Blogging & Strategizing & WAAGNFNP Posted by The Constructivist, 20 Apr 2007 04:00 am

Declaring War on Technorati

Friends, fellow-travellers, and members of the We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party, I come before you today not to praise Technorati but to bury it. Will you join me in declaring war on this Enemy of the Party?

Consider the function of its nefarious popular page, which is a huge step toward doing to blogoramaville what was done to radio and tv (which in their day inspired similar public sphere utopianism as teh intertubes, according to Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan’s New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader (Routledge, 2005) — namely, promoting crap over quality, elevating voyeurism and invective over reflection and dialogue, and making ratings and profits the name of the game. Don’t get me wrong — there are certainly some good blogs among the most linked and most favorited top 100s (a certain ex-fugitive from Party justice is at #85 on the latter list) — but everyone’s heard that even a bad function can find nuts twice a day (or something like that). It’s not like Technorati doesn’t have the capacity to do better: imagine if they produced 100 top 100s, each recognizing a particular bloggy genre. But no, what counts as a new idea for them is WFT (Where’s the Fire) — I say “wft?!” to its WTF Topics list, which takes Technorati’s default-celebrity-sex-tapes/gadgetry/wingnuttia-obsession-mode to its logical and absurd end.

Ah, but Technorati is the royal road to the American unconscious, you say; This Is What the People Want. To which I say, Fuck the People; the WAAGNFNP is all about the annihilationism, not the populism or the humanism.

Others then chime in: an imaginary political party can’t declare war — only the Congress can do that (in the U.S., at least). To which I say, ever heard of the neocons? The Project for a New American Century? Dick Cheney?

But is war the answer? still others worry. To which I say, no, the answer is 42, of course. Which happens to be the number of paragraphs in Chris Clarke’s thoughtful, reflective essay on why more people aren’t reading thoughtful, reflective essays online (a follow-up to a slightly-shorter piece of his). Which is why war is the answer when it comes to Technorati — or at least infowar.

You see, WTF is new enough that it’s still easy to hack. I propose the following 4-step program:

1) Head on over here and here right now and vote for these WAAGNFNP WTF blurbs.

2) Write your own WAAGNFNP WTF blurb (be sure to put WAAGNFNP in the first text box) and put a link to it in the comments to this post so we all can repeat step 1 with it.

3) Write your own WTF blurb on any topic you please and put a link to it in the comments so we all can repeat step 1 with it.

4) Propose further steps in the comments for expanding our Technorati infowar to new fronts and frontiers.

We need to learn from the Blog Against Theology Week(end) folks’ mistake — sure, they got listed once or trice as the #1 WTF during Masters Easter Weekend, but by failing to produce multiple blurbs, they left the top WTF topics to the likes of Anna Nicole Smith, Britney Spears, Antonella Barba, Paris Hilton, and Ann Coulter; YouTube, google, MySpace, twitter, and the iPhone; and, oh yeah, global warming, Iraq War, and Barack Obama (and now, Virginia Tech).

Go now and gird thy loins for the Technorati invasion — you have nothing to lose but your mind-forg’d manacles. (And we all could use a harmless prank these days.)

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Responses to “Declaring War on Technorati”

  1. on 20 Apr 2007 at 6:24 am 1. The Constructivist said …

    Bonus points to anyone who fills in the blanks in my “wft?!” typo epithet!

  2. on 20 Apr 2007 at 6:30 am 2. JP Stormcrow said …

    Hmmm, I am thinking this might be on the scale of The Duchy of Grand Fenwick attacking the US in The Mouse That Roared. But since I am a virile “charge the deranged killer” type I will take a run at it. …later when I have the time.

    The Q-Bomb was the GNF before the GNF was the GNF.

  3. on 20 Apr 2007 at 6:35 am 3. The Constructivist said …

    Hmm, now there’s a place I’d pledge allegiance to!

  4. on 20 Apr 2007 at 7:45 am 4. Proletarian Hammer Tendency said …

    As formulated, this call is incorrect: We must turn the war against Technorati into a civil war within the blogosphere, dispensing harsh class justice against all who would take half-steps.

    Be that as it may, the Proletarian Hammer Tendency joins WAAGNFNP in this campaign.

  5. on 20 Apr 2007 at 7:54 am 5. peter ramus said …

    “…you have nothing to lose but your mind-forg’d manacles.”

    But, …but I like my monacle!

  6. on 20 Apr 2007 at 8:04 am 6. christian h. said …

    Well, I’m sure the Worker’s Vanguard (I won’t link to it because it’s not safe to view at a capitalist workplace - it’s the paper of the ICL (4th Internationalist), formerly known as Spartacist League) will soon identify us - and the Proletarian Hammer Tendency - as capitulationist reformist pacifists (they did in fact describe the Worker’s World Party in those terms…).

  7. on 20 Apr 2007 at 8:32 am 7. Proletarian Hammer Tendency said …

    For the mollycoddle milquetoastes of the Spartacist League to call anyone “capitulationist reformist pacifists” in their wretchedly Popular Front newspaper Workers Vampire is surely a case of the pot calling the kettle black!

  8. on 20 Apr 2007 at 10:37 am 8. christian h. said …

    their wretchedly Popular Front newspaper Workers Vampire

    Brilliant. By the way, I maintain that we have been at war with Technorati since 1979.

  9. on 20 Apr 2007 at 10:45 am 9. James Killus said …

    We must turn the war against Technorati into a civil war within the blogosphere, dispensing harsh class justice against all who would take half-steps.

