I just got this virtual bouquet of flowers…
…from a nice young lady who wanted to apologize for hanging off my accordion last Thursday night.
Really, you needn’t apologize. That’s exactly the reason I walk around with the accordion in the first place!
Alan Graham and Bonnie Burton’s review of the best blogs out there, Never Threaten to Eat Your Co-Workers: The Best of Blogs, is out! And among the blogs featured in the book is…The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century!
As one might expect, the book also has an accompanying blog.
I’d like to thank Alan and Bonnie for considering me worthy of
being included in a book that contains the “best of blogs”, and
congratulate them on a job well done!
Last night at 11 (my timezone, Eastern Standard Time, a.k.a. GMT -5), AKMA wrote:
Anyone feel like recording a chapter of Lawrence Lessigs new book?
The license pretty clearly indicates that, so long as were not
making a commercial venture of it, we can make a recording of
(perform) the text. There are a Preface, Introduction, fifteen
chapters, a conclusion and an afterword. If youre willing to
contribute an MP3 recording of a chapter (ideally, hosting it on your
own server but Ill bet we can gird up the Disseminary
to host chapters for you, if you can host it yourself drop us a
comment and let us know which chapters youll take. Heck, we could have
duelling chapters; which version of chapter 5 do you like, Accordion Guys or Jenny the Shifted Librarians?
(Disclaimer: I just typed their names in there. They havent offered or
anything. Yet.)
12 hours later, this item has already appeared on Boing Boing and
received 26 comments on AKMA’s site, and a flurry of email has appeared
in my inbox regarding this project. All on a Friday night! I have deduced two things from this:
I have signed up to read a chapter, but haven’t chosen one yet.
I’m going to go look over the book and see if there’s one that tickeles
my fancy or if there’s one that nobody’s volunteered to read yet.
I will see if I can convince Boss Ross and Boss Ross’ boss Elliot Noss
to contribute a chapter. They’ve got great speaking voices and their
contribution to the ‘Net at large is far greater than mine. I write a
blog and helped generate some buzz for P2P; they’ve helped make the
Internet work.
But not today. I’ve got an aunt and uncle from the Philippines whom I’m joining for lunch at the St. Lawrence Market, followed by catching up with Cory’s book reading, a haircut, a couple of birthday parties to attend and a friend from out of town who need to sample some more of the local night life.
While I laud my fellow bloggers’ industriousness, I suggest that they
turn off the computer and get some fresh air. And a double rye and coke!
Last night, I stepped out with Eldon and Dave “Dave’s Picks” Polaschek, who came here all the way from Minneapolis for a little vacation. We took him to Smokeless Joe’s, tried to get into The Drake for a Vice Magazine karaoke party (some karaoke fans put me on the guest list), hit the Gladstone instead and wound up the night at the Cadillac Lounge. It was an evening of drinking, mild geekery, waiting in line, more drinking, conversation and the requisite women-fondling-my-accordion thing.
Details to follow. Gotta work.
I (finally) got my paws on a copy of Cory’s new novel Eastern Standard Tribe at his reading on Thursday. Personally autographed, even: “For Joey — In circadian solidarity!”
(We agree on many things, but circadian rhythm is not one of them. Cory
likes to start his day insanely early, while I prefer to end mine
insanely late. His upcoming move to the GMT zone may actually put us in
sync.)
I read it in two bursts: from the start to the point where the
protagonist explains tribes to his incredulous group therapy-mates
yesterday, and this morning, I read from that point straight through
the end. There’s a certain casual but insistent forward flow to his
writing that makes you want to keep reading. It’s rather like the
motion of a Haunted Mansion Doombuggy: it shows you something cool, but
its wiggle tells you that something cooler is waiting just over there
in the next chamber.
One thing I enjoyed about the book was the way it was peppered with
little bits of OpenCola cultural folderol:
coworker/friends: argumentative personalities, smooth-talking biz-dev
guys and anal-rententive user experience orthos so real that you want
to pimp-slap them with a hardcover edition of Tufte.
wireless
Napster on the Massachusetts Turnpike in the novel is a refinement of
ideas that Cory would bounce at us during our runs to Fry’s when we
both lived in Bay Area (“Impulse-shopper aisle, Joey! Beef jerky plus
porn equals-equals good!”). We talked about how a peer-to-peer network
of WiFi nodes in cars could be used to report traffic conditions and
provide drivers with optimal routes.
