Same Grim Mime Rags

NOTE: An article in this week's New Yorker ("The Riddler" by Burkhard Bilger) mentions that one of the puzzlemasters points out that Pepsi-Cola spokesdroid Britney Spears anagrams to "Presbyterians" while Pepsi-Cola anagrams to "Episcopal."

At last night's RIM GAMES, hosted by TART JEW SON, it was no surprise that SILKY ACE AI won a total of 5 GERM AIMS or that FOLLY NATURED took Best Female Vocal Performance. And YELL DAME DRAMA from the movie RUIN MULE GOO deserved the award it got. Old-Timers ZANY RV TINKLE won for Male Rock Vocal Performance and ROYAL JAM SET got Male Pop Vocal Performance. But no one was expecting EARTH WHORE BOTHER TOUR to walk away with album of the year! After all, HOW HE TORTURE EAR BROTH is ASS LEG RUB music!

On a non-anagramatic note, man was I pissed at Michael Greene's diatribe against Napsterism! As if the recording industry is looking out for the interests of the musicians. As Ken Layne writes, Michael Greene "is like John Ashcroft without the charm. "

Sitting Out the Flames

I'm deeply uninterested in having a flame war with John Dvorak. In fact, I wasn't going to blog today since I'm on the road and have about 45 seconds before I have to unplug.

I did like Tom Matrullo's comments on Kottke's board.

And to become rather miscellaneous, Chip points us to an article that continues the propagation of the belief that a major conspiracy is about to emerge, one involving Afghanistan, Bin Laden, pipelines, Enron and why Cheney is hiding those with whom he met. (Michael Moore said on The Daily Show the other day that Cheney was meeting with the Taliban about a pipeline up until a month before 9/11.) I haven't had time to read the page I'm pointing you to, which is, of course, the height of irresponsibility. That is, it's bloggin', baby! Go decide for yourself if this is worth reading. As always.

More MiscLinks

Martin Jensen recommends a site about Richard Dawkins, about whom I railed the other day.

Here's a John Perry Barlow interview in which he uses the phrase "private totalitarianism" to label the corporate attempt to own the economy of ideas as well as the economy of work and money.

Eric Norlin has uniblogged his metablog about the inner relation of blogging and rap. (Ok, so maybe "uniblogged" for publishing a concatenation of blogs isn't a keeper. But Eric's content is.)

MiscLinks

At Dan Dubno's site, Gizmorama, you'll find a link to the amazing EarthViewer, demoed at TED. Type an address into the client and it delivers a cinematically thrilling aerial view of the locatio. There's a 14-day free trial on the site. The Gizmorama site also has links to other ditigal images of the earth and a link to CBS News' comprehensive links about disasters of every stripe.

Dave Rogers blogs on Dvorak on Cluetrain and blogging (see my previous blog entry).

Tom Shugart has started a blog. Looks promising. His very first entry is a reflection on the authenticity blogthread. Tom takes a pretty radically existential position: "...inventing the self is a supreme act of personal responsibility. You're either creating it and putting it out there or you're operating as a default self—i.e., without authenticity." Invent or discover? (Note: Tom's way too flattering about this blog. I am blushing undeservedly.)

Hermani Dimantas has started a blog. I assume it's good because, although it's in Portuguese and thus impenetrable to me, I know from correspondence with Hermani that he's an enthusiastic, smart guy.

TED Saturday

This was an extraordinarily good day. The only weaknesses of the day are weaknesses of TED's format itself: the presentations are non-interactive with the audience and with one another so it is very difficult to develop ideas. For example, if a Nobel prize winner raises a provocative issue in his allotted 15-20 minutes, there's no Q&A, no panel, and no further discussion by later speakers who, by and large, have labored for months polishing a presentation from which they dare not swerve.

This weakness was quite apparent in the first presentation of the day. Daniel Dennett, a philosopher of amazing clarity and originality of focus, compared the ideas humans are willing to die for to an actual virus whose propagation requires causing its hosts — ants in this case — to commit suicide. As he led us to believe he was talking about militant Islam, he pulled the rug and said that our Western memes are a virus that threatens to do to the non-Western world what real viruses did to the native Americans when the Europeans arrived. Just as he was about to tell us what he thinks can and should be done to protect the world from these mental viruses, his time was up. As a result, he left us at the weakest part of his argument, it seemed to me. Yes, ideas are like viruses in that some multiply at the cost of their hosts' lives. But, unlike viruses, they do not necessarily act in a mechanistic, deterministic way (unless one believes that all thought is deterministic). There is something profoundly anti-intellectual and demeaning about the "ideas are viruses" meme. After all, this view has to say that all ideas are viruses, doesn't it? Rationality is a virus as much as extremist religious views. Otherwise, we're just picking the ideas we don't like and labeling them viruses, smuggling the negative sense of "virus" under the coat of the genetic sense of virus. But Dennett would have revealed all ... if only Ted slots were wider and the speakers fewer.

Here are some more highlights:

Steve Jurveston had 7 minutes to talk about the nanotech revolution. Fascinating but way too abbreviated. He expects revolutions in computing, medicine, materials and manufacturing in 5-10 years. He also pointed out in passing that the human genome is smaller than MS Office.

Nobelist Kary Mullis gave a country-boy reminiscence of his discovery that the scientific method is a human invention. After giving a vivid sense of what "doing science" means to him, he attacked politicized science, taking global warming as his example. He cited two recent studies that found no warming in the past 50 years, throwing into doubt the "More CO2 = More Warming" hypothesis first formulated 100 years ago.

Next came Richard Dawkins who pissed me off mightily. He's obviously one of our great minds but ... he's got an impressively blinkered view of religion. I wholeheartedly agree with his main point: American culture needs to accept atheism as a mainstream belief, and I liked his proposal that atheists come out of the closet in order to legitimize the atheist position. But he wrapped this in a virulent and, frankly, ignorant attack on religion. I wanted to go up to him afterwards and say: "I hate science. Scientists experiment on animals." He would reply (I imagine): "First of all, you twit, astronomy, physics, etc. don't experiment on animals." Then I would pounce, it being my fantasy and all: "Exactly. And a critique of religion-in-general is just as twitty." It genuinely irks me that he recklessly conflates all religions as if they all reject science, all insist on blind faith, and all appeal only to the weak-minded. (The fact that my wife, who has a doctorate in philosophy and is one of the clearest-headed people I know, is an orthodox Jew certainly doesn't affect my attitude :)

Josef Penninger gave a fascinating presentation on his genetic research that may result in treatments for osteoporosis, arthritis, and pain management. More interesting, however, was his explanation of discoveries about how particular genes work. For example, the gene that controls the death of cells is also used by the body to "sculpt" fingers out of fetus's webbed mass. I spoke with him afterwards and found him to be shy and friendly. (Yes, you can be both.) When he talked about his new institute, he talked mainly in terms of human values. Emotionally, he felt like Dawkin's mirror image.

