Entries Tagged 'boingboing sucks' ↓

A (not so) final word on BoingBoing jumping the shark into hypocrisy and The Communist’s Consumerist creates new “commenting rules” so ridiculous and censorial that I gave up reading it. Continue reading →

So, if you’re a fan of Teh Intertubes, you know all about the non-smackdown that happened between Violet Blue and BoingBoing and just how boring and frustrating it’s been the past few days. When will someone at BoingBoing say something that doesn’t sound like Scott McClellan wrote it? When will the BB fan boys stop acting like Violet Blue is the devil? When will readers notice that BoingBoing and Big Brother share initials and memory hole policies?

For those of you who aren’t Intertubes fans or have been in a cave recently, the non-story of the year goes like this:

Violet Blue is a sex blogger and sometimes writer/radio show host who probably has more money than God that comes from simply talking about sex. Boing Boing is an anti-censorship, liberal vehicle for Cory Doctorow’s latest work copyleft/copyfight blog that pretty much makes money from talking about how much copyright, big government, and invasion of privacy suck. Sometimes, the libertarians on this blog are all over BoingBoing; sometimes, we’re just over it.

The connection between the two comes from the fact that Blue once wrote a few posts for BoingBoing, and used to be a favorite on BoingBoing insomuch as she was linked to with frequency. Over the course of a few years, Blue wrote for or was mentioned in BoingBoing somewhere on the order of 70 times, give or take a few, according to an LA Times blogger who bothered to go to the WayBack Machine and count.

Why the Wayback Machine? Well, that’s the rub. You see, according to BoingBoing, they “unpublished”, which is a NewSpeak way of saying “deleted”, not just articles by Ms. Blue, but every mention of her in existence on their site, effectively scrubbing her from their archives and sending her down the memory hole.

Trust us, Winston Smith was doubleplusbusy that day.

Naturally, for such an anti-censorship site as BoingBoing, this seems rather odd, especially since there was no transparency in the action to unpublish Ms. Blue: one day she existed in the BB universe, the next she did not. Even Ms. Blue was unaware of her deletion until this past week, when the news slowly began to trickle out that she was gone from BB. People began to ask questions, and alternatively flame the hell out of BoingBoing, and BB began a hard and fast policy of denial: any comment that mentioned Violet Blue was systematically deleted from their site. The InterTubes grew restless. Metafilter got involved, then ValleyWag picked up the story, which then hit its sibling site Gawker, and all hell broke loose.

Sometime yesterday, BoingBoing responded to the controversy with a non-post about the issue by Moderator-cum-Douchebag Teresa Nielson-Hayden, who did her best White House Press Secretary working interview and forced out the editors’ response to the controversy, which was pretty much “This is a personal blog, we’ll damn well do what we feel like and have no responsibility to tell the readers what happened or why. More over, this is personal, so leave us alone.”

Also, she cannot comment on an ongoing investigation.

Now, that by itself wouldn’t be so bad, if the comments that followed weren’t routinely attacked for asking questions that seemed pretty self-evident after reading the post, such as how can a blog about transparency and accountability be neither transparent nor account for its actions? How can they continue to post about Mr. Doctorow’s novel fighting Big Brother (entitled “Little Brother”) when they had gone totally BB themselves and unpublished a writer? Between Nielson-Hayden and the readers, things in the comments quickly spiraled out of hand and two camps formed: fan boys who believe BB can do nothing wrong, reading for two minutes of hate with Violet Blue as a symbol of all that’s wrong with the InterTubes, and conspiracy theorists and general uber-left communists who now want BB staff to post home addresses, SSNs, and all other personal data to be the most transparent InterTubes blog of all times or else fail miserably under the weight of evil corporate oppression.

After that there were only three or four new posts to BoingBoing’s site, ending around 3PM. Then, for six hours, BoingBoing was dark, save for the glowing light of the comments thread growing exponentially. Meanwhile, ever the willing victim in all of this, Ms. Blue was giving interviews to any blogger who would listen. She even created a spreadsheet detailing every post involving her that was deleted from BB. When it comes to being sympathetic, Ms. Blue seemed to be aiming for a new residency over at Fail Blog.

Lost somewhere in the maelstrom was the question that the first few hundred posts reasonably asked: what transgression did Violet Blue commit that was so horrible and unspeakable, she had to be erased from the annals of BoingBoing, at the expense of BoingBoing’s own integrity?

For anything even close to an answer, only the LA Times and SF Gate came close to getting answers, and theirs had the ring of X-Files paranoia to them.

