"Nothing can change the shape of things to come." -Max Frost

"Belief can be manipulated, only knowledge is dangerous."
-Bene Gesserit maxim

"It can only be attributable to human error." -HAL 9000

n the eve of Waterloo, Wellington cautioned his officers about "running around like wet hens." A cool simile, and still apt, after 190 years, when applied to our media as we enter this brave new year. Tech is in such uproar that few can factor it into their thinking. In 2005, we saw unprecedented, multileveled upheavals in mass communications. At one end of the spectrum, the Los Angeles Times dropped in circulation, downsized its editorial staff, and gave up charging for its online edition. At a far extreme, enterprisingly twisted boy jailbait sold webcam voyeur sex, quite without any recourse to adults except as customers and Internet providers. Change shakes windows and rattles doors. Something is happening here that is probably exponential, but does anyone have a clue as to what it is?

If current floundering augers anything, the answer is, "The hell we do." While Netflix eats the video store, Hollywood thrashes like a dying ape, creating movies that look like videogames and wondering why the Xbox generation fails to show at theaters. In a world that dreams of liquid crystal home cinemas with cheap Chinese hardware, and where game CGI is better than the last Charlize Theron film, moviehouses full of popcorn reek and babies on cellphones lose their appeal. Meanwhile, Howard Stern singlehandedly makes satellite a viable radio player, and, in another media arena, Print and The Electron go head to head, with the showdown coming maybe sooner than many expected. Daily newspapers show battle fatigue and make undignified advances on the youth market, trying to prove they're not 20th-century relics. But everybody knows that The Electron will win, if only because The Electron says it will.

The Electron's Labyrinth, however, is not without conspiracy and conflict. Cable television/Internet providers slither fat in local monopolies, but phone companies are straining at the government leash to deliver programming to subscribers. Fundamentalists - via the FCC - have been led to believe they have oversight of everything, and now complicate every regulatory move with absurd stipulations of morality, making the chances for even marginally intelligent solutions close to hopeless. The New American Century is hardly a golden age of clarity and vision. Communications are a massive sector of global Rollerball capitalism, and operate with the same tooth-'n'-claw audacity that allows the Bechtel Corporation a monopoly to sell the Bolivians their own rainwater by order of the World Bank.

A president of the United States who is leery of science, uncomfortable around smart people, and distrusts the Internets still dominates a Congress so shamelessly corrupt it gives new meaning to Bob Dylan's Wilburys maxim "everything's legal as long as you don't get caught." And the whole pack of them do business with the equally corrupt Comrades of Beijing, who believe they can control cyberspace but are threatened by sex blogger Mu Zimei and hackers like the Hong Kong Blondes. A Second Cultural Revolution might actually succeed ... unless Google gets bigger and smarter, in which case we may well be headed to either Utopia or the Matrix. Or both.

Print vs. The Electron

In a recent personal letter to me, Felix Dennis, self-made print billionaire and publisher of Maxim, expressed the belief that print, in many of its most familiar forms, will become obsolete in the foreseeable future, but that nothing radical would happen "in the next couple of years." He saw sufficient cushion for industries to adapt. The proprietors of daily and weekly newspapers might disagree, having lately sustained more bites to their flesh than a drunken teen in a shark movie. The single chomp of Craigslist may have hit vital organs, as a nation that once paid newspapers for its classified ads - jobs, apartments, buy/sell, hookers, and personals - now increasingly logs on to Craigslist for free.

The Craigslist empire grew out of software designed by Craig Newmark in San Francisco, which could automatically add e-mail postings to an expanding website. Launched in 1995, with a mission to "restore the human voice to the Internet, in a humane, non-commercial environment," the system now boasts three billion page views per month in multiple cities. Classified advertising might seem minor to the outsider, but within the newspaper industry this loss of traditional hard cash represents a body blow from which recovery may not be easy.