By the way, I also had a chance to talk briefly with Dean Kamen. "Since Segway challenges so many of our habits and many of our institutions," I asked, "how do you see it getting accepted? Who's going to adopt it first? Where will the breakthrough be?" "I wish I knew," Kamen said while standing, as always, on his Segway. But, he said, things are looking up since the Segway's introduction: Automobile companies don't hate it the way he thought they would and two states have passed laws allowing Segways on sidewalks.

Steven Pinker, whose work on language and the brain is brilliant and too hard for me, gave a highly understandable preview of his new book that argues that there is indeed such a thing as human nature. He pointed to four reasons we fear that idea: We don't like the inequality of capability it implies, we think it means that we are not perfectable, it seems to imply determinism and it seems to suck all the meaning out of life. He gave brief, effective counters for each fear.

Next up was Deepak Chopra, a popular spiritualist. He opened up by saying that Dawkins "seems to be a bit of a fundamentalist [laughs from the audience] and even perhaps a bit of a bigot [gasps from the audience]. He then spent his twenty minutes trying to erase science's distinction between observed and observer, using indeterminacy and quantum leaps as his proof points. He spoke the language of physics fluently, but even I, whose lack of understanding of quantum mechanics is truly deep, spotted some misunderstandings. I think. Besides, his approach can't possibly convince scientists because he's not telling them anything they don't already know.

Quincy Jones talked about his life. Frank Gehry chatted about his life as an architect. Chris Bangle, BMW's chief designer, told an amusing story to show that love and trust are at the heart of the collaborative process.

Overall, it was an amazing line up of intellect, squeezed, alas, into slots as small as veal pens — with just as much room to move around.

This is Richard Saul Wurman's last year as the head of TED. Next year, Chris Anderson, founder of Business 2.0, will host it. Chris is promising to maintain TED as it is, but it remains to be seen if it can weather the departure of its leader and icon.

TED Friday

Report on Friday at TED, the Technology Entertainment and Design conference in Monterey, an eccentric mix of presentations and performances, celebrities and civilians.

This was a more successful day than yesterday, IMO. The highlights from my point of view:

Robert Full from UC Berkeley discussed his group's research into animal motion. They've been able to make robots that navigate through complex landscapes without requiring a computer brain to match actions to an internal representation. Instead, legs made out of materials that are complexly flexible — just like animal legs — adjust the critter's movement to the terrain simply because of the shape and nature of the legs themselves. This seems quite similar to Rodney Brooks' work on getting inner representations out of the AI picture. Full also talked about the mechanism by which geckos can scoot up walls: It turns out that the gecko's toe pads foliate to such small nodes that molecular Van der Waal forces can overcome gravity. (Was that a look of inspiration I saw in Dean Kamen's eyes as he thought about he might apply this to wall-climbing Segways? Nah.)

Frans Lanting, a photographer for National Geographic (is there a more evocative job description?) cycled through astonishing photographs of wildlife. You can see a few here.

Jeffrey Katzenberg showed the first 7 minutes of his new animated feature ("Spirit: Stallion of Cimarron") about wild horses. It puts characters drawn in 2D illustration style into a detailed 3D world. The artwork is beautiful (but familiar) and the movie's opening tries for the bravura sweep of the opening of The Lion King. The problem is with the writing. The narration is so hackneyed and trite that Matt Damon's reading can't save it. And the very first words of the script are just flat out wrong: The star horse intones that the horses have been in the American west forever. Yeah, even before the Spanish brought them?

The late morning session presented a string of humorists (a chuckle of humorists?). Bruce Vilanch told some funny jokes of the Viagra, Shirley Maclaine and Richard Gere and smally furry mammals variety. Emily Levine did a routine that managed to be genuinely funny about philosophical dualism. And MacArthur Genius Ben Katchor deadpanned his way through his arch, illustrated prose-poems that are as willing to be ambiguous as Katzenberg is willing to be trite. Jill Sobule performed again; I had the chance to tell her that I fall more in love with her every day.

Dan Dubins, a CBS News producer, demo'ed software that combines satellite imaging data with geological elevation data so that you can zoom, tilt and pan as if you were flying a space-capable helicopter. Others have produced similar software, but this had more data than I'd seen and, more dramatically, treated the entire experience cinematically, an excellent example of the importance of entertainment in presenting information. Unfortunately, Dubins didn't give the software's name, although I thoughtI heard him refer to "earthview."

Steven Petranik, editor of Discover magazine, ticked off his Top Ten list of ways the world could end suddenly:

Top Ten Ways the World Could End Suddenly 10. Failure to address the worldwide epidemic of depression 9. Alien invasion 8. Ecosystem collapse 7. Particle accelerator accident produces an uncontrollable black hole 6. Biotech disaster 5. Reversal of the magnetic field 4. Giant solar flares 3. An epidemic 2. Contact with a rogue black hole 1. Giant asteroid

He wasn't kidding about any of these. See you in hell.

Amory Lovins talked about the hypercar project, a radically redesigned car that uses hydrogen fuel (producing water as its exhaust) or fuel cells. It reverses most of the principles that have guided car design from the beginning. Most exciting, he has put the design into the public domain so that no one can patent it and many can build them.

Nicholas Negroponte wrapped up the sessions by predicting that in 1-2 years, we will see the development of a "viral telecommunications network" based on 802.11 wirelessness, a single installation serving an entire neighborhood. This will go beyond merely enabling multiple connections to the Internet, Negroponte predicts, resulting in a peer-to-peer network that parallels the current Internet topography. Further, he suggests that establishing wireless networks in areas of strife will enable children to reach past their parents' stupidity.