“Opencolan” was the company’s joke name for its employees. We’d started
using the phrase “that eats serious ball chowder” after stumbling into
it on a message board where the Icy Hot Stuntaz were getting dissed.
because it shared certain qualities with the ficitious space station:
far from the central organization, a visiting place for strange aliens,
and bad acting.
Colavision, was a personal broadcasting tool, and we always suggested,
even to the most stoned-faced no-apparent-sense-of-humour
investors, that “backyard midget wrestling” was one of the things
that people wanted to broadcast. I think the midget wrestling thing was
an obsession of John Henson’s (not the guy with the TV show, but our friend and coworker).
Of course, I can’t imagine a writer not throwing in little bits of
his or her own experience to give some meat to a novel. They make the
story feel more “real”. It’s especially cool when you’ve worked,
played, double-dated and gone to Disneyland and even watched Dude, Where’s My Car? (and in the theatre, no less!) with the author; it makes those bits feel like little secret high-fives.
I was about two-thirds of the way through the book when the feeling of deja vu
hit its peak, and then it dawned on me. A clever idea to make a cool
tech product? Everything going smoothly until the double-cross? The
idea’s originators being run out of the deal and dicredited and screwed
over by the suits? This was OpenCola. This was life, from late 1999
through to early 2002.
Keep in mind that this is Yours Truly’s interpretation of the book. I
have no special inside knowledge: I never saw any notes for the book,
nor do I have direct access to the part of his brain that he will
eventually stick a Creative Commons badge on, once we get wetware technology.
It’s a great read, and I highly recommend it.
Had a great time at last night’s Poliblogger (politics blogger, not
polyamory nor polysaccharides blogger) get-together, which took place
at
the little side-bar on the west side of the Drake Hotel, a place where
somehow a number of friends of mine have acquired jobs over the past
few weeks.
I spent most of the evening chatting with the folks at the end of the
table that still had some free seats, which inlcuded David “Ranting and Roaring” Janes, Rick “Boomer Deathwatch” McGinnis, Kathy “Relapsed Catholic” Shaidle and special out-of-town guest blogger Damian “Daimnation!”
Penny to name just a few. The conversation and beer flowed freely, and
topics ranged from poncy local journos to
love-the-people-hate-the-Cuban-government to little indie pet software
development projects to “you had me, then you lost me” politics to WiFi
to hot tubs and rock and roll to wondering what it is about Accordion
City that gets people from wildly divergent
socio-economico-complexo-migraino backgrounds to get along reasonably
well.
At one point, someone at the table saw Kathy and I in conversation and
said “Glad to see you two have made up.” We both got a laugh out of it,
and took turns explaining that there’s a difference between spirited
difference of opinion and blood feuds. Besides, fashion-coordination
rules alone dictate that we had
to get along: she wore an American flag scarf, and my over-shirt was a
big Hilfiger affair whose back was one huge stars-and-stripes.
One thing David and I talked about were sideburns. His wife made him
trim down his. Wendy likes mine, so it’s up to me to hold up the fort
for the Toronto Python-programming sideburns contingent.
Rick and talked about Thor and his work at the Metro newspaper, which definitely has more of a local feel than the Metro in Boston (the Metro chain of free newspapers is owned by Metro S. A. in Sweden).
Damian told us a funny story about the independent TV station in
Newfoundland, NTV, which is owned by a rich-but-completely-bonkers old
man. One day, he wanted to watch the cartoon show Inspector Gadget
right then, and phoned the station, demanding they put it on
immediately. Unfortunately, it was during a broadcast of the news. He
had enough pull for the station to come up with a compromise: they
showed Inspector Gadget in a tiny window in a corner of the screen as
the nightly news continued.
I had a great time at the gathering, and hope we can do it again
sometime soon! Thanks to all who showed up, and thanks to David for
pulling the whole thing together!
Here are the last of my notes from the presentation for The Corporation. I’m going to gather them all into a single entry and post that entry next week.
