You never, ever, learn anything first around here, even if you write for one of the allegedly super-wired places on the Net. My first email about Slate came Friday night from a friend there, alerting me that a column about me and my new book was running on the site, and that it was "low and mean."
Then I heard from a Nebraska teenager (she has to sneak on to her father's computer when he isn't home, since she's forbidden to go online) who had been emailing me for weeks about Wal-Mart's music sanitizing policies. "Are you really the Unabomber?" she asked. I thought it was a strange joke, but I still didn't get it.
Nobody lasts long on the Web without an exoskeleton more or less like the Abrams M-1's deployed in the Gulf War. Net discussions move fast and fierce, much like the battle scenes in Braveheart, knives and spears whizzing through the air, body parts flying.
Flamers, cypherpunks, quarrelsome academics, fact-obsessives, and a host of politically engaged combatants and bullshit-sniffers patrol the frontiers of cyberspace hunting down the pompous, the incorrect, the dumb, and the poor reasoners. Woe to the wrongdoers they find.
I have a new book out from Random House called Virtuous Reality, on behalf of which I am about to begin a book tour. In one of our most tender moments together, my literary agent told me last month, "My fondest wish is that your book be viciously and repeatedly attacked." Controversy, she meant, was good for business.
I laughed bravely. Viciously attacked. I can't wait.
I didn't have to. The book isn't even officially published until 10 February, and I already feel like the Empire State Building in Independence Day.
The Washington Post has already accused me of maligning the noble boomers and being nasty to William Bennett. Salon fretted that I was part of a "way new" breed of media critics out to sabotage the Word. Kirkus Reviews said Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital was a much better guide to cyberspace than Virtuous Reality. Ill-tempered, middle-aged boomer males of the quasi-intellectual kind were busting blood vessels all over the place in response to my argument that pop culture isn't nearly as dangerous as politicians are making it out to be.
I got some praise too - USA Today called the book "crackingly intelligent," and The New York Times excerpted a huge chunk of the book in its Sunday paper. But in the early hours of Virtuous Reality's dawn, these were lone voices.
HotWired asked me to file daily columns from the Virtuous Reality tour on The Netizen, and I planned to do that starting next week, but my digital hand has been forced, as they say, by a column in Slate by Jack Shafer, called "Katz on the Cross: The Martyrdom of St. Jon of Cyberspace." So the Virtuous Reality tour begins now.
Even when I saw the title, I wondered how "low and mean" a column on Slate could be? Michael Kinsley, hailed in the New Yorker last year as reinventing magazine journalism on the Web and photographed on the cover of Newsweek kissing a fish, had said he was coming to civilize us.
He would avoid, he said, that cheap attitude so widespread on the Net. So the worst I imagined was some nasty literary sniping, like the stuff you see in the back of The New Republic. Sure, I had thumped Kinsley and Slate and all the hype surrounding both, and wrote that the smart but profoundly non-interactive Web magazine would inevitably bomb.
But we are all pros here on the Web, right? Nobody there would be so small as to hold that against me.
But my email was warning me otherwise. "Yoiks," flashed a friend. "It's an online heart attack!"
My agent's wildest dreams were realized. If controversy does, in fact, sell books, there's a big fat new Power Mac in my imminent future.
In Virtuous Reality, I write about my hero, Thomas Paine (whose portrait hangs above my computer), and imagine him alive today, flaming on the Internet.
Shafer wrote: "Katz-equals-Paine is an awful stretch, but his book invites comparison. Actually, Katz better resembles that other iconoclastic 1990s media hacker, Ted Kaczynski, the alleged Unabomber."
Shafer wrote that like Ted Kaczynski, "Jon Katz broods in the isolation of his suburban basement office, apparently limiting his contact to the outside world to email from other self-pitying souls."
(This is not true. I have two yellow labs, Julius and Stanley, who sit at my feet. I brood with them. And I do have to food shop for the whole family every Friday.)
OK readers, we've been through a lot together. I have to perform the same service for you that others performed for me. Brace yourself: Shafer doesn't like you either.
"Katz's adopted constituency - Web surfers, hackers, rap artists, violent-film buffs, pint-sized Super Mario 64 champions, Web-porn peddlers, and TV-talk-show fans - make for unlikely victims. Who can shed tears for folk who are blessed with smarts, youth, leisure time, and moxie, and who own $2,000-plus Pentium computers?"
Who indeed, has ever shed a tear for Mario 64 Champions?
"I hope it bombs," Shafer says of Virtuous Reality.
This seemed something of a critical review. I called my agent and read parts to her. "Great!" she said. I called my best friend. "It's wonderful news!" he said.
I got sympathetic email. I fumed. And well ... OK, I brooded, but upstairs, not in the basement. Then the dawn came up like thunder. What was wrong with me? This was controversy. This was buzz! This is the difference between Virtuous Reality and The System, by David Broder and Haynes Johnson.
I rushed to the keyboard and posted a message on Threads. Meanwhile the email was pouring in. One of my Wal-Mart critics wrote me: "Jon, you really are a sick and deranged puppy. Web-porn dealers?"
"What a moron," emailed Dano of Shafer. "Not only do I feel for you, but I'm personally offended. I read your column, therefore, I must be a rap-artist, drug user, and general psychopath. Huh. I never noticed."