He connected this with our culture's odd idea that at the age of 5 children should stop learning by playing and start learning by facing forward and being taught. Give kids a connected computer and they will teach themselves and others by exploring the Internet. Pointing to his experience building schools in rural Cambodia, he said: "People say it's not sufficient to give kids computers and connectivity. You know what? It is."

Damn good stuff.

Finally, the day ended with an astounding set of musical performances. In the first half, Gary Burton, Maokoto Ozone and Julian Lage played. Julian is a prodigy, a 14-year-old with technical expertise and musicality that's jaw-dropping. I shared an elevator ride with him and his parents and they seemed loving and grounded. Could my impression based on this 45 second experience be wrong? Actually, no, it couldn't be. You can't lie in an elevator any more than you can lie down in an elevator.

The second concert featured Herbie Hancock. Astounding.

Thursday at the TED Conference

Report on highlights of the first full day at TED, the Technology Entertainment and Design conference in Monterey, an eccentric mix of presentations and performances, celebrities and civilians.

This morning gave us a dull-as-it-sounds panel discussion of the design of chairs preceded by a sparkling performance by singer-songwriter Jill Sobule The only moment of interest (for me, anyway) in the chair panel came when the guy from SteelCase talked about Bluespace, a project with IBM to rethink the cubicle. The chair becomes the brain of the place, automatically adjusting the lights and temperature. Of course, the desk folks are going to insist that desks are the center of the universe. And Apple has already made it clear that it thinks that all revolves around the desk lamp. (Bluespace is reminiscent of Bruce Tognazzini's Star Office concept.)

The chair panel was followed by the truly mirthful Respyni Brothers juggling act.

Walt Mossberg was next up. Before he started his tech column at the Wall Street Journal. ten years ago he was covering wars, the world economy, international affairs and other such frothy delights. Yet he would only get one or two letters a year from readers. As soon as he started the tech column, he started hearing from hundreds of readers a day. Why, he asked, do people not care enough about world affairs to write, but if they disagree with his slightest opinion about computers, they write long, passionate missives? Great question with lots of answers. (My book, Small Pieces, actually is an attempt to answer that question, at least with regard to the Web.)

Mossberg is quite funny, by the way. And frank. He said that James Baker, Secretary of State under Bush Sr., used to have a computer in his office that Baker had no idea how to operate. One key was color coded and hard wired to call up the current value of the dollar so that in meetings with foreign dignitaries, Baker could spin around, hit the key, and say "Hmm, looks like the dollar is currently trading at 1202 Lira," or whatever. He also said that when Mossberg told Baker that he was dropping his coverage of the State Department in favor of writing a tech column, Baker said, "What the fuck would you do that for?" Answer: Mossberg saw that a revolution in technology was going to change the world. When last seen, Mossberg was one of the most respected tech journalists with an international readership and James Baker was fixing a tawdry election in Florida.

Dean Kamen gave a 30 minute presentation, standing the entire time on a Segway. The Segway is supremely cool, but seeing Kamen "pacing" on the scooter made it look like a cybernetic attachment rather than a mode of transportation. In his rambling (rolling?) remarks, he defended the value of the Segway by saying that because it goes three times faster than walking, it extends the effective range of a person without a car and thus can replace cars within cities. (Of course, so can bikes for most people.) I have no idea if the Segway will catch on because it involves replacing so many ingrained habits and assumptions. His bionic pacing only seemed to make the hurdle higher. (Dan Bricklin's article on the Segway's importance is likely to become of historic interest as we look back on how the Segway phenomenon transformed human mobility and cities ... or just fizzled.)

But Kamen really wanted to talk about First, not Segway. First is his program to involve more women and minorities in the sciences. He showed a tape of one of the First robotic competitions. The high school students' stories were quite moving. There is greatness wrapped up in Kamen. And legends have already begun.

He also said that the Ibot — the stair-climbing, human-elevating wheelchair — should be cleared as a Class 3 medical device this year. And, he showed one of the Stirling engines he's been working on. He says that the small engine can move a Segway from New York to Boston on a kilogram of propane. And, the heat that it throws off could be used, he said, to distill 10 gallons of water an hour, potentially ending the curse of dirty water that is the world's biggest killer while simultaneously bringing electricity to remote villages.

Yo-Yo Ma brought out a troupe of musicians playing instruments from around the world. They performed two pieces written around 1500, the sort of courtly, tuneful European music of the time that I've found no more than entertaining. This I found moving. In part it is the joy with which Ma leads his group and the joy with which they play. It helped also that I've been listening to Ma and watching his astonishing growth (from his astounding beginning) all my adult life. Ma is not particularly articulate in terms of his sentence structure, but he is remarkably eloquent. He conveyed vividly the way in which the world's music is connected. I choked up.

Then, in response to the multiple standing ovations, he played Bach, alone. This was one of the richest musical experiences in my life. I wept. (Good thing he stopped because the next escalation of my response would have involved unsightly stains.)

There were many other speakers. Some were excellent. A few were self-involved, conspicuous duds. For the rest of the day, I never quite left Ma's performance.

TED is all about the time between the presentations when we mingle and the class sytem is evoked in every glance even as it is ostensibly being overcome. I bumped into Ma and did the standard fan thing: shook his hand, told him that his performance moved me. Among the other celebrities: Rupert Murdoch dressed like someone had to tell him what "business casual" means. Bruce Villanch, the center square on Hollywood Squares. Neil Simon. Art Buchwald. Jeffrey Katzenberg.

I am not counting computer industry folks such as Danny Hillis, Jeff Bezos and Alan Webber. And, of course, why would I even mention the non-celebrities? Just because that's from whom I'm learning almost everything of value? It does seem that there is an extraordinarily high percentage of really interesting non-celebs here; almost anyone you strike up a converation with is passionate and articulate about something.

There's no reason to point to the dud presentations. But I'm steamed about one. A marketing guy from Nike talked with great pride about the "world shoe" project, which he presented as a way for Nike to expand sales from the 180M sneakers per year it's been stalled at for three years. So, he came up with the idea of designing a shoe that can sell in the third world for about $10. Fine and dandy.

MetaTag: You're It!

So, Dave blogs about Doc blogging about Jacob Shwirtz blogging about bloggers blogging about blogging, and now I reference Dave, enabling me to achieve a Level 5 Meta-Blog, making me the most meta-blogging blogger on the planet! Woohoo!

