Issue #2 of Death, the magazine, is out.

“We’re asking so much more of men today. We want them to be great providers — but we also want them to get pedicures. We want them to be sensitive — but we also want them to be alpha males.”
–That’s Cosmopolitan editor Kate White, proving why she’s a high-paid executive in a time-bubble of 1998.

currently having a super secret meeting with myselfWed Sep 22 20:18:35 via TweetDeck

Brad Feld
bfeld

Early this week, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington posted about a secret meeting at San Francisco restaurant Bin 38 attended by “ten or so of the highest profile angel investors in Silicon Valley.” This precipitated what has become known as AngelGate. Arrington claimed that these angel investors have been colluding in secret to ensure that deal valuations are kept low. Also discussed were how to arrest the growing power of Y Combinator, how to keep new angel investors out of Silicon Valley; and the possibility of a group agreement not to accept convertible notes in deals. Now people are saying the FBI is looking into it.

At least one attendee disputed this account. “At the dinner, there was a fair amount of kvetching about convertible notes, capped or not, hi/lo valuation, optimal structure of term sheets, where the industry was headed, who was innovating and who wasn’t, and 10 million other things of which 3 were kind of interesting and 9,999,997 weren’t unless you like arguing about 409a stock option pricing,” wrote Dave McClure of 500 Startups. Who then went on to quote, in full, the lyrics of Jill Scott’s “Hate on Me.”

All this would be explosive and bizarre enough on its own, but it was followed by the leaking of an extraordinary private email from prominent angel investor (Foursquare, Buzzfeed, Twitter, Digg) Ron Conway, addressed to the meeting’s attendees. It is rare enough in our day to see a rich man declaring his ethics, in public or in private. It is rarer still to see one who is willing even in private to denounce the pure self-interest and materialism of his colleagues on principle.

His email included this:

The world of startups would be a better place if you spent less time complaining about deal structures, terms, vc’s, and valuations etc and the cars you drive, and just helped entrepenuers [sic] build their companies.

The Free Enterprise system is very efficient …..why not let the marketplace demands decide on these issues, its worked for many many years. These startups are binary …they succeed or fail so why waste time on deal structures, terms, vc’s, and valuations etc and just help entrepenuers [sic] build their companies.

In my opinion your motives are driven by self serving factors around ego satisfaction and “making a buck”.

My motives and values are very different.

They are so different I want to be up front with you and recognize this and disengage from any involvement with you.

It makes sense such anxiety is expressing itself in this way now. “It’s no secret that a big part of what led to the secret meeting of super-angels — where the topics of discussion (allegedly) were things like how to push startup valuations down — is the current bubble-like atmosphere around startups and seed investing in Silicon Valley” is one way to put it.

Still, I would find this hard to believe if I hadn’t seen it myself many times, but it is literally true that VCs and angel investors very commonly and very openly brag about their own greed and self-interest; it’s merely a matter of course to them that all anyone is or could ever be interested in is money, specifically the acquisition of more and more thereof. The idea that there could be other motives literally doesn’t compute with a large proportion of them. If Mr. Conway’s ideas succeed in penetrating at least some of those adamantine skulls, it will benefit no small number of people.

Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo: The Macho of the Dork and

Act Like a Gentleman, Think Like a Woman.

“We’re basically back to where we were before drugs.”
-In case the return of bedbugs isn’t exciting enough for you, let’s give a big “welcome back” to tuberculosis!

Last night, NBC premiered “Outsourced,” the show that I am not going to watch about call centers and labor inequity and how weird Indians are, the latter two things definitely being stuff I’m not up to being amused about. Sorry, humorless! Also, what, they couldn’t find a role for my high school buddy Ajay Naidu? Hell no then. But others watched!

• “I defer to African-Americans on issues of minstrel in this country and whether it’s worth it or not. Oh, nah? It’s not. Okay. What the fuck!!!”

• “But, if I may add my two cents? FUCK THIS SHOW IN THE FACE UNTIL IT DIES.”

Related: you know what’s really annoying? I strolled through Google News results for “Outsourced” to see what people were saying and you know what’s there? Every newspaper in the country with a mild, meaningless review and then a reader-grabbing question: “What about you? Did you watch it? What did you think?” When did our nation’s entertainment writers become their own commenter’s whores, eh?

The new issue of the London Review of Books is, as always, excellent-check out Elif Batuman’s piece on creative writing programs-but I was particularly delighted by this bit from the letter section.

“Colm Tóibín reminded me of a favourite joke (LRB, 19 August). Terence Cardinal Cooke of New York convened his bishops and ordered that in accordance with new austerity measures all clergy at Mass would henceforth be required to limit their number of attending altar boys to one and also to wear simple black robes rather than the usual colourful garb. All agreed. Mass the following Sunday began with a parade of obedient clergy: one boy per bishop, all black. But when Terence Cardinal Cooke entered the church, he was preceded and followed by no fewer than eight handsome boys and was dressed, head to toe, in beautiful robes of purple, red and gold. After he took his seat, the bishop seated in the row behind him leaned forward and whispered in his ear: ‘Terence, you bitch.’

Scott Haas
Cambridge, Massachusetts”

(I added the italics to “bitch,” because that’s really how the joke should be told.) Anyway, the Tóibín thing is also worth your time.

In light of the news that NBC Universal chief executive Jeff Zucker will be leaving the company when Comcast officially takes it over, let’s look back at a great Jeff Zucker moment. It came in 2002, when the network introduced “Hidden Hills,” a suburban-based “comedy about us.”

‘’I love this show because it’s very much my life,’’ said Jeff Zucker, president of NBC Entertainment. ‘’It’s, you know, dealing with kids living in the suburbs. You know, I think this is an incredibly relatable area for many people.’’

