Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

In a post titled I’ve Had Enough, Jacob Lodwick, famous for dating Julia Allison, founding floundering social video site Vimeo, and College Humour, has announced that he is departing from blogging. Since the post has been deleted, I’m going to reproduce its text in full below:

After reading my mom’s post on shutting down her tumblelog, I can’t help but agree, and it’s time for me to end this. It’s not about Tumblr, specifically. It’s about the web in general. It’s become overrun by too many animals. One of the last straws was adventures of mascarah, who, after reading a few posts where I expressed myself, wrote this:

“I will say that if you cut off his head he still looks much better here than with his new shorter locks and Office Space/ child molester glasses. You might not have been happy then, Jake, but wow, you looked so much better.”

I may be a millionaire but I this sort of thing still hurts. If this were a one-time thing, I could deal with it, but it happens several times a week, no matter what I do, and I can’t avoid seeing it. To be hit with a personal insult, from a stranger who knows only my blog persona, yet attacks me as a person, is an awful feeling. Another last straw was this Gawker post, where I wanted to learn multiple basic summaries of the China situation as a starting point for a larger exploration of the country. I was torn to shreds (I still don’t understand why) by the poster, an elf who has never talked to me but stammered a darted his eyes when I encountered him at a party a year ago. Worse than the post were the comments. Imagine reading these things about yourself:

* Boil. Your. Face.
* His relationship with Julia “hey guys, I need to write an article, send me stuff and do it for me” Allison makes so much sense right now. They’re BOTH what’s wrong and evil in this world.
* Oh, he’s my least favorite brand of asshole: the kind that thinks being an asshole makes him edgy. It doesn’t. It just makes him an asshole. He sucks.
* Please kill yourself. You’re completely worthless.
* I didn’t think it was possible to hate him more. But it is, apparently. He needs to shut his ugly face. We can call him ugly without fear of retribution in the form of execution right? Ugly. Inside and out.
* Ha. Seriously. Fucking Napoleonic complex to go with his undoubtedly tiny ween. Also, ugly.
* I saw him at the Bedford Ave subway station a week ago, looking like an escaped mental patient dressed as a retarded toddler.

The last one really pushed me over the edge. Not only do these people attack me online, but they recognize me in real life. That’s the kind of thing I don’t want to think about while out and about. The absolute worst, though, has got to be the attacks for any display of self-confidence. You may conceptualize the Unites States as a great nation. But it’s also a big tribe, with its own irrational taboos. One of them is: don’t talk proudly about your achievements.

Unfortunately, my line of work requires me to aim high. If you can’t stomach that, fine, but consider the long-term effects of bashing me and others who goals are to innovate. Entrepreneurs, artists — our jobs are not easy; they require doing something new. This means we assume risk — our business could go bankrupt, our art could be despised. Perhaps you are happy with the current state of USA. I am not — I am deeply unhappy with it — and I want to change it.

But going forward, Jakob Lodwick, the person, is withdrawing from the public web. You will see the results of my efforts through Normative and other companies. I just cannot deal with these animals any longer.

On his website, he has also posted this farewell letter:

Dear The Internet,

I closed my blog on June 26, 2008. I could no longer handle the relentless, vicious, public attacks from a digital lynch mob towards the personality traits I have no intention of changing, such as my curiosity and my self-confidence.

If the Web is to flourish, we cannot count on the good will of the public. The combination of anonymity and universal access means no individual can fully feel safe opening up. The Web itself (the technology) has a vast and unrealized potential. Until we create new types of Web sites which value privacy on a fundamental level, the web risks collapsing into a cesspool of YouTube comments and ad-based gossip-hate sites.

When I say “privacy”, I mean in the sense of private property, as in, “No Trespassing”.

I am walking away from what might be called The Social Web. This comprises any site where ‘anyone can sign up’ and electronically socialize with one another. The story is the same with most of these sites: a few settlers discover and make themselves at home, enjoying the solitude. Increasingly, less-adventurous people find their way to the site. The population begins to snowball. A vocal minority of thoughtless jerks begin to speak up, driving away the settlers. In the worst case, the result is something like MySpace.