You might want to see part one and part two of the notes.
hockey is “What happens on the ice, happens on the ice”. In the rink,
you can commit all kinds of acts that would get you charged with
assault in the real world.
similar rule applies to corporations. Outside working hours, you’re a
citizen with moral values and views. During working hours, however,
it’s okay to do wrong things:
between corporate behaviour “off the ice” and “on the ice” is blurring:
CEOs are taking favouring a “Howie Meeker” approach over the “Don
Cherry” approach: Tom Klein (Pfizer) made an effort to refurbish the
Brooklyn neighbourhood in which a Pfizer branch was located, the CEO of
BP supports the Kyoto accord and BP even has solar-powered gas stations
problem with social responsibility is that it comes up against the
legal mandate of the corporation. How does a corporation justify
actions it takes to be socially responsible?
answer: Any “socially responsible” initiative has to be good for the
company. All corporate acts must be in the corporation’s best interest
law demands that when companies do good, they must justify it in terms
of self-interest. This is the “Best Interest Principle”: the head of
the corporation has to act in the best interests of the company. The
courts have interpreted “acting the best interests” as “maxmizing
profit”.
he is also pro ANWR drilling. The reason? Supporting Kyoto costs BP
nothing. They found efficiencies that allow them to follow the accord
without losing money. At the same time, there is an opportunity cost in
forgoing drilling in ANWR, and it cannot be conclusively proven that
the porcupine caribou herd in ANWR will be wiped out or that the way of
life for native people who depend on this herd will be altered
irrevocably.
reporter, does a story on hormones given to dairy cattle, which end up
appearing in their milk. He filed the story for FOX News. Monsanto came
down very hard on FOX for allowing such a story to enter the queue, and
threatened to pull all their advertising. FOX news killed the story and
fired James.
people who consented to be interviewed are proud of what they do. They
were, according to Bakan, “intrigued by the project, and were
intelligent and thoughtful people” who wanted to engage in the
discussion.
solution: “The Nag Factor”. She realized that there were two levels of
vulnerability: parents are easily manipulated by their children, and
children in turn are easily manipulated by television. The trick was to
turn kids into a live-in marketing department targeting their parents.
looked at effective nagging habits: 20% to 40% of purchases were the
result of successful nagging on the part of the child. According to
Bakan, “entire coporate empires” live and die by the nag. Hughes was
trying to answer the question “How do you create the ad that creates
the right kind of nag?”
took this common-sense knowledge and turned it into a science. She got
behavioural scientists to do research for her, and based on that
research classified nags. For example, there are simple “I want it! I
want it!” nags, and there are more complex “reasoning” nags, such as:
“I want the Barbie Dream House so that Barbie and Ken can have a
family” — these nags get an “Oh, how clever!” reaction. The best
results are obtained when kids use both style of nags.
Pals: These are typically younger parents. They actually, if
subconsciously, want the toys for themselves, and will look for any
excuse to purchase.
parents — feel guilty about not spending enough time with their
children and purchase to compensate.
himself in this category): These parents resent the fact that their
children are the targets of such intense marketing, but buy the toys
anyway.
corporate spy who was interviewed in the film has not ended his career
by appearing in it. He is, in Bakan’s own words, “a master of disguise”.
is an imprecise term. A more correct term is “anti-a-particular-kind of
globalization”. It’s against the neo-liberal kind of globalization that
we’re experiencing.
APEC meeting in Vancouver in 1997. By this time, they’d already started
making the film. The APEC demonstration was the first major mass
demonstration of this sort, and arose from concern about the complicity
of nation-states and corporations.
says that still have to work with governments and even with political
parties and “build more democracy around the shell of democracy we
already have”.
governments; after all, there are no porperty rights nor contract law
without government.
socially responsible consumers, CEOs and shareholders to
“self-regulate” is a myth — we still need some other mechanism, and
that is government.
seems to be an appetite for non-fiction books and documentary films.
Bakan suggests that this appetite is driven by people’s opinion that
that the world is veering onto a dangerous path and their need to
understand the “why” and “how” behind things. They try to reckon what’s
going on with the world. They come with their own point of view, but
you know what that point of view is. Their format must be entertaining,
moving, inspiring and humourous.
book or documentary film’s content is dpressing, they are successful if
their audiences walk out feeling hopeful, inspired, becuase they have
new knowledge.
films take what their audiences intuitively sense, and build around
them with evidence.
very important part of Bakan’s message: this state of affairs isn’t
part of natural law. Corporations are not forces of nature; they are
creatings of our own making: we have somehow allowed our governments to
hand over power to them, and we can take it back.
People
I know fall into vicious cycle of avoidance and denial — things are
bad, and instead of changing the situation, they’re retreating and
avoiding it. How do you motiviate such people?