The very urban Mr. Zucker divides his time between Manhattan and Los Angeles, and television critics have been amused by his attempt to paint himself as a typical suburban dad. He blushed when asked to name his suburb.

“Hidden Hills” lasted 13 episodes.

Photo by David Shankbone, from Flickr.

Let’s hear it for a real hero and inspiration: “A CHAIN smoking pensioner has celebrated his 100th birthday despite puffing on nearly 300,000 cigarettes — and glugging a glass of whisky a day. Old soldier Arthur — who survived being blown up by a grenade in the Second World War — claims the key to his longevity is doing what everyone tells him not to.” Many happy returns, you magnificent bastard!

Free Williamsburg: What do you think of Williamsburg?

Laurie Anderson: I think it’s a pretty cool thing. I mean I’m kind of amazed that so many people are doing paintings again. I love it, I just love paintings, but I thought we were going in a whole other realm of doing stuff on the web or whatever, not just sitting around and making paintings, like the 1950s or something. But, there are some good paintings! Every time you say something about New York, and you think you’ve got it all figured out and you think you understand it, along comes a painter that goes “Hey, check out my paintings!”

by Nick Douglas

Of the three main drivers of internet culture-blogs, social networking sites and forums-most people in the media and in the general Internet-using public only understand two. Blogs work in a very obvious way: they’re like magazines or newspapers, but light. Information spreads from blog to blog up and down the food chain, but it’s pretty traceable. Social networks work in a different but equally obvious way: they’re like real-world word of mouth, but easier to track, though still much tougher to control or predict than blogs.

But forums can be inscrutable to outsiders. And they get far less attention than the other two culture-drivers. “Everyone” uses Facebook and Twitter, and everyone “gets” Gawker and the Huffington Post, but fewer understand what’s going on at Fark, Digg, 4chan, Something Awful and Reddit.

So far, Digg and 4chan have gotten most of the attention. It’s vaguely understood that Digg is that massive site you try to get your blog posts submitted to, and every commercial blog I’ve ever worked for dedicated some time to trading votes in an effort to gently game the system. (I also have friends who arrange voting rings for money, against the site’s rules.)

And 4chan is that deep dark site that Makes Things Happen. They invaded an old man’s birthday party! They hunted down that lady who dropped a cat into a bin! Of course, no one “real” spends any time in the “asshole of the internet” (an accidentally apt meta-reference to Heart of Darkness), and the site doesn’t keep regular archives and no one has usernames. So it’s hard to tell just how many of 4chan’s exploits are truly 4chan’s.

And I say plenty of them aren’t. Likewise, plenty of Digg’s traffic-sending power is overblown-especially now that traffic was down at Digg after their redesign disaster.

Both of these sites are being replaced by Reddit, a four-year-old news forum with far more educated, better-behaved users than either, but with a culture that somehow rides the middle between Digg’s slavery to the mainstream tastes of America’s teen males and 4chan’s obsession with inscrutable in-jokes and anti-humor.

Reddit got almost 300 million pageviews in July, compared to the 200 million Digg views in July that Digg founder Kevin Rose reported on his blog. So says an infographic posted on Reddit by Chris Slowe, the site’s lead developer, who also asks why the media continually call Reddit “tiny” and “dwarfed” by Digg. What’s more, traffic at Reddit, according to their Google Analytics, is up 24% in the last two months.

Reddit’s staff of four (Digg has more than 60) are radically transparent in the actually refreshing sense. In July, they asked why web analytics sites like Quantcast, Alexa, Compete and Nielsen all underreport Reddit’s traffic (probably causing the media’s low estimates). They also explained that Condé Nast doesn’t give them much of a budget because they haven’t sold enough ads on their massive inventory. (They’ve since launched a premium tier with added features.) They even publicly argue against CN’s managerial decisions and ask their users to petition the parent company.

Reddit is still smaller than 4chan, which passed 300 million pageviews back in February, 2009. But because it’s not an intentionally churning forum of anonymous posters, it’s much more valuable, view for view. While 4chan is a great place to get a meme started, and the fog of war makes for a beautifully mysterious beginning to a viral epidemic, Reddit is the place to actually get shit done.

The raid of WWII veteran William Lashua’s birthday party started on 4chan, but the project only evolved when Lashua’s grandson appealed to his internet fans on Reddit, asking them to avoid forming too much of a mob. Such a plea would have been ignored on 4chan, where no one can trust anyone’s identity, and the thread would have been deleted in under an hour, as all threads are on that site. Thus Reddit serves as the gatekeeper between 4chan and the internet at large.

But they can also start their own real-world memes. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are holding a rally on the National Mall on October 30, entirely because Reddit asked them to.

At 5 A.M. on August 31, Reddit user mrsammercer posted his “vision”: Stephen Colbert should hold a rally to satirize Glenn Beck’s August 28 “Restoring Honor” rally. (He admitted a couple of other users had the same idea.) The post caught on, earning over 11,200 upvotes (and 6500 downvotes). Colbert had praised Reddit on the air in July, and many Redditors suspect he’s a regular.

While New York says that Colbert and Stewart had discussed a satirical rally while Beck’s was still being planned, they didn’t announce until the 16th, after Reddit spent two weeks petitioning them online-and raising more than $240,000 for Colbert’s favorite charity, DonorsChoose.

We’ll see if the rally is successful, or if it fizzles into this year’s Snakes on a Plane. But just by getting it rolling, Reddit has already dwarfed the real-world cultural accomplishments of Digg and 4chan and proven that it can push more culture through the internet than its competitors. This is the web’s real center, whether anyone recognizes it or not.

Nick Douglas is a senior editor at Urlesque. He would like to show you his screenplay.