First Think, THEN Ink.

Once upon a time, at the end of the previous century, there was a guy named Brad.



Brad

Brad lived in Oregon. He was headed off to college in Seattle and he wanted to stay in touch with his friends from High School. Sure, there was email and snail mail, but for a young programmer, that simply wouldn't do.

Brad's solution was to build an online journaling website so his friends could read all about his exploits and he, in turn, could read theirs. This program was called "LiveJournal."



Brad designed the program in a very specific way - the comments were "threaded," meaning that not only could someone respond to the person who posted a journal entry, but people could also read other remarks posted, then comment to other commenters and start a conversation with them.

Since everyone using Brad's program already knew each other, that was fine. But soon, this circle of friends wanted to include some of their friends in on this "journaling" thing. So the group started to slowly expand, as the people using it passed on the info about it to others.

Eventually, this became a lot more tricky as friends of friends of friends wanted to take part. Brad's solution this time was to create "invite codes," a special key to unlock LJ that were given to users already on the site that could be sent to other people to allow them to join.

This accidentally became a genius element for two reasons. The first was that everyone joining the site was being vouched for by someone who was already a part of it. Essentially that meant that all the users were approved by at least one person who was already in the group. And the second reason was that it turned the site itself into an exclusive club that you could only join, if you qualified. That made getting a "membership" that much more enticing.

Soon after, there was an explosion as people of all sorts learned about LJ and wanted to get in on the trend. The invite codes were eventually dropped and anyone could sign up make an account. Communities formed - quite literally - A "community" was a group of people who had an interest in a specific topic: from aardvarks to zebras, from ABBA to ZZ Top, from Albania to Zimbabwe... You could think of a topic you enjoyed, make an LJ about it and people would join to discuss it. friendships were forged, as people read all about the lives of each other. And people eventually met each other "in real life." Just remember to put your photos under a "cut tag" because dial up would slow your computer down to a crawl if you didn't!

There even was a new word coined for the phenomenon - "blogging," an abbreviated portmanteau for "web log." In just four years, LiveJournal went from one guy's concept of keeping his friendships going to a million accounts!

And there were the knockoffs.

Because Brad was more interested in people being able to communicate with each other, rather than profiteering, the code he wrote to create LJ was open source, meaning that anyone could come along, take that code and create their own blog site, too. And people did. And then there were other services that intended to cater to niche groups. One of the most notable of those was a site called "myspace."



About the same time as the Millionth LiveJournal Account was created, myspace began.

myspace was a direct result of one of those LJ knockoff sites: "Friendster," or rather, myspace itself was a knockoff of Friendster. And the ambitions were high. Where LiveJournal covered mostly North American territory and a bit of Europe, myspace was planned to be available, globally, and it exploded, globally.

The advantage myspace had over LiveJournal was a major corporation behind them with a whole lot of money. NewsCorp, one of Rupert Murdoch's properties, purchased myspace and were using every trick in the book to get more and more people to sign up. In the same length of time it took LJ to acquire a million different accounts, myspace got one-hundred million.

The problem was myspace was awkwardly designed, had an unattractive color palette, had a difficult to negotiate interface, added a very unpleasant web log that made just writing an entry a challenge and everyone got a friend named "Tom" as soon as they signed up.



Tom

But myspace had something LJ didn't seem to have: celebrities.

Stars from the world of music, film, television, comedy were all creating accounts on myspace. And these celebrities were "interacting" with "regular people." There was a lot of self-promotion as these luminaries would talk about their projects, post photos, list off tour dates and even write blog posts on that clunky blog. People would post the accounts they liked best in their "Top 8," a list of myspace users that could be seen by anyone who visited your myspace.

And as myspace began to take off, Facebook opened to the general public.



TheFacebook, as it was originally known, sprung from what some might consider a sordid place. "Hot or Not dot com" was a site that let you look at photographs of people and asked you to select a score for each person from 10, being Hot down to 1, being not. It was, essentially, a "ranking" website and it's simplicity helped make its popularity.



A typical "Hot or Not" Page

That site inspired Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg to create "Facemash," where he placed two photos next to each other and asked the user to select the one they thought was "hotter."



Zuckerberg - did he post his photo on Facemash?

