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The Internet culture is in crisis. Jewish blogs are stuck. A dignified livelihood is a challenge. Why? In one sentence, when a culture becomes derivative, it mines and depletes its own legacy. I started thinking about this topic when I read this paragraph in Jaron Lanier’s new book:

“It is astonishing how much of the chatter online is driven by fan responses to expression that was originally created within the sphere of old media and that is now being destroyed by the net. Comments about TV shows, major movies, commercial music releases, and video games must be responsible for almost as much bit traffic as porn. There is certainly nothing wrong with that, but since the web is killing the old media, we face a situation in which culture is effectively eating its own seed stock.”

Marshall McLuhan declared that “medium is the message”. What he meant was that a new form of expression, i.e. alphabet, writing, print, TV, etc., changes our brain wiring, tastes and values so radically that medium itself is the central cultural event. Inevitably at a dawn of every novel form of expression, a new medium is awkwardly used to reprocess the old, the bleak task comparable to translating poetry into a foreign language. This is the DJ stage where the Internet finds itself at the current moment. The old tunes are remixed, republished, relinked to a new beat, literally and figuratively no new music is created. Occasionally a new app is written for the legacy proprietary code instead of a new OS.

On to the Jews cursed with the satirical task of amplifying a culture. Every potential convert to Judaism needs to be aware of these axioms:

1. Marshall McLuhan spoke about the “rear view mirror” phenomena or the propensity of any culture to live in a utopia about its past. Jews amplify this tendency in the worst possible way. Most traditional Jewish communities are consumed with intense utopia and the deliberate subterfuge of history.
2. A Rabbi is a DJ, never singing in its own voice and forever spinning someone else’s tracks. There is a derivative throwback tendency in every culture but again amplified by the Jews. The tribe castigated to the two thousand years of the survivalist epic. With the rare exceptions (i.e. kabbalah) the innovation is shut down, conformism is bred and encouraged. People who can’t contain or control their creative impulses are eventually expelled from the traditional Jewish communities.
3. Every group on the face of the earth is defined by what this group is not. Jaron Lanier calls this the “mob switch”. Once again this is most sensitive component of the traditional Jewish culture. Although the potential converts are not specifically instructed about the importance of the boundary defining hate, eventually to successfully integrate in the communities they would have to internalize the intense feeling of hatred towards other Jewish groups and denominations, towards the declared heretics, goyim, real and imaginary antisemites, etc.

Now let’s compare the three “Jewish problems” to the Internet. The Internet is definitely not a utopian vision of the past. There is strong revolutionary current, especially in the communal rhetoric of the Open Source movement and the Web 2.0 social. Alas, after a decade, a new server side oligarchy emerged to control the scalable bits. Instead of empowering creativity, no longer under a centralized command, there is a deliberate and impoverishing push for the “free”, the collapse of the copyright boundaries, devaluation of the original unpaid authorship under the assault the ad supported aggregators. The DJ culture is absolutely the internet as we know it today. The disastrous anonymous comments culture and the combustible flame wars take the group/mob hate to the unprecedented levels on the Internet.

And  what about the Wall St.? The financial services industry dominated by the derivative contracts became the most important part of the American GDP. There is an easy analogy to the Internet (or any derivatives dominated culture). People often complain that the stocks are the trading instruments removed from the real value of a company. An options contract or a credit default swap contract is like a tweet about a comment on a blog post that links to a different newspaper web site. Derivatives are comments removed from a productive culture, they don’t innovate, don’t create value and eventually pop. To slap a Dell label on a product engineered and fabricated in China is like linking to someone else’s content on a popular web site. Our religions, our ability to make a living and our “internet economy”, the trifecta, is overrun by the derivative thinking. We can no longer extract value from comments about the dried up wells and we can no longer destroy the remaining functioning artisan wells. We can no longer condemn people to the indignity of being replaced by the machines or the outsourced slaves. We can’t DJ, quote, link, mashup or re-aggregate our way from this crisis. You can quote me on that.

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