After leaving Stanford, Buyukkokten, one of the designers of Club Nexus, took a job as a user interface designer at Google, where he designed and built Orkut “in his spare time.” (Google programmers are encouraged to spend 20 percent of their time on their own side projects.)

Google’s rebuffed attempt to purchase Friendster casts some doubt as to whether Buyokkokten’s venture into social networking design was a hobby as purely innocent as he maintained in a phone interview. Equally revealing were Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s comments in April that Orkut and Google’s search capabilities would probably be combined. In any case, the advent of the eponymous Orkut spawned a minor Net frenzy throughout the spring of 2004. For those who found Friendster too juvenile, Tribe.net too Burning Man counterculturish, and LinkedIn and Ryze too buttoned-down, Orkut exerted an irresistible attraction.

Its position as part of the Google empire conferred additional cachet on Orkut. As rumors of Google’s upcoming public offering began to circulate, a rosy glow suffused the entire enterprise. The Internet was coming back! Silicon Valley was safe for capitalism again! And not only was Orkut comforting for grown-ups, but it was just so easy — ridiculously easy. Within weeks of its launch, it was, as technology writer Annalee Newitz dubbed it, “the crack cocaine of social networking.” What Google had done for search, it was now going to do for an even more essential human activity — being social.

But you can’t gather too many Net geeks in one place without a backlash sure to brew. No sooner had Orkut begun to take off than outraged users were sputtering over the wording of Orkut’s Terms of Service, which appeared to give Orkut ownership for all time throughout the known and unknown universe of all intellectual property associated with an Orkut profile. The ensuing debut of Gmail, which for some raised the terrifying specter of e-mail content scanned so as to better allow targeted advertising, was followed by the revelation that Google was using the same software cookie to register user identities on all its services.

The alarm went out, across the blogs and mailing lists of the Net: A new 8,000-pound terror of privacy invasion had been born. Call it Googlezilla.

At first glance, Googlezilla is scary indeed. Google appears better positioned than any other Net service to successfully amass a truly staggering database of user behavior. If we care about privacy, then we should be leery, right?

But as I watch my Orkut network jump by 10 percent a week without my lifting a hand, and listen to the clamor of people begging for a test Gmail account, I wonder just who is being frightened. Seven million people have accounts on Friendster, and 200,000 new users are reportedly joining every week. Two million are registered to MySpace. A whopping 16 million are supposed to have registered on Tickle for a chance to take a personality test. Judging by the documentary record, privacy doesn’t seem all that important a value for today’s online masses.

The growth of social networking brings to light a contradiction inherent in the structure of the Internet. The geeks who built the Net tend to be among the more privacy-obsessed individuals in our society. But the network they have constructed is inexorably abolishing every last scrap of privacy that we may have once enjoyed. And yet the masses of people who use that network do not appear to share the values of the people who designed it.

Some observers of new media, like NYU professor Clay Shirky and social software analyst Danah Boyd, speculate that there is a generation gap at issue — that we are watching the first generation to have been weaned on the Net grow up, and they simply accept, as one Friendster über-user told me, that their lives are open books.

“We’re dealing with a generation of people — the first generation of people — for whom the Internet is normal,” Shirky says.

Their attitudes may change as they grow older and suddenly become alarmed at the thought of their children viewing their let-it-all-hang-out Friendster profiles. A privacy backlash may still be imminent. There may also be, in the future, technological innovations that allow us exquisite control of what information we reveal to others and what we keep private. But at the moment, the point is moot. Most people, by their behavior, are stating that they don’t care if all their online activities can be collated in a dossier somewhere on a server in Silicon Valley. If joining a social network leads to one hot date then it’s all worth it.

The payoff of social networking doesn’t even have to be about lust. The lure can be much more pragmatic. Tribe.net already offers targeted classifieds. What if it also offered freedom from spam?

If social networking sites are the gated communities of the Web, doesn’t it make sense that when you walk through those gates and submit to their rules, you might gain the security and peace of a controlled environment?