Newspapers, however, aren't the only area of print where previously undisputed turf is being conceded. The days of the reference book may already be numbered. Instead of reaching for Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide to check the dates, spellings, and casts of films, I now fast-click to the Internet Movie Database. It's a no-brainer. The Electron wins because the electron offers speed. For more general information, I have Wikipedia, "the Free Encyclopedia," on a hot button, and it's faster and more complete than any printed desk encyclopedia. Doubts have been voiced as to how an encyclopedia can be accurate when it is created and updated for and by the people, but constant use tends to confirm Wikipedia's general exactitude, and the entry on me (which makes me profoundly happy) is accurate, if short, and written with enough mild cynicism to keep me in my place. Inevitable mistakes do occur, given Wikipedia's open architecture, but, according to a spot-check by the magazine Nature, these are in a similar error margin to that of the Encyclopedia Britannica's mistakes.

The times that Wikipedia has been used for mischief - most famously the guerrilla rewrite of the entry for Donald Rumsfeld that bathroom-walled the Sec of Def as a child molester, and the punking of journalist John Seigenthaler by a troll who connected him to the JFK assassination - were used as evidence that Wikipedia was just another treasonous but inept liberal conspiracy. The problem, however, was primarily trolls, the bottom-feeding posters-of-mindless-messages who roam the 'Net, defacing anything they can reach, like inner-city taggers without the flair or color. Trolls were partly responsible for the collapse of Michael Kinsley's "Wikitorial" experiment at the Los Angeles Times; brought down the message boards on Howard Stern.com with their dumb-bastard overload; and currently keep webmasters and checkers at IMDb, Wikipedia, and Craigslist on their toes. But trolls are a price we pay for Internet freedom, and are infinitely preferable to any FCC-style oversight, if that were even possible.

Post-Capitalist Capital

In Wikipedia and Craigslist, so-called liberal web conspiracies have created functional resources, without charging the consumer or hustling advertising. Donations need only cover tech and management. Nerds work on their obsessions, and don't require a salary. A post-capitalist business model? Hasn't Star Trek already been there? (Don't laugh yet.) Richard Mason says it all on CalTech's Robotics website: "Characters often describe the Federation as if it were a perfect socialist (or at any rate, post-capitalist) society, where there is no money and nobody wants for material things." In one TV episode, Captain Picard elaborated on the replicator, a device you could ask for anything - a perfect martini or a perfect rose - and it would materialize out of stray atoms. After such an invention, Picard indicated, money became pointless.

If not pointless, money certainly poses a problem on the contemporary Internet. Irrespective of content, some sites make truckloads of cash, and others make none. You'll see no hint of Craigslist post-capitalism in blog-bundling operations like the highly successful Gawker Media, or the heavily funded but failing Pajamas Media. The idea in both cases was to combine like-thinking blogs and maximize ad sales. Gawker mogul Nick Denton made a smart move into the gossip business with the Washington raunch of Wonkette and the L.A. snide of Defamer, and a formula that media site Click Z described as "find a niche topic, recruit a talented and crass young writer, come up with an irresistible title, promote like hell, and wait for advertisers to call."

Bloggers Roger L. Simon and Charles (Little Green Footballs) Johnson also saw the stairway to heaven when they raised a rumored $4 million for Pajamas Media to "aggregate blogs to increase corporate advertising and creating our own professional news service, as well as a new method of fact-checking." Then, last November, they threw a really lavish Manhattan launch party for their blog bundle of "hot right-wing bloggers." And that was it. Except the operation changed its name a couple of times, and all that remains, less than two months later, is one lackluster and cumbersome blog with a single space for one lone rotating ad.

This Ain't Your Father's 'Times'

The grim truth is that folks don't like to pay for anything online except porn, gambling, and shopping. All else - especially news items - is like paying for the peanuts in a bar. The Times's Arthur Sulzberger Jr. already alienated NYT online readers with a pay-to-play premium of seven bucks a month to read top columnists like Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd. Inexpensive but irksome - and infinitely avoidable because Rich is already being bootlegged on multiple sites, and Dowd can be had for free on something called Unknown Candidate. The "fair use" provisions of Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107 are currently being read as an Internet license to reproduce without paying a dime, as long as you're nonprofit. News is now linked, blog to blog, site to site, until concepts like copyright become as meaningless as the money on Star Trek. Fair use may be in the realm of barely-legal-so-sue-me, but who's going to litigate over news stories when the movie industry is struggling to keep bootleg DVDs of King Kong out of the hands of Nigerian street vendors?