1: Cory Doctorow is a big copyleft protector, fighter of the “evil” of copyright. Violet Blue legally changed her name two years ago to Violet Blue and soon after sued a porn star for using Violet Blue as a name. Said porn star is a single mom (Oh noes! Leftists always bleed extra hard for the single mommies!) quit the business to sell her own work herself (Leftists also get massive hard-ons for independent production and small business) and (here’s the actually important part) had been using the name since 1999, long before Ms. Blue was a sex blogger. Moreover, it is believed that Violet Blue knew of the porn star’s existence before legally changing her name, and allegedly, before even using the moniker at all. Blue (the sex blogger) even had Blue (the porn star mommy) on her radio show once. The fact that Blue (PSM) couldn’t afford a decent attorney and was trounced in court by Blue (SB) would have really pressed Doctorow’s buttons wrong and ended with Blue being throughly denounced on BoingBoing. However, Blue being a former contributor, it might have looked bad to other editors or the almighty sponsors if Blue was still on the site as a contributor and yet trashed later on, so it was best to delete her and go on their separate ways.

2. Federated Media supports BoingBoing through ad revenue almost exclusively. Like many other publications, BoingBoing could, theoretically, be held hostage to the demands of Federated Media, and if they decided association with Ms. Blue was becoming a liability, they could demand she be wiped from the site.

3. Blue was “riding the coattails” of her BoingBoing posts, according to some readers and bloggers familiar with the two. She allegedly referred to herself as the fifth BoingBoing editor, which may have bruised an ego or two, and eventually might have had a falling out over taking more credit than her due and trying to raise her importance level to back her new projects.

4. Editor Xeni Jardin and Ms. Blue were allegedly involved at some point, and the affair turned sour. A hurt Jardin may have then convinced the other three editors that deletion of Ms. Blue was the best way to go. This rumor is fueled by a LA Times blog post which suggests that after a conversation with both Jardin and Blue, the blogger was satisfied that it truly was a personal matter handled poorly and not worth the bru-ha-ha it generated. Of course, that blogger’s lips are sealed.

5. Combine theories three and four. Or, as ValleyWag puts it:

For Blue, we’ve come to believe, the friendship always had a mercenary angle — Jardin could get her linked as well as laid. The association with Boing Boing boosted Blue’s career. How painful it must have been for Jardin to realize she was being used by a groupie who wanted to join her band. And people in pain exercise supremely bad judgment, which is what Jardin did when she “unpublished” posts about Blue from Boing Boing.

None of the rumors implicate either Mark or David as the root of the problem, which makes sense, as Mark just seems like such a nice guy, you can’t imagine him getting into a fight with anyone (did you see him on the Colbert Report?) and David isn’t nearly as active as the other three. Mark and David are like the Ringo and George to Doctorow and Jardin’s Lennon and McCartney, respectively. While you can see the latter getting into public feuds with people, the former just are so freakin’ nice and quiet, you’d have to murder their ickle robot puppies for them to get upset with you, and even then you could probably settle the matter over a cup of tea or something.

So, no matter what theory you subscribe to, the one thing all the theories have in common is that BoingBoing has compromised their principles for some unnameable reason, which makes the compromising of said principles all the more suspect. For a group of editors who decry the Bush Administration (and who doesn’t anymore, really?) they sure have learned a few lessons from the last 8 years under Bush Jr’s reign, such as how to talk without actually saying anything.

War is Peace.
Secrecy is Transparency.
Long live BoingBoing.

And in other news the Earth is round.

Yes, I am aware that BoingBoing.net hating Ted Stevens isn’t exactly earth-shattering, but when it’s this blatant, well, what can you do but post it to your blog!?

Today’s “links round-up” post:

Boy, the Peninsula Tokyo sounds sweet: “This being Tokyo, the hotel also includes a futuristic touch: a first-of-its-kind telephone system that allows you to make calls throughout the building with a cordless handset, which then switches to mobile mode the minute you step outside.”

However, when Sen. Ted Stevens said he wanted to switch from his home phone to a phone he could use on his motorcycle (a, duh, mobile phone — or cell phone, as we know them) BoingBoing called it technobabel.

To be fair, Xeni posted today’s post; Mark posted the one about Sen. Stevens (who did, yes, once compare the internet to “a series of tubes” thus giving rise to my favorite term for the web, “InterTubes”) but I still think this smacks of BoingBoing elitism.

“Oooh, we’re all cool hipsters and this is an old (possibly in big oil’s back pocket) geezer who doesn’t understand technology. When he want’s something, it’s stupid, but when the Japanese do it, it’s not stupid. It’s advaaaaaanced.” Excepting, of course, that BoingBoing isn’t cool enough to reference Jhonen Vasquez, so yeh.