ARTS & FARCES internet

[Disclaimer: I’m a member of the Green Party of Minnesota. My coverage is probably biased. Live with it or move along....]

Someone—I think it was former Saint Paul, Minnesota mayor George Latimer—said earlier today that if there was ever a time to be sleepless in Saint Paul, it’s tonight.

The Minnesota races are very important this year, particularly the Senatorial race which has national implications. Therefore, I’ll be providing updates as long as I’m able.

The way this is going to work is that I’m going to be writing/editing live in an editor window within the website, so you’ll need to click the More… link and refresh that page regularly to get the updates. The editing will be necessarily raw, but I’ll make every attempt to keep it honest (or at least transparent) by making material changes using the del tag.

If things get really exciting, I may venture out for some location reports later in the evening. It’s going to be a long night because the senatorial ballots have to be hand-counted.

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It’s midterm election day in America when some percentage of us—usually less than half—hold our noses and go to the polls. Hopefully by now you’ve taken the time to inform yourself and you’re prepared to vote your conscience.

Before you trundle out to your local polling place consider what’s being done in your name by the current regime. It’s not pretty. If you’re a technologist this has been an especially horrible season. The American Open Technology Consortium (AOTC) is a nonprofit group of technologists with the mission of educating elected and appointed officials about technology. Unlike most other factions you can name, technologists have never been politically influential as a group.

The AOTC focuses most of its attention and efforts on the Internet and has assembled a list of the worst coders in Washington. Code is law, as Lawrence Lessig observed. “West coast code” is the code that runs our computers. “East coast code” is the code that runs our lives.

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[Disclaimer: I’m a member of the Green Party of Minnesota and whole-heartedly support—and will vote for—my party’s senatorial candidate, Ray Tricomo. I also fully realize that Tricomo doesn’t have a chance of winning Tuesday’s election. If you’re even considering voting for the putz that is Norm Coleman, make sure you read Paul Demko’s “Magical misery tour” before you decide. Frankly, I think we’d be just as well served if we drafted our representatives.]

Walter “Fritz” Mondale is the reluctant Minnesota DFL senatorial candidate, taking Senator Paul Wellstone’s place on the ballot after the latter’s untimely death in a plane crash. Up here on the far edge, we don’t have plain old Democrats, we have the Democrat-Farmer-Labor party. We used to have the Independent-Republicans too, but the Independents weren’t and now we’re back to plain old Republicans.

Mondale is most widely known as Jimmy Carter’s vice president (1976 - 1980) and as the first major-party presidential candidate with a female running mate (1984).

Fritz is concerned about big money compromising American politics. He told us so in his acceptance speech last week. His exact words were, “I will fight for citizens who are appalled by the oceans of special interest money that have swamped and compromised the politics of our country.”

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“What’s good for Microsoft is good for America.” That seems to be the consensus reaction to the accepted settlement of U.S. Department of Justice v. Microsoft.

Unless Shrub’s Justice Department magically grows a set and files an appeal, the case is over.

Coverage of Federal District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’s decision is all over the web, but Salon‘s Scott Rosenberg has the best (and most concise) take on it.

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[ed. note: I did this interview with the Head Lemur several months ago and completely forgot about it until he emailed me that he was going to run it this week. Here’s the original Lemurzone link.]

Michael Fraase

“When elephants dance” was my introduction to Michael Fraase. He believes the internet is sustainable and renewable. He is not wrong.

About you

What did you do before the Web?

Mostly what I’m still doing…. Writing, doing technology, business, and publishing consulting, causing good trouble, and striving to live as what Ken Kesey defined as a “warrior.” My wife and I co-founded ARTS & FARCES in 1979 while I was still in graduate school. We started out as an independent video production company, shooting mostly documentaries and short features. We had to form a business entity in order to work with state agencies on two documentaries for which we were being offered real contracts. We had to have a business name for those contracts and we couldn’t think of one. Like most college students at the time, I was having more than my share of recreational chemistry experiences and heard a British comic refer to his circle of friends as the “artsy-fartsy crowd.” I scribbled ARTS & FARCES as the production company name on the contract and it stuck.

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