Enron Humor

Thanks, J. Arnold

Get Your War On

The new mnftiu is available. We're watching genius unfold.

MiscLinks

From Chris Pirillo's Lockergnome games discussion board comes a free game, called Crash!, that is surprisingly hypnotic in a Bejeweled sort of way. Thanks, Ernest! (The help files for this beta version aren't very helpful. The object is to clear the board. Clicking on a square will clear it if it shares a border with two others of the same color; its border mates are also cleared. The bottom line of the screen shows you the next line of squares that will be added.)

Paul Graham, who is an acquaintance from a previous life at a software company, has written a really interesting explanation of why his start-up used Lisp to write their application, including an argument about what constitutes a higher level language. (Thanks to Bret Pettichord for pointing this out.)

Of course, this recalls the old joke that circulated via email about ten years ago. "I've managed to hack into the Defense Department's Star Wars code," it explained breathlessly. "Unfortunately, I was only able to get the last page." What followed were 2,000 close-parentheses. Oh, the tears of laughter were like CDRs to the Lisp geeks' eyes over that one!

A Day on the Blogstream

Take Friday on the blogstream...

Read Mike Golby, Akma, Steve Himmer and Tom Matrullo, four brilliant writers with fast-beating hearts all writing on the same topic. Ten days ago, three were new to me.

Compare Akma's and Steve's careful precision that honors the topic to Tom's inhabiting of history that enriches it to Mike's jazz that invigorates it. Or don't compare. Just delight in them all.

See if you can follow the threads which led to those posts. Reconstruct a dance from a snapshot. Here's a salad, now rebuild the lettuce.

In the course of a week, they and others just as worthy have spun up a body of thought about an idea. Analysts have analyzed it. Artists have riffed on it. Practitioners have applied it. Ideas have been proposed and withdrawn. Certainty has been broached by a more useful indecision. A new type of focus has drawn an ever-widening horizon. Feelings have been hurt as we feel our way towards one another. There's been at least one return to faithful roots. I have a handful of new friends I expect never to lose. We are writing a new book — distributed, contradictory, in process, unowned, right and wrong, loud and soft, angry and glad, inspired and dull, alone and together.

Don't tell me this isn't new. Don't tell me that it's "basically like" this or that.

A Miss and a Link

KateCoe writes:

I read your mention of Hot Topic and "bottom up" fashion design. This is nothing new. Six long years ago I worked as scout for Converse. I went out with a home video camera, talked to people in surf shops, movie lines, concerts, etc. Then, I turned over the tapes, and the kids' opinions and reactions were endlessly analyzed. And I was at the tail end of the action, as they'd been doing it for about 3 years before I got the gig.

A & F [Abercrombie & Fitch] no doubt does just the same thing. All the companies use forecasting services who scout around for coming trends that some brave soul is already wearing, and then revamp it for mass market. If you wanted to give a plug to Hot Topic, that's nice. But this technique isn't anything revolutionary.

Yeah, I can see that. I wouldn't even have mentioned it except I wanted to get to the inherent contradiction in Hot Topic's mass marketing to non-conformists. Thanks for the info.

AutoGoogleWhacker 2

Ken Walton has put up a site that lets you googlewhack painlessly. It also tracks high scores. You should also check this site, although the name of the person who created it got lost in my disk crash. Sorry!

Authentic Miscellany

The blogthread (hmm, does the fact that it's multi-site meant that it's a blogyarn, not a blogthread?) about authenticity, marketing and the world has some excellent comments and additions.

Bill Seitz writes:

... in addition to authenticity and voice, perhaps the term Congruence has some play here. I've run across it mainly in a management context, but it's a bigger/meatier/softer idea.

On Bill's site congruence is defined as "Having action be congruent with thought. Doing what you know you should do."

Oy, Bill, don't go deepening this discussion on us! Authenticity has usually been taken to be within the realm of self-understanding, not action. But, of course, not only could you re-construe the entire discussion along the lines of the congruence of thought and action, but you would immediately plunge into a literally theological debate. E.g., faith versus works, to put it Christianly. For Jews, the faith/works model doesn't work all that well. And now we're off to the races...

Maybe congruence is all that we can or should demand of a business. I still believe that "authenticity" just doesn't apply to organizations, but if we take corporate "thought" to mean not only the codified "vision" and "mission" but its external marketing, then, yes, if Monsanto is preaching "building a better world for all of us," then I damn well want their actions to be congruent with that. In fact, I care much more about congruence than authenticity in this case.(By the way, I made up Monsanto's motto.)

Andrew Ross writes:

I have been reading your recent thread about authenticity with great interest, as my own research [He's at Oxford - dw] deals quite a bit with learners creating a sense of community (and with that, a sense of belonging) on the Internet.

I've come to believe that authenticity is where you find it — some people arrive at the person/ether interface with a well-established sense of self that carries through in toto into the Internet, and some others use the opportunity to lose the body as a change to renegotiate their selves. What results is a system that allows people either to import or to synthesize identity. It seems strange (and probably misleading) to discuss whether or not a projection of self is 'true' or 'authentic', mostly because doing so assumes a binary true/false duality of self. Perhaps we should speak in terms of two relative loci of being ('In situation X, I am more/less like I am in Y') rather than one fixed and one fluid locus, as we tend to do ('In situation C, I am more/less like myself'). Authenticity therefore would be more a description of how acting/speech in a particular context is like that in contexts that a person believes are important to defining who s/he is.

I like the way this helps get us out of the trap of thinking (to put it in a purposefully loaded way) that not only do we have a single "inner self" but that that self is who we really are. It also provides a model that removes some of the traditional moral weight of authenticity — "Thou Shalt Be Authentic" — so that it's more descriptive than prescriptive. This lets authenticity apply better to the Web where having a variety of selves and personae may be a sign of creativity, flexibility or playfulness rather than an indication that your moral core is flabby.

I think that Andrew's view of authenticity makes it pretty irrelevant to corporations, which is fine with me. Or am I just thinking about this wrong?

Jonathan Peterson writes:

David Rogers' observations are pretty interesting, as is your response. It seems that the voice of the ideal cluetrained corporation is a gestaltic chorus, guided by a clear understanding of core corporate values and ideals. To become clue'd, a company has to have fundamental values that are clearly understood and shared by all employees (and partners/customers for that matter).