Virtually all social networking systems offer, or plan to offer, some way of rating your friends or acquaintances. On one level this is ludicrous. If breaking the concept of friendship down into binary terms is absurd, so is breaking it into seven categories, or even 70. Such classifications may not be, as author David Weinberger has suggested, an actual “act of violence” against the concept of friendship, but they strike many people as artificial and repugnant. Pondering whether someone is merely an acquaintance, or an actual friend (if not a close friend), is not a task on which I wish to waste any of the precious remaining seconds of my life.

But such ratings may be necessary if social networks are to become “reputation systems” — a kind of holy grail for human-relationship hackers. If I get e-mail from a stranger, but my social network rates that stranger high (because a friend of my friend rates him a close friend, for example), then I’ll be more likely to let the mail through. But if somewhere along the way the sender had been judged unreliable, then the mail would be stopped.

Jennifer Golbeck is a researcher at the University of Maryland working on exactly such a reputation system — she calls her application-in-progress TrustMail. She posited a situation in which, I, as a reporter, sent her an unsolicited e-mail. She doesn’t know me from Adam, but her social network does.

“If it turns out that my advisor had read an article by you that he likes, and given you good rating … then your mail gets a high rating,” Golbeck says.

As networks get larger, they get noisier, and their utility decreases. We’ve all experienced this as we’ve moved our lives onto the Internet platform. We no longer thrill to the sound of incoming e-mail, because we know that more than likely another truckload of foul-smelling junk has just been dumped in our in box. But what if the sound of e-mail coming in rang with a chime that told us it was a good e-mail? And what if we don’t even need to bother to do the ratings of our friends ourselves? Can’t the network take care of that by itself? Our behavior on the Net, who we send e-mail to, what communities we join, what blogs we read, all add up to a data trail that will permit reputations to be derived automatically. We don’t need to do anything but be ourselves.

Clear trends in Internet software development — the easy merging and management of content streams via systems such as RSS aggregation, the evolution of distributed rating systems such as those employed by Slashdot, the ongoing attempt to decentralize the control of information while making it fast and easy for people and software to forge “weak ties” — will contribute to the network’s ability to determine if we are good or bad actors. This is happening all over the Net. Social software networks provide distillations of that overall evolution in tidy, user-friendly packages.

It’s a classic cyberpunk construct — humans as patterns of information, their “worth” or “value” deducible from the electronic paths they tread and the bread crumbs of data they leave behind. Yet it is hardly science fiction — it’s already becoming a fact of network-society life. So far, we’re only getting our feet wet in this data pool. But we’ll continue to plunge deeper.

As Bernardo Huberman, the director of the Information Dynamics Lab at Hewlett Packard Laboratories, mused to me at the end of our phone conversation, “I think we are on to something big.”

Marc Pincus, the CEO and founder of Tribe.net, waves apologetically at the dog following him into his office.

“I know, I know, it’s a start-up cliché to have a dog in the office,” he says.

I can only nod my head. I’m suffering an extreme dot-com flashback.

About 25 or 30 employees are quietly hunched over laptops, sitting at desks built out of sawhorses and planks. There is no receptionist, but a Koosh-ball net hangs from a file cabinet. On giant whiteboards lining one entire wall, buzzwords sprawl — words like “community” and “personalization” and “persistent identity.” Words that once blasted forth from every start-up minaret in Silicon Valley. It’s as if the bust never happened.

Marc Canter has a theory that the software innovations involved in social networking software, along with a host of other advances in what is called, more generally, “social software,” are directly attributable to the dot-com bust. All those brilliant but laid-off programmers were sitting around at home with nothing to do. So they started hacking.

“We had an amazing phenomenon happen the last three years,” says Canter. “Some of the best and smartest people all got laid off, and they were forced to sit at home and come up with shit on their own. [And they decided] that ‘social networking’ and ‘social software’ will be part of the infrastructure.”

It’s a kind of twist on the old “creative destruction” meme. Out of the demolition of the dot-com economy, the next stage of Internet evolution was born! By the spring of 2004, the excitement over social networking software wasn’t just confined to the geeks and the millions of people trolling Friendster for dates. It had spread to the business community. The venture capitalists were coming out of hibernation.

“We’ve been getting calls every day, bottles of wine sent to our office…,” James Currier, the CEO of Tickle, told me, just a few weeks before his company was gobbled up by Monster.com.