This evolved into an online version of something that already existed. A "facebook," as it is often referred to by collegians, is a guide to students of a university class year, showing a submitted photo, a name, hometown and perhaps name of high school for each enrollee. It was a way of getting to know your fellow undergrads.

Zuckerberg wanted to create a version of that for the web, but when Harvard dragged their feet, he just went ahead and did it, himself. The resulting website became an instant hit. After it went viral at Harvard, the other seven Ivy League Schools joined, then other elite schools such as MIT and Stanford were included, eventually leading to all Colleges being added and elite high schools were also permitted to join.

Again, like LiveJournal's "invite codes," the requirement of being part of the scholastic community gave the site a certain cachet that made people want to join. And, like LJ, Facebook eventually opened to anyone who wanted to create an account, over the age of thirteen.

Last, but certainly not least was the arrival of Twitter.




As the blogging craze peaked, there had to be a backlash. Not everyone was a writer but they still wanted the jolt of having people hear what they had to say. Enter twitter. With a strict limit of 140 characters per entry, you had to be brief. Essentially twitter was the blog for people who hated blogging.

And a celebrity couple helped to catapult the site, nearly immediately. Ashton Kutcher was at the height of his pop culture power, starring in the popular Fox sitcom, "That '70s Show" and was creator and host of MTV's celebrity prank show "Punk'd." His then wife, actress Demi Moore, (AplusK and MrsKutcher as they called themselves on the site), joined twitter and got a lot of their celebrity friends to open accounts there, too.

Where myspace had the potential for celebrity interaction, Twitter promised direct contact with the stars. Of course, millions scrambled to join, and Kutcher was the first person to reach a million followers, something that seemed incredibly impressive at the time.

But let's get back to the old El Jay. Right before Twitter was about to begin and as these other sites where people began interacting with each other were growing, Brad was approached by a group that wanted to purchase LiveJournal.

SixApart, a company that already had a kind of web log service on its roster (Moveable Type), purchased Danga Interactive (the company that owned LiveJournal) from Brad at the start of 2005. But as soon as the purchase was announced, there was a severe sense of foreboding from the userbase.

Brad had previously made a promise to the users: no ads anywhere, ever on LiveJournal. Most other sites had text ads or photo ads as a part of their presentation. LJ was never designed for that. It, like the internet itself, was created to be a communications outlet first, not an advertising one. So, when 6A came in, the users knew that ads were going to arrive with them. After all, no one buys a social media site to NOT make money.

SixApart's purchase of LJ, and their attempts to monetize the platform were hampered by a series of missteps that caused many users to recoil. One of 6A's early actions dealt directly with censorship - the ability to use icons to show what you want as you post an entry or comment.

Attempting to dictate what was permissible for the already established userbase may have been fine to make the platform safe for advertisers, but it did not sit well at all with the people active on LiveJournal. This happened several times, created a lot of strife and caused many users to want to preserve their journals before leaving the platform for some other, less controlling service.

6A frequently issued changes in policy without consulting the users first. Though it was clear they were harming the very people who were what they purchased the website for, they pressed ahead. They even created a brand new blogging service that they called "VOX" to siphon users off of LJ. In that way they could ignore the "no ads on LiveJournal" rule that Brad had promised, because anyone joining VOX would no longer be on LJ.

The people at 6A made so many blunders that they eventually created an anonymous account which they called "theljstaff," their way of attempting to correct things without attaching a particular person to it. Let's call that what it was: an attempt to hide from the users, never a good sign. They even held an election to create a user/staff liaison from candidates who used the site, and that went as well as everything else they attempted.

But there was something else going on with LiveJournal that most people in the West weren't aware of.

Russia was starting to change under their leader, Vladimir Putin. Putin was the Russian leader from 2000 to 2008, and a number of Russian citizens were not fond of his rule. Though the country was claimed to be a "democracy," it seemed quite clear that this was a front and that Putin was controlling elections, eliminating contenders, preventing any opposition and blocking any criticism of his government.

In Russia, LiveJournal was, in fact, the place where Russian celebrities, political figures and other luminaries had accounts. Known as Zhivoy Zhurnal, or ZheZhe for short, It was, essentially what Twitter was in the United States: the place where everyone wanted to be.

It was also the platform where those that opposed Russian rule communicated with each other.

