Practically every day, somebody asks me, ‘AKMA, you know David Weinberger; he’s obviously an internet pundit, but what kind of guy is he really?’ (Well, not every day. In fact, I’m not sure anybody has ever asked me. But I wanted to talk about him, and this seemed like an easy way into the topic.) I do not plague such a person with my increasing neuralgia about the function of ‘reality’ and its constituent terms (‘real’, ‘really’, etc.) in contemporary discourse (more on that, inevitably, later). No, I speak forth and tell them, ‘David Weinberger is the living illustration of a mensch.’
Take today, for example. For a long time, many of us internet insiders knew that David had come up with the apposite witticism, ‘In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people’, a play on Andy Warhol’s ‘… for fifteen minutes’. It was a saying that fit both David’s interest in relationality and his understanding of how the Web of the late nineties and early aughts operated, what was exciting and distinctive about it. Then after about ten years, he found out that somebody else (Momus) had said it first. Rather than getting pissy and defensive, David went on a one-man campaign to publicise Momus’s prior art, and to deflect attention from his own subsequent independent generation of the aphorism.
Recently, he noticed that his own disclaimer on his blog had somehow been swallowed up by one or another supermassive gravitational disturbance, and could no longer be found online. So he hopped into action, and today [re-]published a public explainer and pointer to Momus.
Now, none of that was necessary. Anyone who knows David would have known he didn’t copy the idea from Momus. Indeed, I’m not in the least surprised that he hadn’t ever heard of Momus before someone pointed out the Scottish musician-blogger-zine-contributor’s use of the ‘fiteen people’ concept. But David has made the extra effort not just the first time he learned of Momus, but a second time, when he noticed that the first post was no longer findable.
That’s David. I’ll bet he’d even buy Momus a round if they were in the same pace at the same time (and assuming Momus wanted a drink; consent matters).
So the next time, maybe the first time, someone asks me what kind of guy David is, I’ll tell them the Momus’s Music Zine Massacree, with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each photo to be used as evidence on his behalf. David’s a mensch, and I’m proud to know him.