The problem is that all the vision statements in the world won't actually tell you who a company IS, for that you must be there for a period of time. And the majority of companies are very different from who they say they are.

I worked with Earthlink in the very early web days, packaging an Earthlink sign up kit in our CD-ROM titles from CNN in '95), and have been a customer since then. Perhaps apocryphal, but earthlink's founders claim to have created this statement BEFORE deciding what their business was going to be: http://www.earthlink.net/about/ourvalues/cvb/

Interestingly http://www.earthlinksucks.net/ is a good example of how the internet can enable the voice of a single person. How these things inter-relate may be an interesting real-world lesson in corporate core values, voice and what happens when a company forgets where it came from through mergers, loss of founders, etc.

So, this would ground a company's idea of itself in its actual history. I like that a lot. And it has an odd impact on the implications of Andrew's and Bill's ideas, for we don't necessarily want congruence between a company's history and its actions but this longer view of corporate identity maybe gives a way to identify an authentic (!) inner core of a company. (In The Cluetrain Manifesto, Doc and I wrote that positioning isn't a matter of taking a blank piece of paper and jotting down some ideas. In fact, the market positions companies. And it can take generations before, say, Volkswagen is no longer "branded" as a Nazi car.)

Good heavens, is AKMA a masterful writer and the rare person who raises up all who meet him. His latest is brilliant along several axes. Unfortunately, I deleted the blog of mine to which he refers because I thought it was, well, crap. Had I known that it figures in AKMA's latest authentico-blog, I might have left it up just so his links wouldn't be dead. (I also was affected by the "hot 'n heavy theological mash note" AKMA's wife sent him yesterday.)

Dave Rogers, part of the original blogthread on this topic, has a terrific piece on whether Love is really the killer app. It's very much on the same theme as the blogthread since it asks if businesses are capable of love. He also has blogged praise for Santa Cruz Bicycles as a company that perhaps deserves to be described as authentic. (I ran an interview with them in my 'zine because I was similarly impressed with them.)

Jason Thompson is off to a great start with his new blog, including an entry about voice and marketing.

NPR: Weblogs and Journalism

The Authenticity Complex

There's too much to reply to in AKMA's, Tom's, and Dave's blogthreading about authenticity. I feel like we've developed the topic well enough that blogging is no longer the right instrument of conversation. We should move this to a discussion board where the topics are more fragmented (shorter posts, faster replies) or even to a chat room. Nevertheless...

AKMA is right to remind us that selves are much more complex than my "inner self/outer self" explanation of sincerity and authenticity implies. In fact, "authenticity" impies a much more complex relationship whereby what is public is either "owned up to" or not ... in an infinite variety of ways. Most of our great literary characters, from Hamlet to Madame Bovary to Zuckerman, are great because the complexity of the relation of who they are, who they seem and who they own up to being. (That this starts with Shakespeare lends credence to Bloom's seemingly ridiculous claim that Shakespeare invented what we think of as a person.) This fact makes it much, much harder to think about what authenticity is.

AKMA's main point in that particular blog entry, however, is that our Web personae are not extrinsic to our real selves. I wholeheartedly agree. That's why our Web personae are interesting and important to us. That's why we're writing ourselves into existence on the Web. In fact, in a single blog I managed to say both that "As I understand the term, 'authenticity' assumes that there is a public outer self and an inner private self and that the two are intimately related" and "If your outer self doesn't pretend to represent your inner self, you're now in a politics of theatre or authorship, not one of personal identity." (Emphasis added.) I meant the first to say exactly what AKMA says better: we are our public selves. The second overstates what I meant, for it implies there's no relation between public and private selves. AKMA admirably spells out the complexity of that relationship. The point I was trying to make was that the relation of Web self to "real" self is different than, and looser than, the relation of RW public self and RW private self. It'd be useful to explore that relationship. Maybe it'll take a Tolstoy or a Flaubert to do it successfully.

So, I like AKMA's suggestion that "while 'authenticity' may be elusive as a positive quality, 'inauthenticity' may be easier to get hold of." (I also like Dave's idea that could reel in this discussion by talking about what it actually means for business.) John Austin, the British philosopher, once warned us not to be fooled by the existence of a word into assuming that it must denote some existing thing. For example, I may use the word "real" to distinguish a real gun from a toy gun, real money from counterfeit, real feelings from feigned feelings, real juice from reconstituted juice, etc. It would be a mistake, suggests Austin, to assume that there must be a thing called "reality." Rather, the word "real" perhaps only has a use like the word "very." Likewise, the word "authentic" when applied to people (as opposed to Louis XIV furniture) perhaps should be understood as meaning "not inauthentic." (Well, I guess that wasn't exactly Austin's point, but I like Austin's point so much I'm going to leave it here anyway. So there!) Perhaps "authentic" means nothing more than "Not a phony, not an ass-kisser, not a lying sack o' shit."

We got started on this because I blogged about whether the Corporate Voice could ever actually be authentic. (Actually, as I reread my post, I don't use the term "authentic." Dave Rogers introduces the term. So blame him! :) And I still think that neither "authentic" nor "inauthentic" can apply to an entity with neither body nor soul ... nor, as RB always reminds us, sex organs.

(And I haven't even replied to extraordinarily rich blog entries from Dave and Tom!)

Bush Abandons Universal Connectivity

Forwarded by David Isenberg from Benton.org, a non-profit devoted to gaining social benefit from communications technology:

Bush abandons national strategy to bridge the digital divide.

After a year of public speculation over whether the White House was committed to expanding Internet access and skills to all of America's citizens, the administration has finally broken its silence. In its FY 2003 budget, the White House stripped over $100 million in public investments previously available for community technology grants and IT training programs—programs that offer real payoffs to rural communities, the working poor, minorities and children.

So predictable.

Missing a Day of Blog

I have to run to catch a plane. (Ottawa in February! Ah!) I'm speaking at a customer support conference and I've definitely decided to come out in favor of supporting customers. Sure it's a controversial stand, but it's what I believe.

This is the first time I'm going to be away from my blog. I barely have time to do an entry today, and tomorrow I expect to be blogless. I feel like the first time we went away for a night without our kids. Sniff sniff.