After completely botching just about everything to do with LiveJournal, 6A finally decided to offload it to the only interested buyer that would match their price: A company in Russia called SUP.

It doesn't take a lot of imagination to realize that *someone* in Russia was trying to find and weed out the dissidents that were coming for Putin and his government, and soon after this Russian company took control of the site, the organization built on that platform to go against Putin had severely diminished and essentially ended.

And now we flash ahead to 2022, when another takeover of another social media site happened. Elon Musk, long time head of Tesla, the man behind SpaceX and the efforts to get humans to Mars suddenly, and almost defiantly said he would purchase twitter for the tidy sum of 44 Billion dollars. People were curious as to why Musk seemed intent on purchasing this platform, as he had no experience in social media, except for using it, like anyone else on the site.

After some haggling and jockeying, the purchase finally went through and Musk took ownership of twitter in October 2022: a new toy. He had revealed his intentions to revamp the entirety of twitter, for his own gratification.



Musk

Musk has stated that he feels that "free speech" has been harmed and claimed to want to rectify this. One of the hinted actions included reinstating accounts of twitter users that were banned; the most prominent of these being former President of the United States trump.

Though that hasn't happened, so far, a whole lot of wild actions have taken place, none of which has improved the usage for those people with accounts nor has it helped his stated goals. Just what is going on here?

When examining SixApart's purchase of LiveJournal and relating it to Musk's acquisition of twitter. The community is what they were buying. It's the community that makes any social media platform. Without the people, all you have is the hardware and software. Brad never would have created that original site if there were no people to write to - and that site never would have grown into something a company wanted to purchase if an enormous mass of people didn't find it worthwhile.

But how do you "control" the community once you own the site?

At the very least, Musk has been trying to cease all criticism of himself by anyone on twitter. Accounts have been banned or shadowbanned or simply quashed.

But, when you reveal your weakness to any trolls on the internet, they exploit it, so more and more parody accounts, more jokes, more insults and more slams started coming as soon as it was clear this was what Musk didn't want. And that led to more action against the offenders.

Away from the online parodies and reactions that were starting to explode, something to remember about twitter is that, similarly to the Russian part of LiveJournal, people were using that platform in a very serious way: to communicate and to organize.

Over the years, time and again, in Moldova, in Iran, in Tunisia, and even in Ukraine, after LJ was all but dismantled in the Cyrillic world, twitter became to go-to place to keep track of what was happening, of police state circumstances, of human rights violations. And it was the place to record video clips and photographs of offenses for anyone who had an account to view.

So the question must be asked:

Does Elon Musk realize that his personal antics on this site could potentially cause harm to populations who rely on the site to stay in touch, or, perhaps, was that his intention? Is he trying to, as the Russians essentially did with their version of LiveJournal, dismantle the platform to prevent any more action from the rank and file against the upper echelon?

But is Musk actively and knowingly attempting to help particular rulers who see revolution in their futures and want a helping hand to stop it? Who can know?

It's been a long strange trip from a high school coder in the Pacific Northwest to the richest man on the planet. And this ride isn't over. It's just a matter of where we are collectively going next.

The one important lesson we need to learn is, we must keep control of our communities, not have them taken over by those who don't care about them, or us. It's through communication that we have our greatest strength, and that's what those in power fear most.

Let's keep the conversation going.

UPDATE: Musk reinstated trump's twitter account as of November 19, 2022 based on a popularity poll he conducted.

It seems as though I have been blogging publicly on the internet for twenty years. I mean, it doesn't seem like it to me, but the calendar insists, so I guess it's true.

If you went back into my archive, the first official entry was listed as March 24, 2001. But that was posted at 1:33am. So my anniversary spans two days, sort of.

Twenty years. Two decades. One score.

It's as good a time as any to consider what the process has been, what I may have learned and what it might mean.

As anyone who has followed me knows, I began blogging on LiveJournal, back when they were an American company. Then, like now, I was working on a book. And then, like now, I wasn't sure anyone besides me would care about or even see anything I posted here. But that was okay, then, because back in 2001, I had been keeping personal diaries for a few years. I was used to being my only reader.

And it's okay, now, because I am cognizant of our circumstances.

