Jon Katz writes an interesting article on the battle between corporate power and individual creativity on the Internet in Technology And The Fast Food Nation [Slashdot]. I am a bit tired of all these apocalyptic Woe is me, AOHell will take us over articles when so much of the Internet experience can be and is being defined by brilliant and revolutionary bottom-up forums like, well, Slashdot, and the Independent Media Centers, and FreeSpeech Internet Television, and Blogger, and even the user-community aspects of big corporate sites like Amazon.com and Salon.com. This is a battle that we can easily win, if we keep up the kind of decentralized networks that these tools allow and promote them. Of more concern, of course, is the continuing amalgamation and control of Internet access points through corproate mergers and sweetheart telecom legislation. What can we start doing to reverse this? We need to start looking towards microfinance to keep small entrepreneurs afloat. We also need to look to building guerilla network infrastructures such as are already beginning to crop up, and making these infrastructures accessible to people other than hardcore geeks. And, of course, we need to work at the legislative level to oppose the continuing progress of corporate privilege and corporate power over telecommunications. The best part about these bottom-up Internet technologies is that they may provide a key component of creating the political and economic networks we need to make all this a reality.

Stephen O’Connor points out that President Bush’s faith-based initiatives are nothing new, and some of its likely limitations can be found by examining the history of government-funded religious child welfare groups in New York City [NY Times].

Carson Brown wrote a fabulous article on virgins (or the celibate) as The New Sexual Deviant [Bitch Magazine], doing an excellent job of calling attention to the male-centric nature of the so-called sexual revolution which has merely flip-flopped the old formula that Only Sluts Say Yes to Only Neurotic Prudes Say No. Of course, ultimately, this is nothing new: it’s just the playing out of the male Left vs. male Right culture wars that have been going on over the past century that were initiated by the battle between Freud and the traditionalists. The article does a good job of elaborating the sexist suppositions of both the anti-virginity and pro-virginity crowds.

My only complaint: Brown argues

It certainly makes sense: How are capitalists supposed to market their stuff if people aren’t actively pursuing sex? How are they supposed to sell cars, clothes, beers, breakfast cereal, perfume, make-up, or travel on the premise that their products will get you laid if people are content to not get laid? So the market pulls out all the stops to ensure that we will remain sex-obsessed, so that we’ll buy things.

Well, yeah, ok, but who is constructing sex as rebellion in the first place? Who is controlling the big capitalist corporations and media outlets that use faux-rebellion to make money? The answer in both cases is: men. The one thing that Pat Robertson and Hugh Hefner can agree on is that sex = rebellion, orgasms = liberation. The question they bicker over is whether this rebellion is good or bad. Ultimately, corporate capitalism would find other rebellions to construct and market. I think we have to recognize that the enemy here isn’t capitalism. Or rather, that capitalism is subordinate to the real enemy: male supremacy.

The New York Times has published an interesting article on gender differences in e-mail communications. Not surprisingly, males and females tend to show pretty much the same communication patterns in e-mails as they do normally: men tend to be more taciturn, instrumental, and transactional. Women tend to be more voluble, open, and relational. This dovetails interestingly with other findings that corporate CEOs, the quintessential alpha males, are are very terse in their e-mails whereas lower-ranking workers tend to be more formal. I suspect that this has more to do with tersity being a male behavior, and therefore valued, than tersity being valued, and therefore becoming a male behavior. In either case, though, there may be some hope yet: some researchers have also found that the disinhibiting effects of e-mail actually help some men communicate intimacies and feelings that they’d never communicate face-to-face.

Barbara Ehrenreich, an always-powerful voice for feminism and social justice, has put out an excellent-looking book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America [review by NY Times]. Ehrenreich spent three months trying to make ends meet in low-paid unskilled labor, the kind of situations faced by millions since the obliteration of welfare (it’s 6 years after the 1995 welfare reform, meaning that the first wave of people booted off the rolls by the five year restriction are now facing the increasingly troubled job market without anything resembling a safety net, without any chance to go to school to better their chances (since that doesn’t count as working for the purposes of TANF), and generally just in a pretty shitty situation. Ehrenreich’s time spent living in a trailer, so exhausted and in a neighborhood so desperate that she could only describe herself and her neighbors as canned labor, is a frighteningly real response to those feel-good liberals who proclaim the virtues of voluntarily living in poverty and complain about how frustrated they feel with their Palm Pilots and SUVs.