This is a
hard question to answer at such a general level. You have to talk to
your friends. “If we care about issues, we should to talk about
them to people who something to us” — it’s part of being a family
member / community member.
You talk about the corporation
as a monolithic entity. They have different forms depending on where in
the world they are. Why didn’t you analyse the corporation in its many
forms?
The focus is different in the book and in the
film. In the film, we were looking at the US transnational for-profit,
publicly traded company, the institution having the greatest impact. We
tend to think of corporations in terms of difference — company X,
company Y, company Z, industry 1, industry 2, industry 3 — but I
wanted to convey the sense that corporations share the same
institutional structure. Once you abstract away the industry they’re in
or what they produce, the actual underlying institution doesn’t vary
much from corporation to corporation. Underneath it all, they are
entities whose reason for existence is to generate wealth for their
owners.
What about the relationship of the filmmaker to
the corporation? In some way you have to play into the corporation to
get published or your film shown.
True. The US book
publisher is Simon and Schuster, and they in turn are owned by Viacom.
The film was shot on Panasonic cameras, and distributed bycorporations
in the US, Canada, UK, Italy. They were shown in theatres owned by
corporations. This is proof that the corporation is the dominant entity
in our society: you can’t make anything without them. To try and make
something outside the sphere of their influence is “like saying you’ll
operate outside the monarchy in 13th-century England”.
It
seemed silly and ironic, but they thanked their corporate sponsors at
the awards ceremonies at Sundance. American filmmakers said of them:
“Well, those guys can joke about corporate sponsorships; they have a
whole public infrastructure supporting them.”
The problem: Public
broadcasters are under attack and privatization is a holy grail. We
should be concerned about the demise of public cultural institutions.
Certain people such as Michael Moore are stars, and have the appeal to
do what he wants, but most of us don’t have that luxury.
When you look at the success of corps in China, India — outsourcing — is this the beginning of reform?
Appeared
on a talk radio in the US. Heard from a truck driver: “I only buy
American, and I make wife buy American too. I’m a conservative
anarchist, but I don’t like the way things are goin’.”
We’re
losing jobs to the developing world: self-interested concern. This will
probably shape up to a major issue in the election and could be an
election winner for the Democrats.
Of course, there are
those such as Michael Walker of the Fraser Institute, who say that by
outsourcing jobs, we’re doing people in developing countries a big
favour. They’ll do slightly better than without us. Alturism isn’t the
goal, though, cheaper rpices are. The high-mindedness is over an
“incidental benefit” to these people. It’s the old “in a slave system,
the slaves are materially better off” argument. It’s “a morally
specious argument, and it’s always suprising to me when people make it
with a straight face.”
We need to twin policies to both protect
local jobs and support aid programs and redistribution of wealth [The
“R” word! I just felt a great disturbance in the Libertarian Force —
Joey]. We have to be willing to pay more so that people in the
developing world can have decent lives.
What do mean that corporations are required by law to act in these ways?
It’s
meant to safeguard investors, to guarantee that their money will be
used for the prupose they intended rather than to pay for some
manager’s vacation. It’s the Best Interest Principle.
How did you go about balancing appeal to emotion and appeal to reason?
There
is a difference between appealing to emotion and being manipulative.
Not all appeals to emotion are manipulative, and not all are for
profit. There is a difference between art for advertising and art for
creativity. In writing the book and film at same time, they influenced
each other: the film had more intellectual rigor, and the book had more
narrative and emotion.
How do you pose a political challenge to corporations, if they’re so powerful and pervasive?
If
you look at history, you’ll see that it’s often at the time that the
dominant forces seem most omnipotent that they are actually the most
vulnerable, whether it was the Church, the monarchy, or the Communist
Party. In the end, it was people’s willingness to stand up to these
forces that caused the chnage to happen.
Bakan: “I don’t know
what choice we have” other than to believe that we, as citizens, can
change for the better. Ultimately, we are the ones who empower the
corporation. We in essence created corproate law and property rights.
The institutions that we’re up against are institutions that we’ve
made. “Perhaps I’m an optimist, and perhaps I being naive, but
corporations aren’t forces of nature. We can change them.”
Bakan comment: Advertising encourages us to think in terms of our own
self-interest solely, and tries to paint corporations as “good
neighbours”.
personal rant: Will you people at this sort of Q&A session stop
prefacing your questions with mini-manifestos? Just ask the damned
question!