Two of the season’s new standout SF/fantasy shows, Jericho and Heroes, are both abysmally awful in their own ways. Because I’ve been chronicling their rapid downward spirals over at the MeeVee blog, I’ve had to pay preternaturally close attention to them, which has no doubt magnified my dismay.

When I first read about Jericho, it was as a critical standout — it was to be a dark and edgy show about life in a small Kansas town called Jericho after nukes obliterate most of the US. I was expecting something raw and nihilistic like Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale. Instead, the show is eerily reminiscent both politically and narratively of 1980s Cold War classic Red Dawn, in which hero Patrick Swayze fights off a Russkie invasion with the help of a small-town high school football team.

The main characters in Jericho are all good, clean Americans. You know, white men. Robert, the only black character (and the only person of color on the show) is some kind of secret agent whose behavior gets more and more suspicious. The women are mostly useless (except for one who can fix engines), and have “helper” jobs as schoolteachers, shopkeepers, or homemakers. Nuclear annihiliation is really only a backdrop to the real drama of the show: the relationships between fathers and sons, as well as the importance of protecting the family unit. Of course, there’s a lot of exotic talk about atomic bombs — the show’s writers seem to think that we need a five-minute lecture about why radioactive fallout is dangerous — which seems largely aimed at reviving that venerable old US tradition of atomic horror.

Jericho is one of the most conservative shows I’ve watched in a long time. Not only is it mining the retro Cold War vein, but it’s also working its ass off to set up a situation where old-fashioned family values are all that’s left in the world. The only plot arc that could save this series, as far as I’m concerned, is if it turns out that aliens or ghosts set off the nukes. Hey, maybe it was Xenu!

Like a lot of conservative TV and movies, Jericho has one thing going for it: coherence. You’re never left wondering what the hell is going on, or who a particular character might be. There are good guys and bad guys, white heroes and black spies, strong men and emotional women. No fucking around with ambiguity or the unexpected. The show Heroes, however, doesn’t benefit from a reliance on conservative cliches. It’s all over the place with its multiple characters (whom we have to meet in dreary succession, learning about each of their stereotypical lives) and star-crossed mutants plot.

For those who didn’t tune in last Monday for the pilot, whose over 14 million viewers earned NBC the coveted “timeslot ratings winner” ribbon, Heroes is about a batch of people who develop “special powers” overnight. One can kill with her mind; one can fly; one can teleport; and several more can do several other predictable things. I’ll admit that the cast is pleasingly diverse — there’s even a hot guy from India in the lead role, which has to be a first for nighttime drama — and you won’t find much in the family values department here. What you also won’t find are good writing or plot development.

I’m not a hater of stories featuring big casts. I’ve even been reading Grant Morrison’s 7 Soldiers of Victory in the proper order, meeting each new character individually and skipping between their stories confusingly just to get the right feeling out of the series. But Heroes is no Grant Morrison comic book. The show is so busy trying to get on its feet and introduce everybody that excitement and good dialog fall by the wayside. Instead of glib moodiness, or even smart drama, we get bad voice-overs about how “everybody has a destiny” and “we all want to be special.” Enough, already! Get to the superheroics!

Turns out the superheroics in Heroes won’t happen until we meet all the characters (tune in next week to meet three more on top of the seven we already know), they meet each other, and we figure out what the psychic painter’s picture of a nuke going off in New York means. Hmm, I sense a nuke theme here. If only we could wed the coherence of Jericho with the potentially interesting characters in Heroes. If only Grant Morrison wrote for TV. If only Firefly hadn’t been cancelled. If only Battlestar Galactica were having its season premiere in a week and I would get to see Lucy Lawless in a good role again. Ha! At least I’ll get one thing that I want.

You can read my reviews of the first two Jericho episodes here and here. My review of the Heroes premiere is here, and my gushing look forward to the new season of Battlestar Galactica is here.

My column this week wasn’t just a peppy endorsement for the alpha-version smart thing known as the Chumby. It was also about the coming army of smart things — para-computers with wifi that mediate online information via sounds, colors, and data-snippets — and how they’ll change the way we bring our online lives into our real ones. Computers will become fully-integrated into other kinds of objects, making the world of the internet both more pervasive and yet less uniform. We’ll be accessing its massive data holdings via many portals — and some will be cute and plushy, like Chumby.

