Heather Gold, who was one of my favorite guests on The RU Sirius Show will be interviewing Larry Lessig among others live in San Francisco on Friday night. Lessig, of course, started the Creative Commons and then recently moved on to become an activist against political corruption.

Lessig’s book Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity convinced me that excesses in copyright law pose the biggest threat to free speech in America today. In fact, were I to list the threats in order, they would be:

Excessive Copyright
Hypersensitivity (the Umbrage industry)
The State

Here’s Heather’s release for the show this Friday:

Friday, November 9: Earnestness: The current importance of being earnest. How
can we create believability in our corrupt and chronically insincere politics? What
exists outside the quotation marks? Can you can comedy without cynicism?

Heather conversates with Larry Lessig (founder of Creative Commons, Stanford Law
Professor and now a political corruption revolutionary), Curtis Reliford (named
American Red Cross’ American Good Samaritan for his post-Katrina work), comedian and
anti-death penalty advocate Aundré the Wonderwoman and you.

Show: 8:00–9:30 pm. Doors open 7:30
After-Party: 9:30 - 11:00 pm.
Luscious Garage (map)
459 Clementina St, San Francisco
tix: www.heathergold.com
$15.I’ve promised that if the show sells out ahead of time i will earnestly sing a
Carpenters song on stage.

We have quite a few bakers this month (cupcakes,sour cream cake, pumpkin cake,
cookies) but if you still need the show to be free email me and we’ll figure
something out.

We’ll also be experimenting with ustream for the first time. There should be a
live stream of the show at www.heathergold.com if your in the Bay Area though, I
really encourage you to come. The live experience at this “open source”-ish show is
awesome.

So a friend of mine sent me a note suggesting that my opening blog post about the original Revolting! site back in 1997 — what with visions of Charles Manson, exploded shit, and torture-writers — might not be the best strategic presentation to help along my current career pursuits which are at least slightly less… well… revolting than that particular project was back when.

It does seem certain that some people might not get it — more and more of them in fact with each passing generation… and I will resist a verbal critique of the extant mentality for this round — but I guess you could say I wear several hats. One hat does advocacy. Under another hat, I do my best to play a ringmaster at play in the apocalypse.

These days, people seem to view everything as advocacy. Also, of course, colleges warn their students to be careful about what they post on the net because it might hurt their careers. It’s obviously way too late for me on that account…

No worries. Soon the entire Library of Congress will fit on the head of a pin… so that’s all they’ll need to be well-informed…

Some time in 1998, I decided to start “The Revolution” party and run for President. It was – as you might imagine – an ill-considered decision. Ironically, I was absolutely world weary at the time and little interested in participating in anything at all. But I had promised to write something for Disinformation and I was in such a dropped-out state of mind that I couldn’t come up with anything. So I cleared my mind completely and let whatever would emerge, emerge. And what should bubble up from the lower depths of my unconscious but this declaration and this one?

I thought the pieces kinda kicked ass while at the same time they were so fundamentally silly that they wouldn’t be perceived as an aggressive re-entry back into the activities of the world. So – despite my world weariness — I had no hesitation in putting them out there. People liked them.

In calling the party The Revolution, I thought I was being ironic. I had recently noticed that there was a sports team called “The Revolution” while glancing with only partial attention at my TV. The news had been running down some scores – (Was it hockey? College football? It doesn’t matter.) I was amused by the cheapening of a word that had so much juice for so many of us around 1970. The media had already declared “The Reagan Revolution.” Time Magazine had a cover story “Say You Want A Revolution?” with Bill Clinton on the cover during his first week in office in 1993. Then we’d had a “Gingrich Revolution” in 1994. So I thought it was kind of funny for a white yankee radical reformist with a strong sense of the absurd to adopt “The Revolution.”

Some joiners though took the moniker fairly seriously and I can’t completely blame them — I think I put out some valid ideas. I got a pretty good response and next thing I knew, some people were helping me change the original Revolting! into a site for The Revolution Party.