Software companies that had been doing business for as long as 10 years were suddenly reinventing themselves as “social networking companies.” Kleiner Perkins invested in Friendster and Knight Ridder bought into Tribe.net. The dark ages were coming to an end; the renaissance lurked, just around that next IPO.

Locked in a symbiotic embrace, the naysayers were back in force as well. Because what was social networking if not another play on the same old “community” trope? Friendster, Orkut, MySpace, Tribe.net — they were all free. Where was the business model? Why would anyone pay for these services? So what if 200,000 new users were joining Friendster every week — how many hundreds of thousands had already abandoned their Friendster accounts for some brighter, shinier gathering place?

The typical pattern of user behavior for any of these services, says Clay Shirky, can be compared to the shape of a comet: furiously hot and active and swirling at the beginning, and then gradually trailing off into the chill nothingness of dead outer space.

You know you’ve got a problem when even as energetic an advocate of social networking as Canter acknowledges that “everybody signs up, it’s really fun, and then you’ve got all your friends there, and you’re all dressed up and there is nothing to do.”

Was social networking just the latest addition to the emperor’s wardrobe? As spring moved toward summer, the bloggerati who documented every new iteration were getting bored almost as quickly as they had become excited. Very early on, they had coined an acronym that oozed with jaded disdain: YASNS, for “yet another social networking service.”

Pincus struck me as ideal person to press on the issue of business models. Tribe.net had some interesting innovations, but it did not appear to be experiencing the rapid growth of a Friendster or an Orkut. So how was it going to succeed in generating revenue? More importantly, Pincus has been through this all before. He’s a serial entrepreneur, a veteran who was right in the middle of one of the biggest early waves of Internet hype.

Remember “push media”? Pincus founded Freeloader, one of the earliest of the push clients — a program that would download Web sites for you while you weren’t at your computer. Pincus and his co-partner managed to do quite well out of Freeloader, selling it to another company and cashing out, while the technology itself went nowhere. Not long after, “push media” became an Internet laughingstock.

Pincus nodded sagely when I asked him what made social networking different from push media. But it was difficult to tell whether he was conceding that the question was valid, or had already been asked the question too many times. And then he executed a classic side step.

“The business you’re in is not social networking,” says Pincus. “You need to apply that innovation and the consumer interest in it to something that’s a real business … Social networking is something that we found along the way and it was a means to an end.”

Tickle’s Currier could have been reading from the same playbook when I talked to him a few weeks later. “The excitement around social networking is not about social networking … [The term] is a proxy for the excitement, for the re-excitement, about how Internet technology is changing consumers’ lives.”

And then Currier made a simple point: The Internet, he said, gets only 2 percent of the total national ad budget, but it already swallows up 16 percent of media viewing time. And after a few bad years set off by the dot-com bust, Internet ad sales were already growing again, quickly, with lots of obvious room to expand.

So why worry so much about whether there is a revenue model in “social networking”? After the bust, while dot-com naysayers were so busy congratulating themselves on their prescience, millions of people continued to spend more and more time online. It’s not that complicated. The classic revenue model for media services has been in aggregating eyeballs for advertisers. With all those millions of people flocking to sites that, one way or another, offer social networking, somebody will figure out how to turn a profit. It may not be Tribe, it may not be Tickle, it may not even be Friendster that ends up keeping millions of people hanging around. But someone surely will.

One Saturday morning early this year, I checked my e-mail and discovered two messages from friends inviting me to join Orkut, and one asking me to check out a network called LinkedIn. A few days earlier, another friend had instant-messaged me, begging me to be his “Friendster.” One friend, recommending Orkut, even went so far as to tell me, “It’s really cool, really viral.”

As a battle-scarred veteran of the dot-com boom and bust, I reach for the Delete key when I hear the word “viral.” The last thing I want is another infection.

I was guilty of the been-there done-that syndrome. At Salon, we had run a story on sixdegrees, the first explicit social networking site, way back in 1998, and followed up with a story about Ryze in late 2002. When the pitches poured in last year from freelancers eager to wax lyrical about Friendster, I brushed them off. What was there possibly left to say? As Shirky notes, “Online social networks go all the way back to the Plato BBS 40 years ago!” You mean to tell me that people are gathering together online in affinity groups, making friends and creating personal networks?! My God — it’s just like Usenet in 1988, or the Well in 1993! Stop the presses.

