Men with common ideals coming together into a communal living environment such that brother can hold brother responsible to a shared oath… This was the promise of fraternities. Making assurances that others would not profit unscrupulously from another’s work, encouraging creators to share their artistry with the world such that each may grow in the sharing… This was the promise of copyrights. Things have, er, drifted a bit since then. Nowadays, most peoples’ interactions with fraternities and copyrights involve hazing incidents, sexual assault allegations, Cease-and-Desist letters, and “This video has been removed due to terms of use violation.” errors on YouTube.

Exclusivity is not an evil on its own, the idea that a fraternity or copyright should belong to those who put the work into it seems like a basic right. Still, any closed system tends toward groupthink (via a genetic inbreeding of ideas), easily evidenced in people thinking its okay to make others swallow goldfish or pay $2.99 for a “My Humps” Ringtone. In many ways the Open Source community has paved the next evolutionary step here, recognizing the importance of interoperability as a glue to bring together smaller, autonomous parts. While one programmer may “own” the calendar plug-in and another the event plug-in, both benefit from being able to share data (and, of course, opening up the components to the community can help even further). The current copyright players seem to have taken Sacred Oaths never to reveal the Inner Secrets of the DRM Brotherhood. Sony and Apple, I’m looking in your direction.

Abusive behavior, in contrast, is an evil on its own. There are no excuses that can be made for the now infamous RIAA suits against little girls, dead grandmas, and a family without a computer for file sharing. The RIAA has sent too many innocent freshmen to the hospital. It’s not much of a stretch to compare the Sony Rootkit fiasco with slipping an unsuspecting girl a roofie.

The collusion behind the scenes, the winking, nodding, and nudging, is just as bad with copyrights as with any fraternity. The Blu-ray format, for instance, is vying to become the next step beyond DVDs (holding up to 9 hours of HD video) and is being heavily marketed by a coalition including content-owners Sony, Disney, Time-Warner, and Fox along with hardware manufacturers Apple, Dell, HP, Panasonic, etc., all of whom are very pleased about the Blu-ray’s built-in DRM and working together to help it succeed. Like a frat house rivalry, the competing HD-DVD format has risen to egg their front door.

There is a reason to be hopeful for both fraternities and copyrights. For every Old School there’s a New School. The fraternity of which I was a part in college was then undergoing a massive shift to re-invent the college fraternity experience with their Balanced Man Program. While outlawing not only hazing but pledges all together (if you’re asked to join, you’re in) and providing a series of challenges with increasing levels of community responsibility, it has seen a 90% undergraduate retention rate and 3.0 national average GPA.

Likewise, the sluggish caterpillar of the copyright has transformed itself into the magical butterfly of Creative Commons licenses. Despite all the hub-bub around Google’s acqusition of YouTube last week, which some surmise is more about protecting Fair Use laws than business models, up-and-comer video site Revver is already putting CC to work—and passing the profits on to the creators.

I have plenty to say about LonelyGirl15, but I’ll hold it for another time.

The desire to be loved and respected is a step on everyone’s Hierarchy of Needs and hardly unique to my own situation, but this particular manifestation began in earnest just this week. I suppose I should lay out the objectives of Project Internet Famous before I get caught up in the details: there is something amazing going down on the internet, I want to be a part of it and recognized as such. However, in the audacious spirit that the project name implies, I’m doing this (at least so far) exactly backwards. It wasn’t until well into the week that I realized maybe I should make some contribution for which to be recognized, instead of cultivating recognition strictly by use of Kato Kaelin voodoo.

Monday, I decided to go to 111 Minna for the WWDC Webloggers Party. If you don’t know much about San Francisco, 111 Minna is a hot little art gallery that is constantly hosting elite parties that combine great art, great music, geeks, and copious amounts of alcohol. Seem like the perfect situation to get in there, rub some elbows, and come out smelling like famous. Except I didn’t know a goddamn person there. I have no probably meeting new people, but without even a single in, I was overwhelmed and left.

The major tragedy of the situation was that was all set to Dodgeball that I was at 111 Minna, scoring extra cool points. Instead, I walked over to the Sony Metreon and watched Little Miss Sunshine by myself, defeated.

Tuesday, I tried again. I found a cool little coffee shop in my neighborhood complete with free wireless, an indie rock soundtrack, a cute barista with a European accent, and really good vegetarian quiche. Clearly the internet luminaries I was so trying to emulate would totally love this place. I set up the laptop, checked-in with Dodgeball, and waited for the magic to happen. My last blog post, in fact, was written at that time. Mission accomplished. I was officially “blogging at a coffeeshop”. I went home and slept the sleep of a winner.

Wednesday, it was time to get a little more ambitious. I had long read about these wonderful Creative Commons Salons. They had, a number of times, made it as far as being added to my calendar but never further. This time I was determined to go. I grabbed my friend Jenny, who had been pre-warned that the night was liable to be extra, extra dorky. Indeed, she didn’t seem to get my joke about the address (1337 Mission St.) being Leet for “Leet”. Many would consider this high praise for young Jennifer. Again, I knew no one, but started to recognize people from the last time I didn’t know anyone. Progress!

It was at this time my cohort suggested we meet up with her friends. She had been a good sport up to this point, so I indulged her. Soon we discovered ourselves watching “40 Days and 40 Nights“, drinking wine with Tantek Çelik. Big points to Jenny and her socialite friends! I won’t share any specific details about Tantek’s awesome apartment, but will mention that, as I was leaving there was much talk about how nice my hat is. Before you cloak yourself in ironic detachment about how little it matters if the creator of the Box Model Hack likes my hat or not, ask yourself this question: Does Tantek like your hat?

It was Thursday before I realized that perhaps I was going about this in the wrong way and that perhaps I should be spending my time trying to “change the game” or see “the big picture” or “move and shake” something. I think I read about how those things are happening a lot. I wrote up a quick schematic for a Web 2.0 website that would help you manage which damn Web 2.0 websites you were on and help you find friends that you had on one site on all of the other sites. It was brilliant! I was certainly cut from the same cloth as Steve Jobs, Jeffrey Zeldman, and whoever came up with Dogster.

I finished the day working on the flag I’ve been making for Consu-Camp. I’m going to Burning Man with a bunch of people from Consumating, all of whom are just the right combination of nerdy and genius to propel me to the next level of internet popularity. It’s only a matter of time.

I’ll keep you all updated on my progress “going forward”. In the meantime, feel free to suggest ways I can reach this goal in the comments section. I have also added it to my profile on 43Things.