largely female re-enacting groups. One of the groups, called the Soiled Doves of Texas, dressed in bawdy saloon wench corsets and skirts (but as it's affirmed on their website, they are not actually prostitutes). The other group, the Order of Confederate Roses, occupied the far

A widow glides across the graveyard

opposite side of the nineteenth century continuum of womanly virtue. They dressed entirely in black, their faces obscured under a black veil. They looked like a cross between the Bene Gesserit and characters from a ghost story (you know the one, where a guy on a train wakes up in his sleeper car to find a strange woman in a rocking chair in the corner, and then it turns out that the lump she has under a shawl in her lap wasn't a child after all but her husband's severed head!). As far as I could tell, they didn't say a word the entire ceremony, just maintained their spooky silence as they proceeded one by one up to Thompson's grave and presented it with a single black rose.

The saloon wench shows her respect

The MC then performed a ceremony where he read off the names of the Confederate dead and then rang a bell in remembrance. I believe they only read the names of the ones who Thompson knew personally, which took a lot less time than I had feared it would.

Cannons!

Then we got to the part I'd been waiting for, the firing of the cannon. I guess that our local CSA regiment was never properly disarmed after The War.

Musket salute!

Now comes the part of the article where I address the elephant in the blog post: Aren't people with a lot of confederate flags horrible racists? For instance, the KKK no longer dresses in the white hoods, they cover their faces with Confederate flag bandannas  From what I saw during the Thompson event, I would say that although the Confederate re-enacters occupy the same iconographic continuum as the KKK, they don't seem like the same social group. In essence they don't appear much less dorky or guileless than the cosplayers the readers of this blog are familiar with. Think of them as steampunkers, but without the sense of whimsy.

The ringing of the bell for
the names of the Confederate dead

Commissioner Patterson made the point (in roughly so many words) that although our Texas ancestors have a lot of warts when viewed through a 21st century lens, it's not wrong to venerate the “military tradition” of the people who served.

Far be it for me to criticize someone for celebrating their ancestors. After all, my family still holds the vikings in high esteem and that's not considered distasteful (at least in Minnesota). But maybe that's because so much time has passed, or maybe it's because nobody really denies that vikings were terrifying racist murders. Certainly nobody wants the vikings to come back into power. Likewise, for all the talk of Texas secession, it seems unlikely that there's any serious attempts by the South to establish a golden circle plantation state any time in the near future.

Seriously, I wish I dressed like that every day

Maybe there's a sliding timeline of acceptable historical re-enactment? For instance, people celebrating the Germany of seventy years ago are clearly monsters. But Minnesotans celebrating the vikings of a thousand years ago (who were at least as bad as the Confederates on a sheer human suffering level) are considered cute. Flying the flag of the rebel south is probably somewhere in the middle.

Lost in machine translation

I found the above brain bomb just two clicks from the Drudge Report. Could it be purposeful on the part of that innuendo-slinging cyber-Winchell, busy fomenting post-Newtown "blood of tyrants" fears that the government is about to disarm the civilian population, to lead me almost directly to an image of a cute suburban grade schooler wearing a bunny suit, a gas mask, and several extra candy bar ammo clips to feed his assault rifle? Leave it to the gomi-no-gnomes of some fifth floor Tokyo action figure atelier to show us the what the Zeigeist really wants as the next step in the evolution of American insanity: arm the grade schoolers with really cute SWAT gear so they can defend themselves!

The network architecture was simple. Drudge featured an image of an action figure of the President, as one his baiting caricatures of the day. That led to this, which in turn led to this:

[Machine translation: "Proficient president, a Japanese winter."]

The little redhead kid's face appeared below picnic Prez as a thumbnail. Not sure why I clicked it, but I did, and got the rest of the story. "Let's Go Baby!" were the only words I could read on the Japanese-language page (not counting the red text indicating the item was 20% off for New Year's). The machine gave me its version of the rest:

New World box "Go Baby" series "baby wearing a costume ..." was the theme!

Body that is 15 centimeters in height to be able to display along with the 1/6 figure is very cute!

While wearing a costume modeled after a rabbit fluffy, this time hard core style equipped with heavy machine guns and gas masks!

Also accessories such as anti-noise earphones and Tactical vest, gem of attention to detail that sticks!

I guess that suffices for what, but it barely scratches the surface of why. The action figure boutiques of Tokyo and Hong Kong have always been curious barometers of network culture's memetic undercurrents. They have a genius for uncovering lost Bronsons ready to be revived in a form that can stand on top of your television. After 9/11 they engaged in an almost real-time conversion of grainy photos of secret operatives on the ground in Spin Boldak hunting for Gandalf into the ultimate 1/6-scale adventure team. Perhaps now they are actually anticipating the newest additions to our semiotic pantheon before they exist in any other form.