But like most other people I crave human connection. And as a chronicler of geeks and a geek myself, I also still hang on to the hope that digital networks and computers can bring people closer together, even though I am weary of a life in which most waking hours are spent in front of a monitor screen. I also well recall the days when I first logged on, in 1993. My friends and relatives ridiculed me for disappearing from the world into the modem. But as a full-time freelancer with a baby at home, I found the opposite was true. The Internet introduced me to a new life, a new social world, and many, many friends and colleagues who are still a part of my life. Who was to say new, improved software tools couldn’t continue such good works? Plus, I needed a date.

So I joined Friendster, Orkut, LinkedIn, Tickle and Tribe.Net. I spent many a late-night hour tweaking profile information. What to leave in, what to leave out? How honest a representation do I want to make of myself to the world? Do prospective dates really need to know about my split-custody situation, or how much NBA I watch on television, before they’ve even met me?

I soon found myself behaving in different ways on different networks. On Friendster, I looked for people to date. On Tribe.net, I joined tribes and participated in discussions. On LinkedIn, a business-oriented service, I didn’t do much of anything at all. On Orkut, I went friend-crazy. Orkut was where “my” people were hanging out, the geeks and techies and online journalists. I started slowly, inviting into my network only people I was pretty close to, but soon my diffidence dropped.

Flipping through profiles, I would see someone I had worked with briefly 15 years ago. Point. Click. Part of my network. Likewise, a writer I had edited once, or someone I had met at someone else’s party. And as I started reporting this story, I began asking some of my interview subjects to join my network. I was interested in seeing what constellation would be created. What was the map of my social structure? If the network theorists were correct, and the network was some kind of key to my constructed personal identity, then what would I learn about myself from my evolving social networks?

There were some early rewards. I struck up a conversation with a guy on Friendster that I had met once at an old girlfriend’s party, and ended up scoring a bunch of cool new CD mixes. I reconnected with people I had lost touch with for years. Someone who had been a source for a score of articles over the years morphed into a friend. I even went on a couple of dates.

I can see the future, in theory. I can easily see myself with a MyGoogle page, where my blog, my search, my network and my e-mail are all centralized. I can see that space as not just a static HTML representation of my interests but as the dynamic center of a set of interlocking services. Whether this is the “digital lifestyle aggregator” that Marc Canter likes to talk about, I’m not sure, but I see the potential. After so many years of writing about geeky things, I am not immune to the siren call of software — I’d like to believe that a killer application can be a human relations boon, that clever code can circumvent social awkwardness.

But friendship is hard. Over the past several months, as I’ve gotten caught up in work, or the NBA playoffs, or parenting, or other distractions, my social networks just sit there. Nothing happens. Occasionally, someone asks me to be part of their Orkut network, but after I click my acceptance, I never hear from them again. I did get hit on by a couple of Filipinas who appeared to be trolling Friendster for green card husbands, but other than that, my networks remained static if I didn’t exert myself to reach out to the people on them.

There are no truly easy short cuts to real human connection. No matter how clever the programming, one still has to reach out, to brave rejection or chance ridicule. Maybe it’s best, to paraphrase John F. Kennedy, to ask not what social networking can do for you, but what you can do with social networking.

We do need all the help we can get. If there isn’t a short cut, is it possible that at least some obstacles have been removed from the road? It’s easier to send an e-mail than to cold-call someone, and it’s easier to look someone up on a social network than approach them in a bar.

The geeks are excited about social networking because they never give up believing that they can apply their favorite tool, an algorithm, to the processes of human nature. The VCs are excited because they see so many eyeballs flowing to these sites, and if just one site turns out to be a Google, or a Yahoo, or an Amazon, or an eBay, somebody is going to get filthy rich. Everyone interested in studying human behavior is excited — never has so much up-close-and-personal data been so accessible. The masses are excited because, well, hell, their hormones are pumping and there are a lot of pretty pictures out there.