With such an array of reprints, the online reader can cherry-pick news and features from a vast array of sources, and new patterns of news consumption emerge. We no longer rely on Tina Brown to select the stories. The web is now an information buffet where we build our own sandwiches. This is something Matt Drudge realized early on with The Drudge Report. Although a furious rightist gadfly, Drudge knows a good story when he sees one, and headlines a link, so even those who don't appreciate his politics stop by the hugely successful site. Since May 2005, Arianna Huffington has been emulating him with a progressive twist. Pundits laughed when she came out with The Huffington Post, but it has proved to be a useful mix of linked stories and a column of guest blogs by a range of names as diverse as Larry David, James Wolcott, and Norman Mailer. OK, so Huf Po is a media-left cocktail party, but it's intelligently designed so everyone can join in with the posted comments, which grow into an attraction all by themselves.

William Gibson may have gotten it wrong, but a vision of endless cyberspace - populated by a million lightpoints of capricious blogs and the slightly denser glow of more centralized information at Huf Po, Drudge, and Wonkette - still indicates that, if the mainstream media sail in like big-buck battlestars, they'll have problems with their navigation. The Internet has proved so skilled at circumventing attempts at control, it may actually be where freedom truly rings. Sadly, the same may not be said of television where the fight is to hold on to what we have, as the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights goes after South Park, and the FCC subverts the U.S. Constitution.

Cable Shows of Satan

When Time Warner and Comcast Corporation offered $17.6 billion for the bankrupt Adelphia Communications, FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin saw his chance. As outlined in last week's Mick's Media, he threatened the would-be buyers that "unwanted conditions could be imposed on their proposed acquisition if they do not agree to curb the proliferation of sexually explicit programming." The FCC was blocking a business deal to extract controls over programming. To close the deal, Time Warner and Comcast would have to advance Martin's decency agenda. Unconstitutional? Probably. Illegal? That, too. In 2000, the Supreme Court upheld cable's right to air sexually explicit content, since "technology allowed subscribers to block unwanted shows." But Kevin Martin didn't care. The FCC under George Bush is a payoff to the religious right. Focus on the Family and Parents Television Council have direct lines to the chairman. Their first joint mission for God was to sanitize radio content and run Howard Stern off to satellite. It didn't hurt that Clear Channel came out of the airwave crusade with all the money and media marbles. They were also George's old boys. Emboldened by their success, the moral gunslingers advanced on the big prize - cable TV - and the Adelphia purchase became the OK Corral at which all those characters saying "cocksucker" on HBO would be stopped dead.

As things stand, Martin - whose wife is the chief public affairs strategist for Dick Cheney - wants Time Warner and Comcast to accept one of two options. Either offer channels "à la carte" instead of in bundled packages, so subscribers receive only the channels they order - which the cable industry says would wreak havoc with its current delivery systems, drive up prices, and kill off the smaller specialist channels - or to go to a tier system that would create a family-friendly basic package. Reports indicate Comcast and Time Warner have already been lobbying their programming suppliers to accept the same censorship as broadcast TV, and they show no signs of standing up to the FCC to preserve uncut movies, or even their own products like Deadwood and The Sopranos.

To further complicate a ravaged landscape, the phone companies are eager to start sending TV programming down their existing cables, and have been cozying up to Martin and supporters like Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) and Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kansas), by intimating that they would provide an à la carte system, despite the drawbacks. Martin seems unaware that, while technology leads cities like Philadelphia toward citywide WiFi, his FCC crusade is muscling cable TV back to 1983 (and possibly wrecking it). Equally unworried is Brent Bozell of the PTC, who arrogantly told the Los Angeles Times, "maybe you won't have 100 channels, maybe you'll only have 20." Free choice is, after all, the tool of Satan.

The East Is Mu Zimei

But do Stevens, Brownback, and the FCC keep an eye on China as a model of cultural repression that might be easily replicated in the U.S.A.? If they do, they'll have noticed how Beijing totalitarianism was rocked by sex blogger Mu Zimei. She was originally Li Li, who wrote a sex-tips-for-girls column for Chinese fashion mag City Pictorial. "Mu Zimei" was the name Li Li used when, in spring of 2003, she started up a far more explicit blog of her hot-sheet adventures among China's rich and famous on Internet site Sina.com, and attracted 10 million daily visitors to her tales of blowjobs and threesomes. While the government made no comment, Sina recognized a good thing and ran even more of Mu/Li Li. Official displeasure was finally expressed in an editorial in the state-run Beijing Evening News that warned "the blind pursuit after this kind of phenomenon will mislead people into thinking that the authorities are turning a blind eye."

