[Population: One] <A HREF="http://popone.innocence.com/ar

The California recall election is definitely the most hope-inspiring thing to happen to third party politics since Perot. Here’s a theory laying out how a libertarian could win it all.

Look, like it or not, the whole line about winning with 15-20% of the vote is wishful thinking. Either the Democrats or the Republicans are going to come together behind one candidate. The winning candidate is going to have upwards of 35% of the vote.

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about all this excitement at the prospect of winning an election with such a small percentage of the vote, anyhow. It seems uncomfortably like putting political interests ahead of serving the people, which is at least one thing democracy has going for it.

[Population: One] <A HREF="http://popone.innocence.com/ar

Warren Ellis is writing a novel on the Internet. Using LiveJournal. It starts here. You also get occasional comments on LiveJournal itself:

Sometimes I think of LiveJournal as the world’s biggest technogoth community. LJ has been both lauded and derided as a space for people with black clothes and strange hair to work out their alienation and disaffection in electronic public. That hasn’t stopped it being successful, and it hasn’t stopped it being a tool for national and international networking. As a piece of “social software,” it’s not flawless, but its influence and effect has been huge.

The first thing we all do when we find out about this: we link to it. The second thing we do, those of us who have LiveJournal accounts: we add him to our friends list.

Stop and think about that one for a second. On LiveJournal, adding someone to your friends list doesn’t just mean you can read their entries easily. It also means that they’re on the list of people who can read your private entries, unless you’ve customized things a little.

At the moment, 332 people have added Warren Ellis to their friends list. He has access to the private entries of, well, most of those people. He can read them talking about things they don’t mean to show to anyone they don’t know — let alone a writer who’s always searching for new material for his perverted comic books.

In my universe, I’m going to believe that he did this on purpose, knowing full well what access he would be granted.