But we’re also all desperate, amid our excitement. Being cogs in the network society is no pleasure cruise. As we go about generating our clouds of data, lines between work and play dissolve, and the oppression of never truly being at rest hovers over us. Some of the excitement about social networking is no doubt generated by our hunger for tools that will help us cope with the stresses engendered by our always-on, information-overloaded, frenetic lives. As our ties to local communities and our families have become attenuated by the pressures of modern life, and our sensibilities bludgeoned by the awful rhetoric of politics and media, don’t we need reminders at every opportunity that connection with other people is a fundamental part of being alive, and anything that helps us do that, no matter how trivial, should be cherished?

Try it, it’s easy. Just click.

Not only does the foreclosure deal add up to peanuts compared to the $350 billion tobacco settlement, but it also pales before the size of the problem that it is theoretically supposed to address. The amount of negative equity held by Americans in their homes is currently calculated at around $700 billion. As a result of the foreclosure settlement around 750,000 Americans who lost their homes to foreclosure will receive checks of around $2,000 and another million homeowners will see the size of their outstanding loans reduced by an estimated average of around $20,000. Sure, any additional stimulus will be sorely appreciated in today’s demand-constrained U.S. economy, but a $2,000 check isn’t going to make up for a foreclosed home, and it is silly to think the banks will feel more than a slight pinch. The banks have already reserved enough capital to cover the checks that they are going to have to cut (around $5 billion). Compared to the damage caused to American families by both the financial crisis and the rush to foreclosure, the banks are getting off easy.

Obama may be technically correct to say that the settlement “will deliver some measure of justice for some families who have been victims of abusive practices,” but it’s wrong to treat the news as any kind of real payback for bank misdeeds. It’s just nibbling around the margins.

So is it a sellout — “another raw demonstration of who wields power in America,” as Naked Capitalism’s Yves Smith, — undoubtedly the harshest critic of the Obama administration on housing policy and bank reform — argues? That’s a little harder to say, and a lot depends on the future course of events.

Some defenders of the settlement are arguing that the size of the deal is smaller than it might otherwise be because the government has retained the right to sue the banks for a wide variety of mortgage-related bad behavior stretching beyond the fraudulent processing of foreclosure paperwork at the heart of this deal. In particular, the states attorneys general of New York and California can continue their own separate investigations. As Felix Salmon writes, “other big-money lawsuits over securitization can and almost certainly will still be brought — which means that the big banks all still have significant litigation risk hanging over their heads.” As if to punctuate this point, on Wednesday night, the Wall Street Journal reported that federal regulators plan to sue some of the largest banks on charges of fraud related to the dodgy securitization of mortgages in 2007 and 2008.

The proof of this theory will only come when we see how hard the Obama administration and states like California go after the banks in the future. Given the track record of this administration, that may be doubtful. (Although, it may be worth noting that at least one conservative critic of the settlement, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, bases his critique precisely on the fact that banks still can’t put the whole crisis behind them. The administration can’t leave well enough alone, complains Holtz-Eakin, or “resist the political temptation to rouse its base with finger-pointing and lawsuits.”)

A more interesting question to consider, however, is how the housing relief contained in this settlement fits into other administration housing policy efforts currently in the works.

First off, government negotiators are still working on roping another nine mortgage providers into the deal, which could raise the overall settlement total from $26 billion to around $40 billion. In March, the rejiggered HARP refinance program will kick in, presumably allowing hundreds of thousands of homeowners to refinance at currently rock bottom mortgage rates. There is also strong pressure coming from the Federal Reserve and the White House to convert currently unoccupied foreclosed homes owned by the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into rental properties, a step that would remove excess inventory from the housing market.

Each individual nibble here is unlikely to make a profound difference, but taken together, all these initiatives add up to the most concerted effort the Obama administration has taken to date to bring relief to the housing sector. It’s also worth noting that it’s all happening without any help whatsoever from Congress. The approach does not address the desire for punishment that so many would like to see meted out upon the banks, but it will likely help spur additional economic growth. At a point when the economy already seems to have solid momentum toward recovery, every extra bit of help is gravy.

President George W. Bush cut taxes for almost everyone who paid income taxes. Romney would make the Bush tax cuts permanent. But that’s only a first step.

He would also raise taxes on poor families with children at home and those going to college.

Romney does this by reducing benefits from the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit and by ending the American Opportunity tax credit for college education.