Or perhaps the artist behind this strange figure has, knowingly or subconsciously, tapped into some archetypal truth we don't ourselves perceive, encoding one of the seminal paradoxes of our identity: our romance of infantilized violence as one of the faces of freedom. Or maybe this kid isn't old enough to sing "I don't like Mondays."

Secret sentinels and invisible foragers

I have not posted much here over the past year, focused on a rather consuming longer project. That project is on the right side of being done, and I am going to endeavor to breathe some fresh life into this forum. Being part of a group blog where most of the other participants have wandered off can be a weird undertaking at times, but solitary musing has its merits.

This morning I was working on a segment of that longer project in which a group of contemporary American revolutionaries are holed up in a safe house in South Central. The setting was a house on Compton Creek, an urban waterway that feeds into the Los Angeles River. I have a fascination for urban rivers and streams, many of which are paved, or even buried under downtowns, morphed into invisible concrete veins of the weird ecological borg-nets that grow within the denser concentrations of human habitat. Those places tell us a lot about our relationship with our world.

View Larger Map

In the world of the story, the socio-political climate of American society has degenerated to a point where citizen militias sanctioned by fear-mongering government leaders patrol the streets in the name of homeland security. In some cases, they are even allowed to operate extraterritorially. So imagine my surprise when, exploring the network mirror of the real-world place of my fictional safehouse, where a pair of thieves turned social bandits turned revolutionaries are hiding from the vigilante militias, I turned on Street View and found a picture of a cowboy, on horseback, checking his Blackberry.

View Larger Map

We got your posse right here.

It was a weird thing, as if my objectively fantastic narrative were infiltrating my reality. Or, more accurately, the weirdness of reality was wriggling its way into my story.

So I went for a walk, down the street to a very similar urban waterway in my own neighborhood in Austin. Past the birdhouse facsimiles of the great buildings of the world, real and imaginary, through the empty lots where people forage for fallen pecans under the old trees, past the cell tower that has been condo-ized by the multi-family nests of monk parakeets descended from escaped pets of the 1960s, past the ruins of the old Exxon tank farm and the beautifully tagged abandoned freight cars, down Jain Lane, through the woods where drifters camp in the dense understory between the freeway, the railroad tracks, and the creek. The creek where people dump their old tires, and this morning a trio of urban fisherman were harvesting nightcrawlers from the muck that follows a much-needed three-day rain.

A few weeks back on this same walk, I found a curious object lying in the grass between sidewalk and curb. A single cufflink embossed with the federal eagle and the words "PRESIDENTIAL RETREAT—CAMP DAVID." This struck me as an unlikely thing to find anywhere, let alone at the edge of an industrial neighborhood across the street from a burned-down puteria and next door to an oil truck corral. The cufflink ended up in my pocket, a semiotic pecan harvested for addition to one of the terrariums we have created to curate the tangible mindscape of life here in the inter zonas of the American edgeland [see pic at top of page].

Over the holidays, one of my neighbors, a wise veteran of several decades of wars of mental liberation who has lived in these parts for a lot longer than me, asked me where I had found the cufflink and told me how the now-abandoned class B office building that the sidewalk in question passed by was once, he believes, a secret government facility. He explained how, in the strange period of our recent past when a Texan was President, that little office building was always host to an array of black SUVs and sedans with tinted windows and government plates. He figured it for CIA, after researching the company with its name on the door and finding they had offices in places like Karachi and Dubai. Or maybe it was just Secret Service, keeping a stable of vehicles in one of the places the President regularly visited—his sometime hometown.

It's an outlaw skatepark now. But, like anyplace, if you look closely enough, the secret agents may have left behind clues. Encrypted sigils, encoding Easter eggs for you to reimagine the world in which you live.

LoneStarCon 3 membership sale!

Just a quick heads-up on a LoneStarCon 3 media announcement I just sent out today. A good deal if you've got a geeky significant other you need to find a stocking stuffer for!

LoneStarCon 3 offers limited time membership special

November 19, 2012

SAN ANTONIO, Texas – LoneStarCon 3, the 71st World Science Fiction Convention, has announced a special two-week membership sale running Nov. 19-Dec. 2.

Attending memberships will be available for the reduced rate of $170 until midnight, Dec. 2. In addition to full access to the convention, attending memberships entitle the holder to make nominations for the Hugo Awards, receive pre-convention publications and advance information featured guests, exhibits and special events such as the LoneStarCon 3 International Film Festival.

"The committee saw this as an opportunity to say 'Thank you' to the fan communities who've given LoneStarCon 3 so much encouragement and support," said Laura Domitz, convention co-chair. "Think of it as getting a jump on the end-of-year holiday spirit."