I have been an active participant in The Social Web since the 1990s and now it is time for me to leave. I desperately need to socialize on the Web in a way that makes me happy, but the right tools do not exist yet. I now intend to start building them.

If you’re interested in following my progress, keep an eye on JakobLodwick.com. I will simply post stuff there.

Sincerely,
Jakob Lodwick

His tumbler blog is now entirely deleted (why destroy the past, Jakob?), but we can still glean some insight into his world view before it fades into the ether. A post from March 20th, where he addresses the following message from a “fan”, is interesting:

Why must 1/3 of your tumblr posts feature your face? Are you that self involved that you are unaware that THAT is really the most unattractive, ie d***he-bag quality, feature of web life 2.0? You diminish the value of your own stock. Perhaps that will go down as your poetic flaw…

Jakob’s reply is that ordinary people deserve to accept themselves as they are:

By posting pictures of myself, I am also broadcasting the message, “It’s ok to be photographed even if you are not a model.” This may subtly influence people to post their own pictures; as a result, they will become more aware of their own image.

He suggests that any attempt to over up what is with a semblance is irresponsible:

…arching your neck forward to stretch a double chin does not actually change your body.

This conversation embodies some of the things I disliked about his blog. First, the rampant narcissism and egoism, which can’t be excused by “I’m an innovator” or “I’m making art, I need an ego,” shines through the nearly-daily barrage of poorly taken self-portraits. In a three day spread you might see three pictures of Jakob Lodwick, unkept, unshaven, and half-naked posted on his blog:

If nothing else, it’s unprofessional and unsettling to readers. Other posts are remarkably intolerant of internet diversity, such as the names people online choose to give themselves:

But most modern websites don’t make you pick an exclusive name. If you’re uncomfortable giving your full name, just use your first name instead. I am getting really sick of finding out that “brooklyndude” liked my Vimeo videos, or zipzappizzazz is my tumblr follower. I have no idea who you people are, nor will I ever, unless you use a real name.

In real life, a real name is something you’ve been handed down by your parents and the government, not an entity that you have created to express yourself. On the internet, it’s the other way around. Accept the names people have chosen, because they’ll tell you more than their given name. It would have been nice to see Jakob dig a little deeper, past his inane aggrevation with people’s online identities, into the heart of the psychology of how people name themselves. Unfortunately, for me, the post let me down. Many others are like this; some personal pet peave without any real justification. You read them, you just feel beaten down. For that reason, I won’t be missing him when he goes. But, perhaps when Jakob comes back the level of insight will be raised a notch or two. I’m willing to give him a read again.

Update: Matthew Ingram has a salient summary: “for young Jake to moan about all the negative attention he’s gotten, after happily posting every intimate detail and thought about his life and relationships to public blogs, in an almost pathological exercise in over-sharing, is really rich.”

Update 2: There are some interesting comments on the Valleywag piece.

Today the IE blog made the most important announcement of its life with Microsoft’s Interoperability Principles and IE8, saying:

We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. This decision is a change from what we’ve posted previously. Microsoft recently published a set of Interoperability Principles. Thinking about IE8’s behavior with these principles in mind, interpreting web content in the most standards compliant way possible is a better thing to do.

Already, web designers are calling this the “holy grail” of Internet Explorer web development, and possibly the best suggestion the Microsoft IE team has ever made. Here’s a choice quote from Eric Meyer:

I’m glad that IE will act as browsers have always done, and default to the latest and greatest in the absence of any explicit direction to the contrary. I’m doubly glad that the IE team is willing to do that, even knowing what they have to handle. And I’m triply glad that the proposal was made in public ahead of time, with plenty of opportunity for debate, so that we could have a chance to weigh in and affect the browser’s behavior.

Broken Links is saying “I am very pleasantly surprised; this is a very wise decision.” Robert McLaws thinks, “This is great news for the web standards community… but not-so-great news for the billions of web pages out there.”