To be fair to Romney, when the candidate made his comment on not caring about the poor, he did it in the context of noting that there is a “safety net” for the poor, and if it was broken, he would “fix it.” But it’s a little difficult to square the idea of fixing a broken safety net with the plan to eliminate tax breaks that benefit poor families with children who aspire to a college education. (Not to mention the little problem of figuring out how to pay for that safety net, while at the same time committing to making permanent budget-busting tax cuts.)

Romney’s tax plan appears tailor-made for an Obama attack team to rip to shreds. Of course, judging by the results from the primary and caucus contests so far, poor people don’t seem very inclined to vote for Romney, so maybe he figures he’s got nothing to lose.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’ve got nothing against Jeremy Lin. He was a high school phenom in Palo Alto, Calif., and I know some Asian American kids out here in Berkeley who worship the ground he walks on. Lin didn’t make the NBA because he’s freakishly tall, like the 7-foot-4 Yao Ming (Lin is “only” 6″3′). He’s there because he can play ball, because he has a wicked fast first step when he drives to the basket, and he knows how to deliver the rock to the big guys (a skill a surprising number of “legitimate” NBA guards show little interest in mastering). He’s a triumph of will over genetic endowment, a fact that makes him inspiring to an entire generation of Californian kids restless with their model minority shackles.

But you can like Lin, and you can root for him, and yet still find his instantaneous, Tim Tebow-like ascent (in more ways than one!) to pop-cultural phenom — LINSANITY! — to be more than a little disorienting. Jeremy Lin is the latest example of how our socially-mediated, always-on world can churn any data point, any outrage, any act of heroism or moment of despair into a full-scale world-wide frenzy in less time than it took me to write this sentence.

We’ve seen this before. The same forces — social media, digital publishing tools, smartphone ubiquity — that are giving us Linsanity just blitzkrieged the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure Foundation. They torpedoed Hollywood’s attempt to force SOPA and PIPA through Congress and blew up Bank of America’s plan to charge a $5 fee for debit card use. They fueled the Occupy Wall Street movement, magnified every Tebow prostration before God into a worldwide religious orgy and are ever-more ready to pounce on any misstep by a Mitt Romney or a Newt Gingrich and explode it into an instant political crisis.

And the crazy thing is, we’re figuring this out as it goes along — and giving the phenomenon more power. As we understand this new world, and submerge ourselves in it, we are beginning to take our cues from it.

Just want every one to know that I wrote about #linsanity this morning long before it became “hip” this afternoon: bit.ly/Apjdq4

— Jon (@viewmyseats) February 8, 2012

The mainstream media now seems to be adapting its coverage of events on the basis of whether something blows up in social media as much as it does from the perceived newsworthiness of the event itself. It’s startling, but also natural: When you see a fire start to blaze, you run to cover to it. And so Linsanity breeds more Linsanity.

You want highlights? Here’s a distilled package of nine minutes of Lin’s exploits from his 28-point explosion on Monday night. You want a tribute video with an original rap soundtrack on top of some T.I. beats?  Someone is recommending it to you on Facebook or Twitter right now. You want analysis, pro or con? Plug “Jeremy Lin” into Google News and say goodbye to the rest of your day.

You want vaguely disconcerting racially tinged jokes playing on Asian, black, and white stereotypes? Twitter’s going crazy:

Jeremy Lin is a huge pickup for the Knicks. Not only is he scoring a ton of points but he is also tutoring his teammates children in math.

— The Bill Walton Trip (@NotBillWalton) February 7, 2012

“We know that Lin has been playing along, but honestly, fellow Knicks, stop bowing to him after a great play.” nymag.com/daily/sports/2…

— Angry Asian Man (@angryasianman) February 8, 2012

Lots of sterile white folks offer to adopt Jeremy Lin, concerned with the all black family he is currently with.

— The Fake ESPN (@TheFakeESPN) February 7, 2012

On Monday, the social media world was also getting worked up about Michigan Republican Senate hopeful Pete Hoekstra’s racist Super Bowl ad, featuring a Chinese woman (labeled “yellowgirl” in the HTML code for the Web version) gloating over all the jobs her country was taking from the U.S. Once thrown into the 24/7 crazy cultural mashup perpetual motion machine, it didn’t take long before anger about that ad ran head on into Jeremy Lin pride. I have seen tweets urging Jeremy Lin to run for the Republican nomination for the Michigan senate seat, tweets warning that the only American jobs in danger from Asians are those belonging to New York Knick starting point guards, and even a tweet riffing off Kobe Bryant’s self-identification as “black mamba” — Jeremy Lin is suddenly  the “yellow mamba.”