But the fact is, writers need an audience, to motivate the writing, to engage the reader. And blogging meant interaction, feedback, conversation. Writing is a lonely art. Painters typically have a model or a landscape. Musicians have their music. A writer has the words and the page or screen.

My timing brought me many opportunities to try writing styles I had never considered before, and to improve the ones I already had. During this time, I got to be a fictionalized version of a talk show host, then I became a real one, myself. I began as a non-entity, then I met a bunch of fascinating people from many different places, even meeting many in their natural habitats. I got to compete in a writing "reality show" and nearly won!

The blog craze took off and soon everyone started writing, and hundreds of people were following. But as with every fad, people soon dropped it for The Next Thing. In this case, either to the shorter form of Twitter or the next evolution of internet communication - vlogging.

There is still something to say using this kind of platform, but honestly, most of the masses aren't checking it. In fact, of those people who are still blogging, many have been somewhat scattered or scuttled, on different platforms, blogging or not. I moved because of my aversion to a blog platform being run from a foreign land, with no apparent administrators.

How has this been twenty years??

The facts are these. When I began, George W. Bush was in his second full month as president. Today, Joe Biden is in his second full month as president. In some ways life feels similar, in others, more complacent, and in still others, more dangerous.

Have we, as a society, gotten any smarter during these two hundred and forty months?

The thought is in a single word. COMMUNICATION.

Communication is a big reason why I wanted to blog. I wanted to hear from other people. I wanted to read their thoughts. I wanted honest feedback, to get a sense of what worked.

But during this era, especially this most recent five years or so, it seems like we are not communicating effectively. We talk but don't listen. Our opinions are considered sacred. We don't have communities so much. And the platforms that are most popular have moved from words, to pictures, like flickr, Instagram and snapchat and onto video, like YouTube, Twitch and TikTok. Not a lot of talking or listening there.

And there is the issue of life getting in the way. Responsibility is something that takes you away from trivial pursuits. Where are those carefree days of Spring, 2001?

This isn't really a lament. But I guess I miss the me that could crank out entries consistently and not feel there was other stuff on the internet that cut into that time, and that my friends who also wrote were right there for me to read.

I think the ultimate lesson is we should do what we like. Don't worry about an audience when it comes to this, because if there is some sort of audience, she, he or they will find you, when the time is right. Or you will make your way, based on doing those things.

I haven't given up on this blog. But the elements that made it attractive at the turn of the millennium are mostly gone. I guess that is the part I lament.

I hope I can find new elements to make it work. There's a lot we still need to discuss.

My final comment in that first real entry is appropriate to state again, so I will leave you with that:

Feel free to ask me questions, I'll try my best to answer whatever ones you have. I hope you'll find the accounts of this adventure enjoyable! I'll try to keep you entertained.

But really, I'll mostly try to keep ME entertained, for the previously stated reasons.

Here's to the first twenty years of this blog... And here's to the NEXT twenty!

This is the first episode of TZ where the title is a bit of a spoiler. But, as usual, from the mind of Rod Serling, nothing is ever quite what it seems.

( ***SPOILERS ABOUT THIS EPISODE MAY BE REVEALED*** )

If you read the Richard Matheson short story this episode of "TZ" is based upon, there really is only one element that connects the two - disappearances... Or, more accurately, erasures.

( ***SPOILERS ABOUT THIS EPISODE MAY BE REVEALED*** )

Watching episodes of "The Twilight Zone," the original 1959 series, has been difficult.

Let's face it, it's a television show.

What does that really mean? TV is something meant to be "of the moment." I've stated this before: nobody who creates a television program, not even a visionary like Rod Serling, is doing it while considering how people sixty years later would view their work.

And living INSIDE an episode of "The Twilight Zone," which for me began during the wee hours of Wednesday November 9th, 2016, and has continually twisted until the whole world got caught up in it now, has made watching these episodes that much more quaint. Plus, nobody cares.

I do wonder what Mr. Serling would make of where we are right now. Would he try to make a statement through an episode of the rebooted version of his iconic series or would he simply speak, as a rational citizen, to give voice to what he saw?

I have my opinion, but rather than state that, I'm turning the floor over to the man, himself. Mike Wallace interviewed Serling just before his new TV show launched in 1959. It's a remarkable document and should be seen without my commentary beforehand. Here it is.