    I say, fuck civility. Uncivil war is the only way to go, and even full steps are far too small. We must take steps-and-a-half, even at the risk of misstepping and rapidly descending the staircase in full Duchampian glory, open-shuttered chimera recording/merging every bounce and crash.

  10. on 20 Apr 2007 at 11:01 am 10. Oaktown Girl said …

    Excellent!

    The Minister of Justice calls on the Ministry of Offense and Defense to release the MOOAD Hounds - on anyone and everything that has even the slightest whiff of being an Enemy of the Party.

  11. on 20 Apr 2007 at 11:03 am 11. christian h. said …

    PURGE!

  12. on 20 Apr 2007 at 11:42 am 12. Neo-Luddite Blunt Stick Guild said …

    …hammers, manacles, kettles, pots ….

    Posers all!

    Who will rid me of these meddlesome Technorati-loving little Eichmanns of the blogeoisie?

  13. on 20 Apr 2007 at 12:04 pm 13. JP Stormcrow said …

    We must take steps-and-a-half,

    Mother May I take 3 Banana Steps towards anarchy.

    Cry Havoc! And let slip the dogs of the MOOAD! Clearly either:
    a)a justifiable release of the GNF to shorten the duration of the sufferings of humanity,
    or
    b)a cynical use of the GNF to cement post-uncivil war hegemeony,

    is imminent!!

    Gojira Über Alles!!

  14. on 20 Apr 2007 at 12:32 pm 14. spyder said …

    The Minister of Justice calls on the Ministry of Offense and Defense to release theMOOAD Hounds

    So ordered, and they are loose. They have been craving a good hunt and by keeping their meals lean, off of any products (human or otherwise) containing gluten supplements, the hounds are most intent on their success.

    The Minister of Defense and Offense has also ordered an investigation into the deep background funding sources of teh Technorati, because it appears, with each day, that they are acting more and more like a NewsCorp clone (Billboard is a FoxNews corporate partner), all salacious sensationalism and stupefying sexlebrity. And certainly they could not possibly be the spawn of other MSM parents because RollingStone does the top ten-hundred-thousand list thangs so much better (then again RollingStone hired a former FHM editor to lead the mag into the 21st century), and Techno is just so lame? We shall report as soon as the hounds have tracked down, tree’d, and carved up the prey.

    spyder
    Minister of Defense and Offense
    Ministry of Offense and Defense
    WAAGNFNP

  15. on 20 Apr 2007 at 1:41 pm 15. peter ramus said …

    War on Technorati? Let’s declare war on the banner at the top of the page, instead.

  16. on 20 Apr 2007 at 2:03 pm 16. The Constructivist said …

    Hey, I’ve just finished a little unauthorized chimera-izing of the Mostly Harmless hound (think the nice doggie that saves Y.T. near the end of Snow Crash meets the chimeras in Full Metal Alchemist) and I’m about to sic him on Technorati. But I need a name for him so I can call him back. Any suggestions?

    And where did Peter Ramus find that cute frog? Is he perchance the Tree Frog of the Apocalypse? Summon teh Clarke, I say!

  17. on 20 Apr 2007 at 3:36 pm 17. Seattle said …

    Hey! Don’t go dissing the pastoral rails leading off to Hobbiton pic there!

  18. on 21 Apr 2007 at 7:07 am 18. The Constructivist said …

    BTW, war, I hear, is hell, so if you need some R&R in between the Party’s infinite redeployments of, uh, you (what, you didn’t read the fine print when you didn’t enlist? for shame!), head on over to Geert Lovink’s net critique for a link to Google Will Eat Itself. Now there’s an infowar with real money at stake–they’ve bought 292 shares so far–but can we trust them to return google to the people 200 million years plus from now when they fnally own it all?

  19. on 21 Apr 2007 at 8:06 am 19. spyder said …

    Ookami OoGuma???? Will that work for the mythical great hunting hound chimera????

  20. on 21 Apr 2007 at 8:51 am 20. JP Stormcrow said …

    But I need a name for him so I can call him back. Any suggestions?

    The Rat Thing, aka Fido - The Rat Thing is a product of Ng Security, and is part cyborg, part dog,…

    So I think Fido is appropriate.

  21. on 21 Apr 2007 at 9:01 am 21. The Constructivist said …

    OK, then, so how about FidOoOo?

    BTW, teh Clark(e) is getting better at this infowar thing.

  22. on 21 Apr 2007 at 2:28 pm 22. The Constructivist said …

    OK, troops, I hear morale is low. Here’s a perfect circle’s let’s have a war to inspire you.

  23. on 03 May 2007 at 10:56 am 23. The Constructivist said …

    Hmm, it seems I have to take this campaign outside the party–what, no votes?! no blurbs? We need to get organized, people!

  24. on 03 May 2007 at 12:52 pm 24. Fred Levitan said …

    I’m only willing to play along because THE END OF THE WORLD is upon us, and so nothing matters (ecept how hot you are!)

  25. on 03 May 2007 at 12:58 pm 25. The Constructivist said …

    Fred, “we didn’t start the fire!” You get my nomination for comment of the day in the category of metareferences to the most previous WAAGNFNP comments and Le Blogue Berube in-jokes.

  26. on 03 May 2007 at 1:04 pm 26. illdiablo said …

    I say let loose the sumatran rat monkey of war.

  27. on 03 May 2007 at 1:07 pm 27. The Constructivist said …

    You found FidOoOo’s mom!