It’s a tricky, tricky world. We get pissed off when we learn that an HTML jockey has labeled a Chinese woman “yellowgirl” but we grin when see Lin dubbed “yellow mamba.” Or maybe not; maybe we get mad at both. The tweet-stream moves too fast too tell for sure. It’s just one non-stop improv jazz riff frenzy.

The craziest thing is, from his record so far we know absolutely nothing about Lin’s staying power as a potential long-term starting NBA point guard. Lin won a state championship as a senior high school and broke all kinds of Ivy League records at Harvard, but he wasn’t drafted by a single NBA team, sat on the bench last year as a rookie for the Golden State Warriors, was cut by both Golden State and Houston before this season, and was playing in the NBA’s developmental league just two months ago. He’s had two great games against two bad teams, and once the league figures him out, he could easily become old news as quickly as he became the news. Or he might tear his ACL next week, be out for the season, and never manage a full comeback. His incredible domination of the basketball world right now tells us nothing about his future.

But one thing we do know for sure: There will be something to replace him, sooner rather than later. We’re strapped to a new kind of rollercoaster — the only thing we can be certain of is that our passions will be constantly roiled by whatever new outrage or delight seethes our way via our new information channels. You know that the Susan G. Komen foundation is reeling from their contact with this world. And you’ve got to guess Jeremy Lin is having a strange week.

Who’s next?

For New York’s bankers and traders, the new math suddenly reordered their assumptions about their place in a post-crash city. “After tax, that’s like, what, $75,000?” an investment banker at a rival firm said as he contemplated Morgan Stanley’s decision. He ran the numbers, modeling the implications. “I’m not married and I take the subway and I watch what I spend very carefully. But my girlfriend likes to eat good food. It all adds up really quick. A taxi here, another taxi there. I just bought an apartment, so now I have a big old mortgage bill.”

And there’s more where that came from! Banking analyst Dick Bove complains that the government has “basically castrated these companies.” Sorry, Dick, but it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bunch of testosterone-crazed bulls in the entire global economy pasture. Hard times for investment bankers? It’s hard to imagine anything in the world that the average American could care less about, at this particular juncture in time.

2) As proof, amazing as it may seem, that the Dodd-Frank bank reform law is achieving exactly what the U.S. economy needs most: a reversal of the long-term trend in which the financial sector steadily gobbled up more and more of the U.S. economy.

Sherman makes a persuasive case that, even before the full implementation of Dodd-Frank, in anticipation of the new rules the big banks have been forced to make major changes to their businesses that have had a serious negative impact on their bottom line.

What is even more startling about this reversal is that few thought the much-vilified Dodd-Frank act would have much effect at all … And yet, from the moment Dodd-Frank passed, the banks’ financial results have tended to slide downward, in significant part because of measures taken in anticipation of its future effect. Since July 2010, Bank of America nosed down 42 percent, Morgan Stanley fell 25 percent, Goldman fell 21 percent, and Citigroup fell 16 — in a period when the Dow rose 25 percent. Partly, this is a function of the economic headwinds. But the bill’s major provisions — forcing banks to reduce leverage, imposing a ban on proprietary trading, making derivatives markets more transparent, and ending abusive debit-card practices — have taken a pickax to the Wall Street business model

If true, this is great news. In 1986, Wall Street accounted for 19 percent of all U.S. corporate profits. Just before the financial crash that figure had grown to 41 percent. That’s not a healthy economy. That’s an economy of speculators trading with each other and blowing up financial bubbles. Obama has gotten no end of grief from the left for not breaking up the big banks immediately after becoming president, even though one could make a good argument that to do so in the middle of the crisis would have damaged the U.S. economy even further. If, in fact, the long-run resolution of this drama is a Wall Street that is withering on the vine, while the “real” “Main Street” economy gradually strengthens, then we are looking at something remarkable: a profound transformation of the U.S. economy, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Reagan administration.

