"We are all Scoble now," Keen writes. Who? Scoble, a tech blogger who gained a measure of microcelebrity when Microsoft hired him a few years ago, makes videos so boring that Fast Company, his most recent employer, fired him. His lackluster videojournalism was not why anyone paid attention to him, of course; they're more attracted by the spectacle of his incessant use of microblogging service Twitter, where he has 67,000 "followers."

Keen argues that we must all follow Scoble's example and cultivate meaningless relationships that allow us to promote our work — that, indeed, with the collapse of Wall Street and Detroit, self-promotion is the only industry America has left. It's a depressingly accurate thought: A nation of Scobles, never producing anything but distracting people from that emptiness at our core by constantly talking.

He's certainly trying his best himself, assiduously courting the Twitterati to promote his next book, and ridiculing authors who do not engage in self-promotion, like Jonathan Littel, the writer of Holocaust epic The Kindly Ones:

For writers, the great publishing transformation over the next few years has nothing to do with the Kindle 2 or anything other supposedly miraculous technological device. No, the real revolution will be in the way we writers can take advantage of all this new digital technology — blogs, Twitter, interactive television, Internet radio etc etc — to better promote ourselves and our work. All writers — from $1,000,000 lottery-winners like Littel to the tens of thousands of professional writers like myself living off much smaller advances — need to think of self-promotion, both in physical and digital form, as intrinsic to our value.

A shy writer in the 21st century is a starving writer. Diffidence is death. Littel should set a better example. Come to America, Jonathan, and tell us more about your epic Nazi book. It's actually surprisingly nice here.

Ah yes, that's what we need: 140-character tweets about the Holocaust.

Over at New York's Daily Intel, they can't decide if it's the mid-'90s (Dow at 6,500, Newt and Rush are back!) or the early '80s (leggings and unemployment!). But you are all thinking like Dr. Manhattan's dumb girlfriend, with your linearity. It's always been the 80s and 90s and it always will be!

What we're experiencing right now is what physicists call "The Butterfly Effect Starring Ashton Kutcher." Someone is throwing us all backwards and forwards through time in order to right past wrongs. And, as in that film, these attempts just keeping making everything worse. Which is why, instead of "Speaker of the House," we are dealing with "Presidential candidate" Newt Gingrich:

Gingrich and his wife "will look seriously and we'll probably get our family totally engaged, including our two grandchildren, probably in January, 2011, and we'll look seriously at whether or not we think it's necessary to do it," he said, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

"And if we think it's necessary we'll probably do it," Gingrich said. "And if it isn't necessary we probably won't do it."

"I think it's conceivable that by 2012 you could have a second Contract for America," the former Speaker added.

Noooooooooooooo!!! 1.21 gigawatts! It's the Libyans!!

Well, Peter Feld called it last week. He tried to warn us.

So we're all just stuck in this time loop, like that Next Generation episode where the Enterprise kept exploding, and our last hope is that our android president can send a message through his positronic brain giving us some clue as to how to avert the same catastrophes over and over again.

(This maybe has something to do with why Hillary Clinton got Russia a giant reset button today?)