Mostly, I feel bad that some really interesting conversations are going to continue swirling and I'll be left behind. Fortunately, I just finished reading the book "Thinking with the Left Side of Your Behind," so maybe I'll be able to catch up.

Here's an example: AKMA has advanced the conversation about voice and authenticity that I've threaded here. Although I never thought I'd be using this as an analogy, I feel like I'm on a curling team. There's this 42-pound stone that's sliding its way down an alley, and AKMA, Dave Rogers, Tom Matrullo and I are walking along with it, adjusting its progress by sweeping the ice with brooms.

Blogthread: Voice, Authenticity and More...

Continuing the blogthread among AKMA, Dave Rogers and AKMA (see the end of this entry) on authenticity, preaching, marketing and just about everything...

The latest entries are beautifully written, nuanced, thoughtful ... everything I'll mess up if I try to summarize them here. They have to do with whether authenticity for corporations is possible. But this has raised the question of what authenticity is for real individuals.

I've always been uncomfortable with the term "authenticity" but it names a concept that nevertheless we seem to need. I think this blogthread points to two places where the basic model of authenticity falls apart. As I understand the term, "authenticity" assumes that there is a public outer self and an inner private self and that the two are intimately related. "Sincerity" has to do with how accurately the outer self represents the inner self's intentions, while "authenticity" has to do with how well the outer self represents the inner self's self-understanding. Or maybe it just has to do with how well the inner self understands itself, which then gets reflected in the outer self.

If something like that is the case, here are two places where the term just doesn't fit very well:

(1) Marketing. The problem isn't a lack of sincerity, for marketing can reflect excellent intentions (although it's rare because it has to fight the corporate entity's inherent greed). The problem is that there's no inner self to a corporation. It is an organization, not an individual. So the model within which "authenticity" makes sense breaks down.

(2) The Web. I'm less confident about this, but it seems to me that the Web frees us to create online selves that are personae. If your outer self doesn't pretend to represent your inner self, you're now in a politics of theatre or authorship, not one of personal identity. Asking "Is RageBoy authentic?" doesn't make a lot of sense. If you were to discover, as per AMKA, that Ben & Jerry are polluting, right-wingers who have their ice cream made in Tunisian sweat shops, you would feel like you'd been lied to. If I were to tell you that Chris Locke is actually a sweet, kind man, you wouldn't feel betrayed any more than if I were to tell you that Nabokov — despite Lolita — actually wasn't a murderous pedophile.

This is why I'm so interested in the ways in which our Web selves are literary. (I'm sort of working on a sort of book proposal on this idea. Unlikely to succeed, so don't hold me to it.)

Blogthreads (alphabetical order):

MiscLinks

Interesting new site: trustworthycomputing.com.

No, the link's not broken. Think about it, chuckle once, move on.

Daniel Pink, author of Free Agent Nation, has a new site, Just One Thing. Every day, he has one short, pithy, useful and/or amusing entry. What a concept! Since Daniel is one of the most interesting people around, it works real well.

I'd say more, but I have another 150 entries to blog this morning.

Dave Rogers continues the bloghopping discussion of voice, preaching and marketing with a provocative entry.

I blogged my PC woes when my hard drive melted, eliciting the Macintosh user's standard expression of sympathy, i.e., "Get a Mac, a-hole." Dan Gillmor responds by pointing us to his blog entry on why running a Mac is no walk in the park, especially since the park is run by Windows PC's armed with uzis.

Open Source Meaning of Life

Eric Olsen tells us about his project to discover the meaning of life in a post-9/11 world. This is being done in conjunction with a book called "America.com: On September 11" by Eric and Marty Thau. They're going to use "computer communications as an organizing principle." Eric says to participate in the meaning-of-life project:

1) jot down the meaning of life.
2) answer the following for demographic purposes:

a) gender
b) age
c) zip code or country
d) name (if you choose)

COPY 1 AND 2 ABOVE AND RETURN VIA EMAIL TO [email protected]

Eric assures us that all information will be kept completely private. The results will be compiled at a weblog that goes live on Feb. 12. The results may themselves be compiled into a book. Of course, if the book is successful and we learn from it, then they'll have to write another book about meaning in a post Feb. 12th world.

The Anals of Marketing

The Intel download search page reminds us

Search for a specific (full or partial) product name such as: 'pro/100', 'mobile', 'pentium processor'. Do not include trademark symbols.

Prehistoric Blogging

Gilbert Cattoire sends us to the Grapenotes site. There you can read the archive of stories written by Dr. Gr�per, the nom de PLATO of David J. Graper, an undergrad at the University of Delaware in the late 1970s. PLATO was a mainframe-based network for delivering "interactive multimedia programs to students at a number of universities, government institutions, and corporate centers around the world," according to the site. Because humans will form groups where we can, one of the first online communities created itself on PLATO. Dr. Gr�per wrote a series of stories, essays and observations that achieved underground notoriety.

I've frankly had trouble getting engaged by what Dr. Gr�per wrote, but, then, it's not the 1970s, his writings aren't being published in a semi-subversive way on a mainstream platform, I'm not a college student, and Richard Brautigan no longer seems like such a way cool author. But so what? Graper invented a type of weblogging appropriate to his medium. And that is cool.

MiscLink and Reply

In a roundelay of hypering hyperlinks, Dave Rogers, AKMA and I find ourselves talking about voice, marketing, preaching, teaching, designing web pages and "fearless speech." I can't even figure out who started what. But there's some really cool stuff going back, forth and across Dave and AKMA's blogs.

Tom blogs a thoughtful, incisive, and beautifully-written-as-usual review of Chris Locke's Gonzo Marketing. I was particularly struck by the following:

The book�s prime argument is not easily pigeonholed, since it yokes two propositions that don�t have an immediate causal or other obvious relationship, creating an unusual conceptual tension. On the one hand, the corporate entity (any corporation) is informed that it must stop acting as though it were human � stop behaving as if it had a heart (and, by this logic, a mind, an imagination, a personhood); in virtually the same breath, the corporation is told it must assume a new responsibility to the larger world in which it conducts business. Business, then, must live up to an ethical standard even as an inventory of its anatomy finds none of the human attributes normally considered the wellsprings of ethical consciousness.