Twelve cartoons were drawn on September 30, 2005 by the editors of Jyllands-Posten, a Danish newspaper, to show Muhammad as they believed he should look. These cartoons drew the wrath of the entire Muslim community, and are reproduced below with commentary. The BBC notes, “It is the satirical intent of the cartoonists, and the association of the Prophet with terrorism, that is so offensive to the vast majority of Muslims.” It is up to you to decide if they are legitimate commentary or blasphemy.

Mohammed wanders the desert, leading a camel far behind him as the sun sets. I read this as an allusion to Jesus who wandered the desert for 40 days and 40 nights resisting temptation and praying, unless there is a parallel story in Islam which I don’t know about. I’ve never had the chance to read the Koran. So, by drawing the prophet in the desert, the first cartoon attempts to bridge Christianity and Islam.

Mohammed is depicted with a halo of horns made from the Islamic crescent symbol. Clearly the intent is to cast the prophet as a demon in thin disguise, which is insensitive because it does not give us a context in which to reinterpret him. OK, you tell us Islam / Mohammed is evil. Why should we believe you because you childishly draw horns on him?

In this third cartoon, the prophet Mohammed is drawn intertwined with the star & crescent. This is an obvious but necessary connection, because without Mohammed there would be no Islam. As the editor is trying to show, the two are synonymous.

It’s harder to interpret this picture of Mohammed in black with two veiled “virgins” and a short sword in his hand. It is clearly intended to contrast the so-called “promised virgins” that a Jihadist is promised in Heaven with women’s rights, terrorism, and Islam. The women are wide-eyed, indicating that either they disapprove of violence, or that they do not relish satisfying a killer in his personal heaven. The prophet’s eyes are censored–I don’t know why.

“Stop, stop, we ran out of virgins!” the fifth reads. I find this just amusing, especially given that the idea of having 72 virgins waiting for you in heaven may be a mistranslation:

Luxenberg tries to show that many obscurities of the Koran disappear if we read certain words as being Syriac and not Arabic. Luxenberg’s new analysis, leaning on the Hymns of Ephrem the Syrian, yields “white raisins” of “crystal clarity” rather than doe-eyed, and ever willing virgins – the houris. Luxenberg claims that the context makes it clear that it is food and drink that is being offerred [sic], and not unsullied maidens or houris.

The sixth cartoon is one of many meta-cartoons by the editors which decry their reactionary attempts to redefine Mohammed in a modern context. However, the shirt of the boy reads “the future” and the board reads “The editorial team of Jyllands-Posten is a bunch of reactionary provocateurs.” We should take this to indict any kind of overreaction by traditional Muslims.

“To draw the Prophet is to die,” thinks this scared editorial cartoonist furtively drawing Mohammed. If Islam were a religion of peace, would he look so nervous? Conversations are protected under free speech, not persecuted by charges of blasphemy.

The text, which is hard to make out, reads, “Hm… I can’t really recognize him” and “Kåre’s public relations, call and get an offer.” Apparently the editor wants to equate all world religions and all kinds of people together in a gigantic mashup.

If you remember the old bat-light they used to call batman by projecting his logo into the sky, you’ll instantly recognize this call for the people of the book with the Star of David and the Crescent and Moon prominently jutting up into the sky. Does this mean Islam needs more heroes? The text (Prophet, you crazy bloke! Keeping women under yoke) seems to indicate it needs more female ones…

Another pro-free-speech cartoon degrading the Muslim and Arabic response to religious criticism. Why should they worry about a cartoon drawn by some guy from the middle of nowhere? Their heresies are our freedoms.

The most controversial of the cartoons, this one features the Islamic creed written on the helm and a lit fuse and bomb instead of a turban. The idea is dumb–Islam brings suicide bombers. But the image itself is powerful, and the overstated fact is true. Why are there not any Christian suicide bombers? Why aren’t there any atheist suicide bombers??

Another meta-cartoon, this one is excited about all the publicity these cartoons will generate for their publication. I have no comment.