Intellectual Property Law

the unbloggable lightness of being

By Siva Vaidhyanathan

Dear Sivacracy Readers:

It's been a great long while since I've posted, which seemed to be a particularly poor way for me to thank Siva for his kindness and generosity in allowing me to write on Sivacracy. Part of this was simple embarrassment over how my role in the blog hadn't matched up to my initial ambitions. I had hoped to inaugurate a truly revolutionary form of blogging, with prose that would be clean, cold, rational, and nearly dehumanized, aimed at a clinical take on the savagery of international politics and culture. Instead, I soon began simply to praise Kanye West albums and to lament the dominance of the San Antonio Spurs; I had wanted to be Robert Frank but quickly became the guy who takes photographs of kittens and adds slogans like "Hang in there!"

My ineptitude shocked even me. I spiraled into a morass of self-loathing, which only increased every time Ann would post something that would make me laugh, or Laura would post something that would teach me about technology and information control, or Liz would stick it to Joe Lieberman over trying to censor video games (which I play pretty much all the time), or Siva would post something that would make me feel less alone in my rage with one of his pointed jabs about the current American political scene. Why couldn't I do those things? Why were my thoughts (which usually go something like this: "maybe pepperoni I'm glad I'm not a vegetarian anymore because I could also do sausage but I'd better call it in in advance because they get crowded on Friday nights fuck I shouldn't even go on to Burnout Revenge when I haven't completed Grand Theft Auto IV, I forgot to get back to that student's email but why do they need to know the paper topic already, hey, what the fuck I'm out of calming herbal tea, I just bought that canister this morning") so inherently unbloggable, so useless to the larger public debate?

And so I give my farewell with great regret and well-deserved humility, though also with real gratitude to Siva for setting up this wonderful forum and for giving me the great honor of allowing me to take part. Like many other fans, I will miss reading it. And I thank the other writers for their dedication and for sharing their extraordinary insights, and wish them nothing but the best with their other projects.

Full post as published by SIVACRACY .NET on September 19, 2008 (boomark / email).