Why should a large corporation that has just been notified it has no conscience agree to act ethically towards society and the earth itself?

The obvious reason, says Locke, is that it�s in its own interest to do so.

There's the heart of it. Well, two chambers of the heart, anyway. There's been a heated discussion over at the Gonzo Engaged blog about how - and whether - to quantify the corporate interests. It's an important question that shouldn't be written off as "bean counting"; as Clay Shirky says, we all get paid in beans. But bean counting isn't sufficient. This is a question that needs lots of thought and talk.

Tom doesn't slight the other two chambers of RageBoy's abundant heart: The book is a rhetorical triumph and that is not incidental to one of the book's key themes: there is no life recognizable as human without voice. As Tom puts it:

Embedded in this book directed at business are substantial swaths of drama, song, anthemic exhortation, pulp fiction, satire (a visit to a psychiatric unit for marketers) etc. To treat these patches as momentary diversions from the ''serious'' conceptual argument is to render them innocuous. It might be more interesting to see what happens if one doesn�t allow pre-existing models of typical business books to marginalize these florid blooms.

This is the type of review Gonzo Marketing deserves.

[My own attempt to review the book is here.]

My whining about my computer meltdown draws the Standard Mac Rejoinder, this time from Kevin Marks, discoverer of the Googlewhack Marks mark and all around smart guy:

You really need to look into getting a Mac. Ask Doc.

CD-ROM drives and no-configuration networking? They were expected in Macs 10 years ago. Now we've moved on to archiving the Photos and MP3 files for you too. The CD (and DVD) burning is built-in, and you just drag files to the disk to do it.

You want a command line? On OS X it's a full Unix shell.

Yeah, I work for Apple. David Coursey doesn't: http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1107-828481.html

The PC's ancient lack of native CD support was an early consequence of having an open hardware system; there's something to be said for that. It was also an early consequence of really poor design.

FWIW, CD burning is built into XP. You just drag files to the disk.

But, I accept Kevin's comment. There are real advantages to the Mac. There are also advantages to Linux. And even Windows. Hell, I could find some good things to say about DOS.

But not about Bush.

Speaking of Bush, this is from Hank Blakely's Dystopical, on the Bush adminstration's Quest for Secrecy:

...we might as well clear up this secrecy bugaboo that has so many alarmed. What they don't seem to realize is that it's an intellectual property issue: if our leaders told us too much about the government, we might learn enough to go out and start our own.

The Kindness of Strange Thoughts

I've struck up quite a bloggery friendship with AKMA. I love his blog. He's a teacher and minister with philosophical and theological training and interests.

I came across his site because he amplified - improved - something I'd written about the nature of universal truth. Here's what AKMA says:

My way of putting this in an argument with a colleague who believed fervently in universal truths was, "I'll agree that we believe in universal truths when the truths in question are so universal that you'll let me tell you what they are." Of course, Max wouldn't let me define what the universal truths were; he wanted both universality and the whip hand in defining the universal truths. Does that smell fishy to anyone else? "You have to believe in universal truths, and let me tell you what they are."

Widely read and insightful, he's a sympathetic reader. In fact, his sympathetic nature has got him exercised about my offhand, snarky comment in Monday's blog in which I said that that a particular book by Foucault was not "his usual proof of his own cleverness."

AKMA replies, in part:

I thought it would be churlish to blog this, but there are plenty of people smarter than me with whom I disagree, and feel justified in disagreeing, without deriding their work.

One of the hazards of my vocation entails teaching conservative evangelical students whose version of Christian faith troubles me deeply. But both here at Seabury (where they're rarer) and in previous teaching positions, I worked productively among conservative students because I showed them at least minimal respect: I didn't ignore their arguments, I didn't refuse to let them cite their favorite books, I went to chapel the days they were preaching, I asked them to improve the arguments for positions they weren't going to change, not to abandon positions that were fundamental (so to speak) to their identity. And then I could ask them to extend the same courtesy to me, which they sometimes, pretty often, did.

I've taken this out of context; you should understand that AKMA is quite humble. But my offhand remark has caused him to testify, no doubt at least in part because he has learned a lot from Foucault.

My kneejerk response is to say: Hey, buddy, it's the Web. If I can't recklessly slap a dead French philosopher on the Web, then where can I?

But I know that AKMA is right. It's easy to think hard. It's usually easy to think clearly. It's damn near impossible for most of us to think kindly. My passing swipe at Foucault was intended to get me out of having actually to read him with the care and sympathy he deserves. Plus, it's a cheap way to puff myself up.

Foucault Again and the New Weirdness of Words

A couple of you have pointed out that the Foucault text I blogged about yesterday (was it just yesterday? Disk crashes seem to dilate time) is available online. (Thanks Camille, thanks John Harrison.)

Jacob Schwirtz of gazm.org writes about "parrhesia," the topic of Foucault's lectures:

when studying the Talmud, in the original Aramaic, there is a word used often, "Pharhessia" (phonetically spelled), which means "in public." Not sure it has any connection to the Greek word but it got me thinking...

If it's a coincidence, it's an interesting one. Apparently "parrhesia" in Greek comes from roots that mean "say everything," which I assume (= guess) refers to the fact that the person engaging in the fearless speech that is parrhesia isn't holding back any of the bad news -- frank and full disclosure. But, since this type of speech was especially valuable in the public forum (although it also characterized the speech of an advisor to an authority), the connection to the Aramaic is suggestive. Words are funny things, aren't they? They could practically be cute little woodland creatures if they were anything like them.

AKM Adam, has starting blogging recently. He's a professor and minister and seriously interesting. He's also a lovely writer. He questions my claiming that

concepts today that no longer make as much sense as they once did [are:] Privacy. Friendship. Employee. Politeness. Sincerity.

He suggests "distance" as a more likely term

since the Web both makes possible friendships between distant correspondents in ways that Aristotle would have dismissed as impossible, but the same technologies further conceal from me the extent to which my high-bandwidth lifestyle separates me (and sets me at odds with) others.

The New Athens?

I was browsing in the book store — the local, physical store, the one with paper and floors and smells and everything — when I randomly opened a book by Michel Foucault and saw that it was about a Greek word I don't remembering having heard before, parrhesia, which he translates as "fearless speech" (the title of the book). The next book I picked up was by Thomas Merton, and guess what word was on the first page I turned to: "the." But also "parrhesia." So, I bought the Foucault book.