Regular convention membership rates are scheduled to increase Dec. 31.

LoneStarCon 3 will be held Aug. 29-Sept. 2, 2013, at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center in San Antonio, Texas. The Mariott Rivercenter and Mariott Riverwalk will serve as the host hotels. This marks the first time since 1997 that the Alamo City has hosted a Worldcon, when LoneStarCon 2 drew thousands to the downtown convention center.

The guests of honor list for LoneStarCon 3 includes Ellen Datlow, James Gunn, Norman Spinrad and Willie Siros, with Paul Cornell serving as toastmaster and featuring special guests Leslie Fish and Joe R. Lansdale. Artist guest of honor Darrell K. Sweet tragically passed away Dec. 5, 2011.

MEMBERSHIPS

Attending membership rates for LoneStarCon 3 are normally $180 for adults, $110 for young adult (17-21 years old), $75 for children (16 and under) and $480 for family memberships. The listed membership rates are good through December 31, 2012. The sale only lowers the rate for adult attending memberships ($170) and family memberships ($460).

LoneStarCon 3 is also offering a military discount rate of $110, which is not subject to future increases.

ABOUT THE WORLD SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION

Founded in 1939, the World Science Fiction Convention is one of the largest international gatherings of authors, artists, editors, publishers and fans of science fiction and fantasy entertainment. The annual Hugo Awards, the leading award for excellence in the field of science fiction and fantasy, are voted on by Worldcon membership and presented during the convention.

LoneStarCon 3 is sponsored by ALAMO, Inc., (Alamo Literary Arts Maintenance Organization), a 501(c)3 organization. For more information about LoneStarCon 3, memberships or hotel information, visit www.LoneStarCon3.org.

Meanwhile, in an undisclosed secret location beneath Democracy Plaza

[Pic: Our secret cyborg overlord pictured watching the returns in the man cave of his Wyoming Eagle's Nest, while "interviews" using enhanced interrogation techniques are livestreamed to the iPad in his lap. Picture from Mary Cheney's Instagram feed, via Bruce Sterling.]

I spent last night watching screens on which other people were watching screens.

This was the first US presidential election I have watched without a television in my home. When I moved last year, I realized I had not watched television at home in more than a year, and decided it was finally time to live without it. So now I get my news from the web, the radio, and my anachronistic daily delivery of the print newspaper.

When there are breaking news events of the sort that make me want to see live video from major networks, I am limited to what I can get over the Web. So last night we watched the returns with a late model laptop, an 1990s-style software salesman's projector purchased at the CompUSA going out of business sale, a 1960s Da-Lite movie screen purchased on EBay, and a high wattage analog English stereo system best suited for blasting old vinyl. It's a bit of work to set up, and that's a good thing.

Watching the network returns on the Net provided a glimpse of the big three broadcasting networks trying to figure out how to evolve their journalistic business models to keep up with contemporary media. How do they attract the eyeballs and ears and minds of people like me, for whom a television connected to broadcast or cable networks is as anachronistic as a land line telephone? And how do they make money from it once they do that?

All three networks provided livestreamed online election coverage without commercials.

CBS was the only one of the big three that provided the full broadcast content online, complete with Scott Pelley as the post-Cronkite voice of calm authority and Bob Schieffer commenting live from the middle of the twentieth century. During the broadcast commercial breaks, the CBS Net stream switched over to CBS Radio's live coverage. Using voice content to fill downtime during a network stream (or other time-consuming computer process) is a great idea.

NBC online reported with deadpan self-parody "Live from Democracy Plaza" with Brian Williams anchoring and David Gregory and Savannah Guthrie at the table with him. But except when it was time for the gnomes to put another color sheet over the giant map of the states embedded in the ice rink (!), the online coverage was a clone cast provided by the NBC News Teen Titans, most of whom seemed like they were unsuccessfully trying to channel the news anchors they had grown up watching. There was no discussion in either stream of the irony in the fact that "Democracy Plaza" is the courtyard of a corporate office park, the true name of which is that of the Gilded Age robber barons that built it.

ABC News had a complete alternate network for its online coverage: ABCNews.Com • Yahoo! News. Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopolous only appeared after the election had been called for Obama, and the commercials had stopped pending the victory speech. There was no clear indication that you were getting an alternate version of ABC News. The set had all the same signifiers, the people were dressed the same, and the content architecture was essentially identical. But you quickly figured out this was ABC News with the interns in charge. ABC is using its online channel as a farm league to develop its new talent, and to provide a place to use old talent that no longer cuts it in prime time. The anchor desk was filled with three thirtysomething newcomers (anchor Dan Harris, Political Director Amy Walter, and Yahoo! News analyst Olivier Knox) and old timers Jeff Greenfield and Walter Shapiro.

