distributed intelligence diminished today
10:34pm, 3 June, 2007: From the mid-80s to the mid-90s, I read the Village Voice every week -- even though I lived in a village an ocean away. My primary rationale was its music coverage, which directly linked to my job -- New York seemed still to be a hub for the musics I wanted The Wire to cover, and potentially a model for the way the musics interacted, fought, flirted. But I read all the other stuff too (because that’s how newspapers work, or used to): including, in week-on-week detail, the local news stories. The tenor and temper and crackle and conflict of its daily public life seemed to me a furious map of all the world, how its people rub along together (or -- this was after all what most of the news stories were about -- fail to). And then I left The Wire, and the Voice went free, and buying it in the UK a fortnight late when I really wasn’t writing about music much at all, let alone subscribing, seemed a bit daft, certainly very expensive, and I stopped.

I’ve lost friends -- k-reg, liz -- that I met through the interweb, but Steve Gilliard is the first “internet figure” whose death feels like something close to me. He wasn’t anything to do with the Voice, but I read for similar reasons, I think -- for the warmth and energy and battling intelligence of a black New Yorker in a not-so-black realm (american centre-left pol-blog debate), telling stories, talking about cookery and technology, hurtling in to right wrongs; for the same sense of a community, in other words, a living, exciting city.

But actually it was the sense of two communities, meeting and discovering one another, not always harmoniously: the village Gilliard was from (New York), and the virtual village he created. Some of his obituarists have said that -- to read his words -- you’d never know how shy or kind he was in person, you’d think he was all indomitable tough guy, a bitter angry street-fighter; well, the sweetie who’s hard on the net is a cliché if not an Iron Law, but actually (as someone who never met him, or heard his real-life voice, and now never will) I think his gentleness was as evident in his writing as his honesty, his goodness. And evident also in the community that sprang round his blog -- half vigil for him, half carrying on his fight -- when earlier this year he was suddenly urgently in hospital, and very ill indeed. Blogging was his full-time job -- but it was clearly anything but lonely. The life of written media is the nature of the relationship with readers -- Gilliard’s qualities were what drew people to him, but his greatest quality, maybe, as a writer, was how he allowed his engagement with them, supportive and furiously critical, to enrich and expand what he was doing.