To my surprise, it isn't his usual proof of his own cleverness. It's instead an immersion in Greek culture, using a change in the meaning of "parrhesia" as a way of showing shifts in the contexts in which the word was important. It moved from meaning the speech of a citizen that fearlessly "tells it like it is" to an authority to a sometimes negative term for rabble-rousing. Foucault wonders how this change could have happened. It's as if a crack opened up in the word. For example, originally there simply was no question about how the truth-teller knows the truth. But in the 5th century BCE, the question of the justification of belief was indeed beginning to arise. Likewise, Foucault looks at how the socio-political situation had changed so that parrhesia no longer was a simple virtue. He's brilliant at his exploration of the context within which this word had sense.

This is a bit like a shift in a scientific paradigm, except the old paradigm isn't abandoned because of the accretion of anomolies that it cannot explain. Rather, there is a dense human context that alters and a concept that made sense becomes problematic. The bits of the old context that no longer make that much sense provide clues to the larger tectonic movements of thought.

So, what are the concepts today that no longer make as much sense as they once did? Privacy. Friendship. Employee. Politeness. Sincerity. The Web's knocking each of these for a loop.

Not all the terms are Web-related. For example, courage in an age of high-altitude bombing no longer means what it used to. Maybe civilian doesn't either. But a whole bunch of these terms spring out of the Net. That may be the biggest clue that important, and potentially scary, changes are afoot.

Please Be Me

Want to see one of the weirder ways the concept of the self is being stretched on the Web? Go to DavidStill.org where Mr. Still lets you send mail as him. His "about" page says:

You are David Still, 32 yrs old, and a recent emigrant to Almere, Netherlands. You work as an IT Consultant for a small but expanding start-up business that specializes in communication systems. This you enjoy, as it gives you plenty of opportunities to meet new people. You also like where you live, it's clean air, well planned cycle paths and neighbourhoods, and the newness of it all. Your home, that you live in on your own is called the Sail Tower, is close to Noordenplassen (North Ponds), where you often go for a swim, as part of your new lifestyle, though you still continue some of the bad habits you had from your previous life. In your spare time you like to work on your website where you offer the use of your identity to other people.

So, as we wrestle with the problem of maintaining a secure and reliable identity on the Web where we lack identity's traditional anchor — I refer to your fat ass — here comes this joker that subverts the whole concept. Bless him and all his little pseudo-hims.

The Problem with Voice, Part 2

David Rogers responds to my blog about whether corporations can have a voice:

I've been thinking about yesterday's blog on voice for quite awhile—and finally put my thoughts down right here on my blog.

You might want to read this entry on Mark Twain and voice first.

Ultimately, I'm struggling about your assertion that a corporation can't have a voice on the Web. You'll see that I try to assert that it is possible—just rare and difficult.

David's blog on this topic is thoughtful and I think hits the nail on the head ... although I disagree with the direction he drives it. He thinks a corporation can have a voice, although he's careful about this.

David writes:

When I speak of "voice" on the Web, I primarily mean "authentic, sincere, with human qualities and values"—more or less the kind of voice you'd hear in a conversation or letter from a dear friend. OTOH, I sense that to DW and the Cluetrainers "voice" means "human, coming from a truly individual human source, authentically speaking that person's thoughts and ideas."

I think the problem is indeed in our definitions. I'd say that authentic voice does come from a real human being speaking the thoughts and ideas that matter to her. If you take the human out of the equation, how can the voice be sincere? What's the what that's speaking its mind?

David takes Walt Disney as his main example:

...Walt Disney shamelessly promoted his original theme park on television in what were nothing more than 60 minute infomercials. Yet the public loved it! The secret was Walt's voice. He gosh-gollied and aw shucks-ed his way through every episode. Ratings skyrocketed and Walt built a huge audience for his new Disneyland park.

It is certainly the case that a spokesperson can speak for a company authentically and in a real voice. To some extent, Ben and Jerry, William Ford, and Jeff Bezos do this. And, in some small companies, that one person does all the marketing writing; Seth Godin points to Norh, a tiny Thai stereo speaker company, but even its voice has degraded as it has grown, for at some point, Disney, Ben, Jerry and William all hire marketing writers who now adopt (= mimic) the voice of their chieftains. And now there's a human being writing inauthentically. Hell, I spent enough years doing it.

There are two other possibilities for authentic voice emerging from a company in addition to having a leader who speaks for herself. You can miraculously get everyone you hire to believe in what you do and to sound exactly like the corporate style authentically and of their own free will. Ok, so scratch that. The other possibility is to set free the myriad of voices in your organization. Let 1,000 employees bloom. Let them speak for themselves about what matters to them and what they care about. Scary as shit, but do it. Why? Because your employees are already out on the Web doing it ... that is, if they care about your products at all.

Silicon Nostalgia

John Harrison, Pastor of the United Methodist Churches of Sheldon, Bronaugh, and Moundville, Missouri and author of Learning to Float writes in response to my blogging about a site about the KayPro computer:

I bought my first computer in 1984, a Kaypro 4-84, back when we thought 64K was a heckuva lot of RAM, and who needed hard drives, anyway? That machine did quite a bit of work for me as a managing editor for a financial newspaper, and then it got me through three years of seminary. Even as low-powered as they were, they were workhorse machines for word processing and spread-sheeting. Although I have gone through five computers since then, I still have that eighteen-year-old machine with me.

I gave mine up when I got my first IBM PC (actually a Zenith ... such an early model that there were hand-soldered wires on the motherboard to correct some recently-discovered bugs). I typed my wife's dissertation on the KayPro, wrote an endless series of articles and columns and papers, and learned how computers worked. One of the great things about the KayPro (caution: Old Timer story about to commence) was that they were simple enough, in both their hardware and software, for a beginner to figure out. Assembly language for the Z80 chip wasn't all that arcane, whereas you need a doctoral degree, an oscilloscope and a miner's hat to figure out how to program one of the modern Intel chips. And you could get a map of the KayPro motherboard, neatly labeled, from MicroCornucopia and actually understand the electronics — sort of like tracing routes on a map of the NYC subway system. Ah, for the good old days when I had to trim a vowel from the help screen for a file manager I'd written in order to keep it under 4K.