In her blog, Mu Zimei defended her right to sleep with whomever she fancied and to write about it. Sina.com still backed off, downplayed its Mu promotion, but allowed her blog to continue. Not good enough, apparently, because the government then moved to ban a print anthology of her work, despite a massive advance sale, and Sina was ordered into a period of old-fashioned Maoist self-criticism. To defuse more escalation, Mu voluntarily shut down her website, but she also told the foreign press that she would go on writing, as long as the Chinese government didn't prevent her.

For the moment, Mu Zimei lies low, but a market force has been revealed. China has 68 million "netizens" on the Internet, with annual growth rates approaching 30 percent, and they want what Mu offers. Dissident hackers with names like The Cult of the Dead Cow and the Hong Kong Blondes have meanwhile been infiltrating Chinese police and security networks just to prove they can. Link them with Mu - or the next rebel blogslut to challenge the status quo - and the creation of the unstoppable may be in motion. Unless, of course, Google decides to take a side in some virtual-future Tiananmen Square.

Open the Pod Door, Google

Folks who once loved Google are growing nervous. The revelation that the huge and near-indispensable search engine had rewritten some of its programs to accommodate political censorship by the Chinese government didn't sit well. Others simply saw its infinite capacity to store data as approaching the metaphysical. Already it's loading entire libraries into its vast new book search and customizing our web ads, and Google Earth will take you to a simulated spy-satellite picture of your very own building, if directed. (Although not on my four-year-old laptop.) Google must already know more about any one of us than the FBI, and will ultimately know absolutely everything, which, to a few, will make it God. Even those who worry can't hide their respect. "Google has hired really, really smart people. When you put that many smart people in one place, neat things happen," said Thomas Y. Lee, professor of operations and information management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, in an article on its business/info web publication Knowledge@Wharton.

And one of the potentially neat things may well be this heavily rumored Google Operating System, duking it out with Microsoft for PC manufacturers' favor. Balaji Padmanabhan, another Wharton professor quoted in the article, sees a Google system as part of "a move toward PCs that don't have a lot of software installed on them, where most applications can run off a network." How a systems war would affect the consumer remains to be seen, but, since the Google OS would have users more plugged into Google than they ever were to Microsoft, concern is kindled that we may be putting too many of our most basic eggs in the Google basket. And the comfort and freedom of any Google basket is also questionable in light of its response to reports that - after acquiring an interest in Chinese search engine Baidu.com - it had intentionally excluded headlines of government-banned Chinese websites from Google News. Its statement turned out to be a gem of corporate-global doublespeak: "Google has decided that in order to create the best possible search experience for our mainland China users we will not include sites whose content is not accessible, as their inclusion does not provide a good experience for our News users who are looking for information."

A good experience, however, is often in the perception of the beholder. One person's heaven is another's purgatory. In the cyberspace vision, Google begins to look strangely maternal. A vast and synergetic mother system extends umbilicals of fun and data to the entire planetary population, feeding our human curiosity and need to delve - but maybe leading us in predetermined directions we know nothing about. The very name of this wholly faceless but intimate entity is baby talk: The word Google is comforting but meaningless, and, almost without knowing it, we are already modifying our behavior. Our love of stuff diminishes. Once we had CDs in jewel cases, and rolled joints on album sleeves. Now the music we own is an abstraction, a file on an iPod. The stuff we do acquire is frequently more electronic hardware to expand the modification of our minds. I've even observed - although the research is highly unscientific - that online readers are uncomfortable with long essays, and initially scan webtext with an am-I-interested speed-read. TV has already raised two generations with attention-span disorders. So are we natural-born lazy slobs or merely adapting? Google knows more than we ever will, world without end, and may simply be preparing us for the day when it's smarter than we are. And - dare it be said - self-aware? But that, of course would be science fiction. Or the futurist predictions of Ray Kurzweil of the Singularity, coming in 30 years, when we humans will meld with our computers.

But you're OK. You're still reading a newspaper. Like, ink on paper, right?

Or are you?