The Online Buffet
            

            Russ,

            Apparently you are a morning person. I'm not--I have to stumble out of bed,
have coffee, sit around reading the papers--or if it's my turn go into town to
get them first, no home delivery up here. Hopefully something in the paper will
stimulate a little adrenalin (not much luck this week; last time I did one of
these things I had Kosovo to write about). Only then can I begin to face such
questions as ... What do I think of 
                  Slate
               ? Well, first, my
relationship to 
                  Slate
               , Salon too, has been much more like
my relationship to a restaurant than to any print publication. I go there
occasionally, sample whatever looks interesting, often because somebody has
mentioned a piece to me ("you should try the ..."). It's like my relationship
to the rest of the Web, actually, casual and uncommitted, without intense
expectations about what ought to be there or any necessity, as with newspapers
and magazines I read regularly, to see what 
                  Slate
                has to say
about X. Plus, there's much too much stuff to do anything like read a whole
"issue." I didn't subscribe to it when you had to pay. I might now, just
because it's become more prominent in the public conversation, and if I did
have to pay I might pay closer attention to it in the interest of getting my
money's worth.

            But I'm not sure 
                  Slate's "professionalism" is an asset. What
most interests me about online journalism is it's so much looser and more
serendipitous. As a writer, I'm intrigued by this e-mail dialogue form. It's
less like writing a piece than like participating in a panel discussion, only
allowing me to do what I can't in a panel discussion--express myself as well as
I can in writing. I like the idea of talking to people I don't usually get to
talk to, at least where they can talk back. Re: Kinsley himself, he is a
conventional "high journalist," as I think of them; in my view it would be a
public service if all the commentators on the Times , the Washington
Post , The 
               New Yorker , and the New Republic would
simply merge into one composite columnist who would write once a week so I
could find out what the latest conventional wisdom is without having to spend
so much time at it.

            What I meant in saying that techno has cultural-political significance is
that it's the medium of a counterculture; techno fans are looking for ecstasy
(I mean the state of mind, not the drug, though that too), for a kind of erotic
communalism that's basically missing from the larger culture right now ... but
where the '60s counterculture was anti-technological (even though rock 'n' roll
was totally dependent on technology), this one resonates with the
techno-utopianism of computer freaks (I'm not saying the techno audience is
computer freaks or overlaps with them, I really have no idea, just that there's
a common impulse there). And this is what makes pop music, or popular culture
of any kind, compelling: that it becomes the catalyst for a new oppositional
and/or competing sensibility--it holds out the possibility of seeing life and
art and the relation between them in some fresh way. Whereas rock 'n' roll in
its various forms just seems to be rehashing and cannibalizing the past.