3) As unwarranted hype.

Of course, Dodd-Frank has not been fully implemented, and financial sector lobbyists are busily exerting tremendous pressure to make sure every new rule gets written so as to have the weakest effect possible. At the same time, Wall Street will pour hundreds of millions of dollars into the campaign of Mitt Romney, who has promised to make rolling back Dodd-Frank one of the primary goals of his presidency. Profits may be bad this year, and bankers might be whining about their bonuses, but Wall Street will regroup, Dodd-Frank will be neutered, and it will be business as usual in just a few years.

Readings 2 and 3 are not necessarily in contradiction with each other. It’s possible for Dodd-Frank to already be having a salutary effect and for that effect to be short-lived. In some ways, Dodd-Frank’s legacy may be what November’s election ends up deciding — although whichever party wins the White House in 2012, the power of the financial sector over the political process is unlikely to diminish significantly.

But regardless of which reading you choose, the piece itself is amazing if only for the plethora of quotes from bankers lamenting how the times have changed. There’s a self-awareness of the fact that the country headed down the wrong road, that maybe, just maybe, there was something wrong with all the easy money. Wall Street sounds chastened. Whether or not the Occupy movement, or Dodd-Frank, or the bad economy is most responsible for this reality is impossible to say, but for now, let’s call it progress.

For the conservative bomb-throwing blogger Michelle Malkin, Eastwood’s stance was an affront to free market principles:

“WTH? Did I just see Clint Eastwood fronting an auto bailout ad???”

For liberal Michael Moore, it was an endorsement of President Obama.

“Your sermon seemed 2 b a call 2 give O his ‘second half.’”

Charges of hypocrisy poured in like Giants defensive linemen collapsing on Tom Brady. Clint Eastwood has long been regarded as a solidly libertarian conservative, and he is on record as having opposed the auto bailout. Yet here he was, cashing in, indirectly, on the auto bailout: taking what must surely have been a hefty paycheck to tout Detroit’s comeback!

Of course, Eastwood is also a smart man, and by the evidence of his long career, he is not crazy. So maybe he changed his mind. Maybe he saw what’s happened since the auto bailout and decided that in this case, government intervention was good policy. And maybe he’s been looking at what passes for conservativism in the United States over the past few years, and he’s disgusted. Because whatever you might think about the hypocrisy issue, there’s absolutely no question that “Halftime in America” has a clear political subtext.

The commercial analogizes Detroit’s comeback from hard times to the still unrealized recovery of the United States from the Great Recession. And it bemoans not just the hardship, but the hard feelings and disunity that currently define our political landscape. Here’s one key section:

I’ve seen a lot of tough eras, a lot of downturns in my life. And, times when we didn’t understand each other. It seems like we’ve lost our heart at times. When the fog of division, discord, and blame made it hard to see what lies ahead.

Not only is that passage clearly a reference to the political fighting and harsh rhetoric of the past three years, but during that section, the commercial shows images of demonstrators in Wisconsin, protesting the effort by Gov. Scott Walker to break public sector unions! You can’t get more political than that. Sure, as John Nichols at the Nation reports, the pro-union signs of the demonstrators were surgically removed from the shots, but even that revisionism doesn’t obscure the power of the reference.. As a country, we’re fighting each other, Eastwood is saying. Let’s come back together … and support government intervention in the economy!

Seriously, what else are we to make of this?

It’s halftime in America, too. People are out of work and they’re hurting. And they’re all wondering what they’re going to do to make a comeback. And we’re all scared, because this isn’t a game.

The people of Detroit know a little something about this. They almost lost everything. But we all pulled together, now Motor City is fighting again.

As commentator Greg Mitchell pointed out almost immediately at the Nation, mister straight-shooter Clint is not being factually accurate. We did not all pull together. Obama bailed out Detroit, and faced enormous criticism for it. It’s exhibit A in the case for Obama’s supposed campaign to create the United Socialist States of America!

The conclusion seems clear: If we’re all supposed to pull together to reach a full economic recovery, just like we pulled together to rescue Detroit, then clearly we should be pulling together to reelect Obama. It certainly wouldn’t make sense to all pull together to elect the guy who wanted us to let Detroit go bankrupt, would it?