If all of the namechecks of famous authors from "Time Enough At Last" weren't enough to convince you of Rod Serling's literary interests, there's this episode, with three words taken from what is arguably the most famous speech written for the stage, William Shakespeare's soliloquy from Hamlet. However, this tale gets slightly more ribald than the Prince of Denmark ever did.

( ***SPOILERS ABOUT THIS EPISODE MAY BE REVEALED*** )

I have been using DW as a distraction from everything, but I did intentionally select "The Twilight Zone" as a show reflecting reality, so I should give updates about my process.

I am in the COVID-19 capital of the world (currently). In case you didn't know, that's NYC as of this writing. And it should be capitalized because COVID is an abbreviation for COrona VIrus Disease-2019.

There are several obvious reasons why New York is the COVID-19 epicenter. First we are an international hub for traffic through the three area airports, JFK, LaGuardia and Newark (New Jersey is in second place to New York). And a lot of people from Europe and Asia come into the United States through here.

Next, it's the population count. There's just under nineteen million NYC residents - we'll have to double check that with this year's Census.

Then it's the living conditions. The bulk of us live in apartments so we share our living spaces with people we might not know, or possibly never even see, depending on the size and configuration of your building.

And finally it's how we get around. Even if you own a car in this town, you will find that the subway system and yes, even the MTA buses, will get you to your destination cheaper and sometimes with fewer headaches than driving. Point being, we ALL use mass transit. But we pack subway trains at rush hour, then go to our collective offices.

Those four elements combined to make a Perfect Storm for this virus in this city.

It's not New York's "fault" we have this many cases, currently over 113,000 reported, but it is a function of how this city works. I would venture to guess that Los Angeles won't have it nearly as bad because many more people there have private residences and drive their own personal vehicles, one time that owning a car and living in a place that only your family and you typically enter is an advantage.

Both my state governor, Andrew Cuomo (whose brother, CNN anchor Chris Cuomo, tested positive for the virus and is now in quarantine) and my mayor, Bill de Blasio, were pushing for people to stay at home, sooner than the federal government suggested. In fact, I don't think the federal government has officially said to stay in yet.

Personally, I'm physically fine. I have been staying in for a while. I'm not even sure how long. Over two weeks for sure. I lost track. And because so many ignored the "suggestion" of staying home the last week or two, the case numbers are continuing to climb. So, I might be in for a while longer.

It's eerie to see the streets and sidewalks so empty, like that scene in "Vanilla Sky" where Tom Cruise drives into Times Square, gets out of his car and starts running through the empty landmark.



Yeah, it was only a dream. I wish.

The city hasn't shut entirely. It can't. People need to eat, need to get from home to work, if they are essential. And all the news reports.

The first victim I personally knew died this week. When I was DJing at that chintzy night club on West 4th, The Blackhearts, Joan Jett's backup band, would occasionally drop in after hours to drink and hang with us. And the most personable, jocular and freewheeling of the bunch was Alan Merrill. He wrote "I Love Rock n' Roll." He died on March 29th.

I'll reserve Saturdays for updates on how things are going. Please share your updates if you can. Thanks.

Certain themes come up frequently in episodes of "The Twilight Zone." One of those is the theme of isolation. Rod Serling noted that we, as a collective community, were, by the end of the 1950s, becoming more distant and that was clearly by choice. Suburban living was a draw, as people began to move from the crush of urban squalor into the solitude of residential communities. What did that mean for our view of how we see each other and how we see ourselves?

( ***SPOILERS ABOUT THIS EPISODE MAY BE REVEALED*** )

Revisiting childhood, much like foregoing the Space Age for the Old West, is a concept that likely will forever have resonance. If life seems too complicated, think back to the days when everything was simple and carefree. That's at the heart of this episode of the Zone.

( ***SPOILERS ABOUT THIS EPISODE MAY BE REVEALED*** )

The television Western was an extremely popular form, and for a lot of reasons. There was rustic scenery, horses, clear rules of right and wrong and the continual challenge of life and death. It was also, as the Space Age was beginning in earnest, a throwback to a time when some could find a kind of comfort in the simplicity of what all that represented. It was only natural for Rod Serling to explore the Western landscape with his unique vision. This was his first venture into that setting.

( ***SPOILERS ABOUT THIS EPISODE MAY BE REVEALED*** )