My Chumby is named Tribble, and it sits on the mantle next to a Totoro doll, continuously broadcasting headlines from Google News and Slashdot, as well as pictures from CuteOverload. To access a control menu, you squeeze it. I can’t wait to play with the non-alpha version.

“9/11 rememberance week” is almost over, and it’s impossible to remain unaffected by the national mood, no matter how artificial or manufactured. Over the past two weeks, I’ve written about how technology and online social criticism have changed during the Age of Terror.

One of the biggest transformations in everyday technologies has been what I call the weaponization of data mining techniques. The government has tried, in a number of ways, to use cutting-edge (or, in some cases, science fictional) methods to cull intelligence information from piles of digital data accumulated by phone companies, airlines, search engines, and credit card companies. Some of these data-mining efforts, such as the NSA capturing AT&T data, have been exposed. Others are no doubt ongoing. Although it would seem that our personal privacy has been sacrificed on the altar of stopping terrorism, hope is not lost.

I would argue that as the intelligence community has eroded the Fourth Amendment in the name of “national security,” the citizenry has pushed back. Investigative reporters, bloggers, and info-crunchers in social networks have done their own data-mining to expose misrepresentations in the media and to call attention to the government’s secret spying programs. Data mining may have been weaponized, but the people are armed, too.

Another hopeful sign in these surveillance-happy times is the rise of pointed political satire. The Democrats and Greens may not have their shit together when it comes to criticizing the right wing, but progressive satirists have jump-started a renaissance of smart humor. In the mainstream media, there’s The Daily Show. Then there are activist pranksters like The Yes Men. And for those of us who like to troll underground websites, there are things like last year’s fake execution media satire. I embrace it all, from Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert to Ogrish and JibJab’s cartoons. Let’s defeat the conservatives by mocking them out of office.

That’s the (uncensored) title of a panel discussion I’ll be participating in tonight as part of San Francisco’s annual Expo for the Artist & Musician. The panel is about new limits to free expression for creators, including people who dabble with extreme or edgy subjects. My excellent co-panelists include Thomas Roche, Mark Kleim, and Lady Monster.

Come listen and talk with us about censorship and artistic freedom tonight at CELLspace in San Francisco, 2050 Bryant St., from 7-9 PM. $2 to get in, but nobody will be turned away for lack of funds. Also, visit to the rest of the Expo this weekend!

So my book Pretend We’re Dead got a snarky mixed review in the (London) Times Literary Supplement, in which I was upbraided for (among other things) neglecting to offer a granular account of Isaac Asimov’s career. The reviewer ended up grudgingly liking my book, though she did say some of my analysis was jejune. W00t! Getting called jejune in the TLS is like getting called an incomprehensible genius anywhere else. Plus, it makes me think of that scene in Love and Death where somebody calls Woody Allen jejune, and he replies:

You have the temerity to say that I’m blocking you out of jejunosity? I’m one of the most june people in all of the Russias!

So in celebration of my jejunosity, I wrote a long and exuberant post over at MeeVee about why I love the 1979-81 TV show Buck Rogers in the 25th Century:

Read the post for more details on this gem from an era of gay, rollerskating innocence that’s lost to us forever.

If you want to know what the top 10 privacy debacles of the last century are, check out the story I wrote for Wired about all the ways your personal data has been left unprotected by industry, and riffled through illegally by the government. Everything’s included, from ChoicePoint’s dumbassitude to COINTELPRO’s scaryfreakitude.

You may be surprised by which debacle comes in first!

OK, so it might be that I just love using the verb “to pwn” in a headline. My latest column, which also contains “pwn” in its headline, is about why I don’t shred my bills and encrypt all my data in this era of ubiquitous surveillance and identity theft. Of course, I take reasonable precautions to protect my privacy. I don’t throw away my credit card bills, and I check my mail via an SSL tunnel. I don’t use webmail for communication I wouldn’t put on the back of a postcard. I won’t even talk about “sensitive issues” on the phone anymore. At the same time, I refuse to become so paranoid that I go beyond that:

I’ve weighed the alternatives — shredders, constant data wiping — and chosen to take the risk. I don’t want to be forced to hide everything about myself. If some potential employer doesn’t like my blog, that’s an employer I don’t need. If the government wants to persecute me for what’s contained in my stored messages, then I will fight back as best I can or leave the country.

If you want to find out how pwning fits into all this, you’ll have to read the column!