And of course there was C-SPAN online at the ready with all the unprocessed political content you could eat.

A few observations from an evening devouring this content produced by a mass media driving with fog lights toward a new information architecture that has not yet been designed:

- The Net has a way of stripping the cultivated institutional authority away from the bid media networks, whether it's the evening news anchors struggling to keep our attention on them amidst the surrounding social media feeds, or the tendency towards amateur night fourth wall violations—as when ABC's Dan Harris cut off a colleague to proclaim "We can now tell you who won Kansas," unfurled the check box graphic, then cut himself off with "wait, we have to wait five seconds before we can show you that," and a moment later explained "sorry, the voice in my earpiece was telling me what to do."

- You can now watch network news coverage in which the anchor cuts to the reporter in the field and says "Holly, how are things going out there in the Internet?" [actual quote]

- The big networks still build their coverage on the platform of telegenic anchors and commentators, and they mostly provide no more than stock ticker-quality supplemental information in their banners. Last night we were constantly supplementing the net coverage with more detailed information available through other Web sources—just as the anchors were doing on-screen with their own laptops. When the networks use their resources to serve as clearinghouses of unprocessed information, curate the information at more intermediate stages of filtering, and use the video content and live subjective analysis as garnish, they will be closer to providing the unlimited information that 21st century news consumers really want.

- ABC and NBC both included periodic compilations of video commentary soundbites from social media users. The synthesis of that democratic cacophony into a chorus feels like the future of news—a video version of a Twitter feed (or the way the networks give you their version of a Twitter feed that matters).

- The emergence of alternate online versions of the major network news platforms has radical potential. Someday soon more innovative producers, anchors and analysts will realize the opportunity to reinvent mass media news on one of those platforms during some major event, and Dan Rather's ghost will be on a frequency you can no longer tune, Kenneth.

- What the network news personalities do on live television is a lot harder than it looks, and you can see it on the intern versions. This was especially apparent on ABC News.COM • Yahoo! News, in which it was clear all five people on camera were viciously competing to outperform each other, creating a stress lab in which the youngsters all flubbed badly—losing trains of thought mid-sentence, rambling into dead air nonsequiturs, defaulting to the pseudo-authoritative misdirection of big vocabulary (as when Olivier Knox concluded a stumbling comment by characterizing his view as "not Panglossian," eliciting the gleeful competitive ridicule of elder Jeff Greenfield).

- The business of television journalism remains fiercely competitive even as its relevance diminishes, with the on-air behavior characterized by an astonishing amount of troglodytic nonverbal gender domination cues. Just ask ABC News Political Director Amy Walter, whose first ninety minutes looked like the makings of a cathode ray hostile work environment that prevented her from projecting her normal confidence and insight until late in the night. Broadcast journalism is still dominated by preening dudes who are scared of (or at least fiercely competitive with) strong women. ((See, e.g., Ann Curry.))

- The information architecture of TV network election coverage is based on invented drama to keep you from turning the channel before the commercial, fueled by a sucker's adoration of democratic myths. In time, manufactured suspense will be replaced with parallel information streams that you can hop between. It's already happening in small doses.

- When election night broadcasts cut to unscripted speeches by candidates to their supporters live in a room, one is reminded of the potential power of pre-televisual political rhetoric. Can network culture provide a new oratorical forum unmediated by broadcaster yapping and editing?

- Does NBC really think they will inspire my confidence in our electoral system by showing me a roomful of volunteer geezers in portable chairs opening and sorting green envelopes?

- Did Nancy Pelosi really say "We're all for TEAM USA"?!

- Do you think @katiecouric writes her own Tweets?

- Who writes the music for television news themes? Why do the rites of republican democracy merit more venerable melodic loops than the fearcasts of war and disaster?

- Who picks the color coding of the political parties? Apparently it was in the 2000 elections that the common coding switched to cool blue for the left Dems and radical red for the right Repubs. I think the semiotic power of those codings is much more significant than we realize, and reflects a big shift in which party is positioned as the change agent.

- Why do I know the names of several of Mitt Romney's children, and how can I make myself forget?

- Watching the chorus of party representatives commenting across all media, it seems that 21st century political parties are like corporations where everyone works in the PR department, and is elected to their corporate office by their customers.

- Is the non-election of Mitt Romney a sign that we have put the last nail in the coffin of the Zeitgeist of the 80s?

- When can we abandon the pretense and just conduct all of our elections as viewer-decided reality TV shows ending in statistical ties resolved through prolonged litigation?

- (Howard Beale, where are you when we need you?)

- Why is Dick Cheney still smiling?