Most of the email asks how I feel about this.
Well, sometimes it takes other people to help you define yourself. To be fair, Shafer did say I was "brainy" and elevated me to a status on the Web that I do not, in fact, have. One of the interesting things to me is that everything Shafer thinks is most ridiculous about me is the stuff I'm proudest of.
I do work out of a basement in New Jersey. I did fail as a television producer (and a newspaper editor, too). Failing as a media exec was my greatest gift. I wrote a novel about it, Sign Off, which led to my writing career. I do have a minivan, each of its 30,000 miles marking a slice of my family history. Thanks to my career flameout, I was able to take care of my kid more than most fathers get to do. And I got to be a media critic, stubbornly writing my way to becoming a full-time, if not universally hailed, author.
Shafer pegged me on another score. I definitely belong with the hackers, Web surfers, and other oddballs, geeks, libertarians, and freedom-seekers (I haven't yet heard from any Web-porn peddlers). They have infected me with their love of liberty and commitment to the liberation of information. Working in the old media, I pretty much lost any passion for much but survival.
Shafer's column doesn't take itself as seriously as some have taken it. It has some fine moments. Nobody should be fooled into thinking it's personal. He cares as little about me as he knows about me or my work. As with the mob, nothing in insider media is really personal.
In that way, his column offers us a pretty good peek into how our most influential media really work. If Shafer ever gets to write a book (I hope he does), I would never pretend to be able to review it after his column. I'd have to declare a conflict of interest. Nor should he have pretended to be able to review mine, after I've written so critically of Bill Gates, Microsoft, Michael Kinsley, and Slate. (For the record, I think Slate is smart but misplaced on the Web.) If I did review a book of Shafer's, webheads, who see everything and forget nothing, would skewer me. Web writers are held accountable because people can get at them and one another.
Journalists tend to inflate things that happen to them. This isn't a big whoop. I'm a big boy and can take it; after all, I dish enough of it out.
But Shafer shouldn't have misrepresented what my book is about. I don't think he could possibly have read it. If he did, he deliberately misconstrued it. Books take a long time to write, and whether you like them or not, a critic is morally obliged to at least describe them truthfully. Shafer said things about me that he must have known, or could easily have found out, are untrue.
Why would he do that?
1. He sincerely believed it. Or
2. This was revenge for my attacks on Slate. Or
3. This was an effort to intimidate me and other critics of Slate. Or
4. This was an effort to draw some attention to Slate at a time when it isn't getting a lot. The Newark Star-Ledger reaches more than 10 times as many people.
My best guess: mostly No. 4, with a dash of 2 and 3.
An author is most vulnerable (and nervous) when a book is about to come out. A nasty review in the wrong place early on can spawn and influence others and discourage a publisher. But Shafer's attack was off by a week or so. Virtuous Reality has already gotten enough attention and praise to get off the ground. As for my publisher's wish that it be controversial, looks like no problem.
I write for HotWired, Wired, GQ, and other magazines, and have a multi-book contract with Random House. Shafer won't intimidate me, although I will now have to do what he should have and explain clearly in every piece I write about Slate that I was criticized there. And I'll feel queasy about criticizing Slate, because that could be interpreted as vengefulness.
I suspect Shafer will intimidate others, though. The message to writers is that if you poke Slate, Slate will come back at you, even if it has to shade the truth to do it. This is the higher order we keep hearing about?
Shafer's column reinforces my own writing rules: Never attack anybody who is less important than you are, who isn't famous or powerful, or who isn't worth a million dollars.
These nasty attacks no longer seem menacing as much as silly and outdated. The journalistic culture of the Web and the Net has changed the rules. Had this sort of attack appeared in The New Republic or Time, the most the target could have done is popped off a letter that would have run in truncated form that nobody read weeks later. But all over the Web last week, people who follow media - including many who care little for me and who disagree with much of what I write - were wondering why Shafer would have written this column, and were exchanging theories about it.
Is there a serious point to be made in all this Medieval imagery, in my rollercoaster evolution on Slate from Ranter to Saint to Devil?
Maybe. People who follow media grasped instantly that Shafer's rant had little to do with me. His column had the curious tone of the jilted lover about it, and since he and I aren't intimate, it probably had more to do with Slate's unhappy experience on the Web than with anything I've written.
Slate was good from the beginning, and has improved. It survives, but has attracted few readers and no paying customers. Slate is making the rounds in Washington, all right, but not in digital form. It's circulating as a high-priced newsletter, an ironic fate for Microsoft's revolutionary entry into digital journalism.
Kinsley isn't on the cover of any magazines these days, and The New Yorker hasn't yet seen fit to break the news to its trusting readers that magazine journalism hasn't been reinvented here after all.
But by insulting so baldly the people who use this culture, Shafer seems to be saying goodbye, writing a column that is clearly aimed not at us but at the people who need to be reassured that we are barbarians, pornographers, even murderers and maimers. The magazine that arrived on a wave of hype is leaving with a snarl.
Kinsley and his Ivy League friends didn't civilize the Net after all, as he boasted he would. He, and we, passed somewhere in cyberspace and, strange as it seems, we changed him more than he changed us.
See you next week on tour.
