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.

Categories: Uncategorized dw