For awhile, I actually tried to organize this thing. After all, I was maybe the first to suggest liberaltarianism — although I didn’t coin the clumsy word, Kos did that, but I did suggest a liberal/libertarian hybrid. And a post-ideological, anti-authoritarian, counterculturally-inclined political organization did seem like something that should have happened (still reworking the concept, actually) – a pressure group that would balance out the cultural warriors of the religious right. But for all the enthusiasm that was expressed, it’s pretty fuckin’ hard to start a political party in America and The Revolution proved to be a party of slackers.

Still, when someone from “The Party” emailed me a few years ago to suggest that I really ought to be doing something with these ideas in the age of Bush, I briefly sketched out a concept for an organization called Question Authority that would be an informational and educational coalition of antiauthoritarian types.

I’ve got the feeling I’ll be saying more about that in the near future.

I started using this web address back in 1997. The tech bubble was just bubbling up and I didn’t see any place in it for me. It was all faux hipness and “thinking outside of the box” (has it changed?) – in other words, it was for people who acknowledged a box and then stretched their nimble little monkey minds in search of new clichés about the exciting always-on boundaryless world in which we could all work on something cool 24/7. It seemed boring and smug, so I decided to start a webzine with no rules. It would be fuck-all tabloid ludicrousness and it would violate a few laws. My young pal Josh Ellis agreed to help me put the site together and Channing Hansen (brother to Beck) agreed to design a special “Web Of Paranoia” – creating a patterned series of links to conspiracy sites, national security sites, freemasonry type deals. and some weirdass piece of free Microsoft software that – at that time – was screwing up people’s computers.

As luck would have it, Charles Manson came up for parole as I was working up the first issue (there would only be two) and told the parole board that he couldn’t be bothered with getting released at that moment because he was “too busy working on my website.” Perfect hipster tabloid fodder!

My intuition was that Disinformation founder Richard Metzger would be really interested in interviewing Manson’s webmaster (that’s what they were called in those days) and I was right. So I looked up Chuckie’s website, grabbed the contact email address and passed it all on to Metzger. Mansonoid webmaster “St. George” agreed to the interview. (The link on my original site is busted but you can check it here.) It took St. George awhile to respond to Metzger’s questions, slowing down the opening of the site. My favorite moment in the process was getting an email from Metzger with the Subject: “It’s coming down… slow.” When Metzger asked St. George what Charlie thought about certain things, George went and asked him. Very soon after the interview was published, Manson was banned for a long time from speaking to the press.

Revolting! went up with a picture of Manson sticking out his tongue on the homepage. Other pieces included one by Boing Boinger Mark Frauenfelder telling the story of how he and his friends captured an alien and subjected him to an anal probe. We had a “Shockwave Audio” file of Trent Reznor detailing his favorite shit story for my former Mondo Vanilli bandmate Simone (she was collecting excremental tales at the time). It involved – if I remember correctly – someone throwing fireworks in an unflushable toilet filled with a few days worth. Hilarity no doubt ensued.

We grabbed a bunch of corporate banner ads from other sites, including AOL (can’t really remember the others. I think we might have used Warner Brothers) and we put them in rotation as banner ads on our own site. Soon the cease-and-desist demands arrived telling us to remove the free advertising from the site. As soon as I got them, I complied and faxed them back a message, letting them know that the ad had been removed and thanking them for their momentary contribution to Revolting!

After one more issue, I tired of doing the webzine Revolting! without funding. Although I had entertained the notion that the “Long Boom” had room for some authentic memetic bomb throwing — that some newly minted mega-millionaire hipster type would get, and fund, the joke –alas, it was not to be,

But all was not lost. In 1999, Jeff Diehl – who was unknown to me at the time — was hired by the interactive porn company WebPower to create a hip tabloid webzine. I went in for the interview, I showed him Revolting! and I was hired on the spot to be Editor-In-Chief.

GettingIt.com was a year of heaven. We got to pay freelancers a dollar a word. We had regular weekly columns from Lydia Lunch, Andrei Codrescu and Robert Anton Wilson. One writer who contributed a good number of articles was Peter Braunstein. Braunstein was always easy to deal with; his ideas were solid; his work was always on time and required almost no editing, A few years later he was famous all over NYC when he went on the lam after torturing a woman he had been stalking while dressed as a fireman.

Errr… not to end my first entry into the new Revolting on a disquieting note but…