general

According to a Washington Post headline, the "Reston-based company MERS [is] in the middle of [the current] foreclosure chaos."

I wrote about MERS a year ago in two posts. It took that long for the stink to rise to national news level, I guess. As Atrios neatly encapsulates it, banks "established their own land title system without any legal authority to do so." Financial blogger Barry Ritholtz explains all the steps that are supposed to be taken for real estate title to pass. These are mundane procedures of state law. No national system can be put in place to override them. This is a continuation of the 2008 meltdown, stuff that never really got fixed--mortgage mills on the upside, foreclosure mills on the down. Maybe if someone like Elizabeth Warren had been given actual power sooner, people wouldn't be surprised by this now....

Update: This essay by an anonymous ranter sent to a correspondent on the Big Picture blog (and scrubbed clean of swear words) describes the situation well.

re "digital natives":

Would rather not talk about this issue at all. For the record, dump.fm is a brilliant site and it was conceived by "children of the net." I've been 100% supportive, even if the site provides a forum for the NetGen nazi who told me my "perception of dump was horribly fucked and wrong."

Today is 10/10/10. There hasn't been a day like this since... September 9, 2009.

lamb [I] cropped from a [much larger] church sign posted to by dump.fm by aspirinkid

Why you should wait a day before posting. Wrote this in a fit of pique after someone dissed animated GIFs:

Was being mildly ironic: the "pop art" link went to an '80s painting of a Jack Kirby panel that I was calling "late pop." The point was you can make whatever continuities you want with GIFs, or not, but to peg them solely as a late '90s relic was as limiting as definitively calling them art.

The text above was screen captured and posted to dump.fm by a, er, vocal Dumper who thinks calling online activity "net art" is the height of pretension (as best I can make out from his complaints). I wish I could make every post nuanced since I am no fan of most things self-consciously described as "net art" either but sometimes you just get annoyed.

Continuing to read around to see what other old guard bloggers say about Facebook.
Here's John Robb of of Global Guerrillas:

Currently [Facebook]'s valued at ~$25 billion by the market. However, it could be argued that ~100,000 superusers out of 500 million part time users, are the reason that Facebook is valuable. They generate the core network that is the backbone of the tool. Their devoted use, high levels of connectivity, and loyalty forms the engine that grows Facebook, year in and year out. They are the materials, labor, and product of Facebook's assembly line. Yet they aren't paid for their effort. They aren't generating wealth for themselves or their families.

How much wealth? If we awarded 4/5 ths of the value of Facebook (and the same exercise could be done with Google at a couple of million superusers) to its superusers, leaving the tool managers $5 billion in value, each superuser would now be worth $200,000 from their contributions to this tool alone. But they aren't. They haven't earned a penny for their effort. [emphasis Robb's]

Naturally, for criticizing the divine, Robb's own assumptions about blogging were attacked:

I'm curious, how many of your "links of interest" come from readers? Also, how much traffic comes from retweets and shares? Even if it's just a little bit, then your readers are creating added value for you. Not that they should be paid, it's just part of the implicit bargain of enjoying your content and being a part of the community of GG thinkers.
ckundo Thursday, 23 September 2010 at 12:02 PM

Some do. Point taken.
However, I am producing the vast majority of the content (that I give away) and paying for the technology to deliver it to the community.
I'm also not producing much in terms of marketable value. IF I was, I would be VERY happy to share it with everyone that worked to make it so (it would be morally and ethically wrong not to do so).
John Robb Thursday, 23 September 2010 at 12:37 PM

The fact that you pay for the technology demonstrates your intrinsic satisfaction in sharing. While you pay to share your thoughts, FB subsidizes that cost to users, with the tradeoff of keeping the profits. As soon as that tradeoff becomes overly apparent or too steep, people will bail.
ckundo Thursday, 23 September 2010 at 03:00 PM

LOL. OK. We could continue to spar on the differences between my content creation and Facebook's software services, but the gulf in our perspectives is obviously too vast to bridge.
John Robb Thursday, 23 September 2010 at 03:17 PM

That's what I should have said to the person who accused me of "battling internet change"!

The long comment thread is worth a skim. Here is another observation:

I think the so-called critics of Robb are missing the point. Robb used the term "cognitive slaves," as opposed to "chattel slaves" or "wage slaves." Facebook does not own its users outright like plantation owners did their slaves. It cannot execute them at will, beat them, breed them, etc. Rather, it provides an addictive activity that purports to provide value to the user, which millions of people will argue that it does, in that it allows them to connect and share with other people. However, it extracts value that can be converted into money from the users, and does not compensate them financially. Facebook would argue that since it provides it service for free, it does not need to pay dividends to the users. Where the cognitive slavery aspect comes in, is that users become addicted to using Facebook, use it excessively, do not generate any wealth for themselves with regard to the time they put in, but generate wealth for Facebook, therefore, they have become enslaved to Facebook because they enjoy it so much.
tcolonelnemo Thursday, 23 September 2010 at 12:21 PM