The pundit-blogger game

"One of the depressing things about the Internet is that you constantly get front row seats to watching people professionalize, which is almost always a vulgar process– no matter how talented, principled and deserving the individual. In order to make it, people have to be very explicit with their networking, with their panhandling for visibility. Again, I can’t blame them; there’s really no other options if you deeply want to make blogging and online punditry your profession. But it instrumentalizes all of your relationships. And that corrupts, it has to." -- Freddie deBoer, L'Hote blog