Ok, time to stop praying for rain

Word of the day: “Cyberspace” first from “William Gibson, science fiction writer, circa 1984″ in his book Neuromancer (Michael Benedikt in the first chapter of Cybercultures, 2006, edited by David Bell).

David Bell in Cybercultures also quotes Mark Dery with a definition of cyberspace from 1992: “A far-flung, loosely knit complex of sublegitimate, alternative, and oppositional subcultures whose common project is the subversive use of technocommodities often framed by radical body politics…Cyberculture is divisible into several major territories: visionary technology, fringe science, avant-garde art, and pop culture.”

This is all very promising to me sitting at home with a large pot of coffee and the door hanging open to let the cold front in. It justifies discussions of virtual reality, fringe science and popular culture in the context of cyberculture. If I’m supposed to become an expert in something over this next year and come up with a book about it, or at least a book-length dissertation, it would be nice if I could do something to establish a career studying the relationship between news and cyberculture in a way that lets me branch out to look at cultures online in other contexts. My research will always be about discourse and power in a networked environment.

We have always had social networks. Cyberspace just makes it more easy to connect in some ways. Of course with those capabilities come the danger of giving up more than you know.

Speaking of power and friends, Gaby and I watched Where the Wild Things Are last night, and they snuck a little social commentary in there. When Max, the king, couldn’t stop the monsters from disagreeing, I couldn’t help but thing of Hope and Change and Oil Spills. I had the idea that the monsters were the only ones who could fix their problems, and that Max could at best be a catalyst.

Max’s biggest problem was promising that he could do magic. President Obama is having the problem of having promised hope and change, a rather magical platform, and then having to reminding us several times that there are no magic wands to wave and fix our greatest problems. (I’m fairly sure he used the “magic wand” term specifically in the health care discussion, credit crisis, and the related mortgage crisis, possibly regarding immigration reform as well).

What Obama could do better is to push people to work together to clean up the oil spill. Have there been requests made to take stock of underwater diving capabilities that don’t belong to the oil company? If the oil company is the only entity capable of fixing the problems it creates, should it be allowed to go relatively unchecked by the Mineral Management Service? It’s easy to say “no” now.

Perhaps this is naive. Perhaps, even if the U.S. government had someone on the rig every two weeks to do oversight safety checks, he or she would not have been able to do anything to prevent the explosion. We may need to re-think regulation in the context of cyberspace.

What if cyberculture were used to regulate and identify problems of social concern before they exploded? If you can examine our shopping habits and know that it’s about time to buy milk, you should be able to automate an estimation of when the rig is perhaps, maybe due to assplode. Maybe have someone swipe a little plastic card (with a drop of oil insignia on the front instead of a tomato) across a UPC scanner every time he checks the blowout preventer to be sure it still has its rubber seal.

In the age of cyberculture, there may be a tendency to assume magical things can happen, but data mining isn’t magic. It’s a tool, and it can be used for more than delivering ads on for Rogaine on Facebook to males aged 30-39.

To paraphrase my former colleague Mike Colon, who had a photographer’s way with words: “How about you hope in one hand and and data mine in the other and see which fills up first?”

I want to see a proactive government regulatory data mining system in place by the time the oil stops belching into the Gulf.

There’s something the President can do.

As for our other problems, “too big to fail” and “too deep to cap” (insert sick Eazy-E joke here) have the same mother. Corporate power, in these supposedly anomalous but hugely important cases, got just a little bit too big for government to effectively affect. There’s your threshold, the end of your slippery slope: When it’s so big the entire force of the federal government couldn’t fix it.

Never mind control over all of BP, I’d like for our government just to be able to take over cleanup of one offshore oil rig explosion. That’s a legitimate question to insert into the paperwork for the environmental impact statement: “If this blew up, could we, as a nation, freaking do something about it?”

When things are deregulated to the point that the culprits are the only ones capable of fixing their own mess, the rule of law need not apply. People are worried Obama’s a socialist. I’m worried the lack of regulation will destroy our society much sooner. In the past year, it has nearly killed our global economy: twice via the US and once in Europe, and now the lack of regulation is destroying our environment in a direct and obvious way.

If I were you, Mr. President, I might put on the crown, grab the scepter and start growling. Getting away without being eaten might be the best you can hope for on this island, and BP is one of the biggest, meanest monsters. But, if you don’t do something more, now, you’ll be sailing back to the real world and left with the rest of us just waiting for the sun to explode in 2012.