Category: It Happened to Me

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It Happened to Me

Eastern Standard Deja Vu

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:

  • Quirky

    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.

  • The

    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.

  • The instant-messaging nicknames: “opencolon” and “ballgravy”.

    “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.

  • San Franscarcity: Cory’s pet name for Baghdad-by-the-bay. I called the satellite office we shared “Deep Space Nine”

    because it shared certain qualities with the ficitious space station:

    far from the central organization, a visiting place for strange aliens,

    and bad acting.

  • The phrase “midget wrestling”. One project we worked on,

    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.

Categories
It Happened to Me

Polibloggapalooza!

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!

Categories
In the News It Happened to Me

Notes from the "The Corporation" presentation, part 3

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.

The Hockey Allegory

  • The general feeling in professional

    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.

  • You end up with two selves: on the ice / off the ice
  • A

    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:

    • Use sweatshop or slave labour
    • Pollute
    • Break laws bercause the fines are inconsequential relative to the profits
  • Under such circumstances, you live in a “bifurcated world, morally”
  • In one extreme case, the CEO of Shell Oil managed to convince the Nigerian Government to have people hanged
  • Distinction

    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

Social Responsibility vs. The Coprporation’s Legal Mandate

  • The

    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?

  • The

    answer: Any “socially responsible” initiative has to be good for the

    company. All corporate acts must be in the corporation’s best interest

  • The

    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”.

  • Example: Although BP’s CEO supports the Kyoto accord,

    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.

  • Example: the Steven James story. James, a

    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.

Why did people who “ought to have known better” consent to be interviewed for the film?

  • The

    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.

  • Most notable case — the one that got the most laughter from the audience was Lucy Hughes.
  • Hughes was trying to solve the main problem with marketing children’s goods: children don’t buy things, their parents do.
  • Her

    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.

  • Hughes

    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?”

  • “You have to admire the brilliance” of this, Bakan said.
  • Lucy

    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.

  • She also classified 4 types of parents:
    • Deniers: Upper-middle class. Kids have to make good arguments in order to convince their parents to purchase.
    • Kid’s

      Pals: These are typically younger parents. They actually, if

      subconsciously, want the toys for themselves, and will look for any

      excuse to purchase.

    • Indulgers: These people — often single

      parents — feel guilty about not spending enough time with their

      children and purchase to compensate.

    • Conflicted (Bakan puts

      himself in this category): These parents resent the fact that their

      children are the targets of such intense marketing, but buy the toys

      anyway.

  • Another interviewee: Milton Friedman. His assistant said: “If he’s bored with your question, he’ll walk out of the room”.
  • Many CEOs said “no”, but not out of any explicit objection to the concept of the film, but because they said were too busy
  • The

    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”.

Anti-globalization

  • “Anti-globalization”

    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.

  • First signs of this movement: the

    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.

  • “Deregulation” is a misleading term: it’s really just a shifting of control from government to corporation.

Government: Antidote to Corporate Malfeasance?

  • You can’t have property rights and contracts without the state
  • In the “Anti-globalization” movement, there is a sense that you can’t confront government anymore.
  • Bakan

    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”.

  • Corporations can still be influenced by

    governments; after all, there are no porperty rights nor contract law

    without government.

  • The idea that we can somehow rely on

    socially responsible consumers, CEOs and shareholders to

    “self-regulate” is a myth — we still need some other mechanism, and

    that is government.

On Non-Fiction Book and Documentary Filmmaking

  • Documentaries are likely to become a more popular type of film, considering the attention it’s been receiving lately. Cites:
    • The interest in SuperSize Me
    • Errol Morris’ recent Oscar
    • Mark Achbar being invited to a Vanity Fair party
  • Documentaries can have influence: in the wake of SuperSize Me, McDonald’s announced that it will remove the SuperSize items from its menu. Its rationale: they want to “simplify their menu”.
  • There

    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.

  • Even if what the non-fiction

    book or documentary film’s content is dpressing, they are successful if

    their audiences walk out feeling hopeful, inspired, becuase they have

    new knowledge.

  • Many good non-fiction books and documentary

    films take what their audiences intuitively sense, and build around

    them with evidence.

The Success of the Book

  • There’s a lot of angst out there, and that has contributed to the book’s success. It’s angst over:
    • Encroachment of commercial values in the schools that their kids go to
    • The environment
    • Less job security
    • The lowering of safety standards
  • A lot of this comes from governments’ giving more leeway to corporations.
  • One

    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.

  • Trying to provide “a sense of understanding and a sense of hope”.

What You Can Do

  • In book, Bakan proposes what can be done in the near future
  • “The fact that we can’t do everything doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do something.”
  • Start acting:
    • Join a political party
    • Join your school board
    • Do something
  • We’re losing that sense of being citizens — if we lose that, we’ve lost the possibility of democracy
  • See The Corporation web site for more discussion/ideas/ongoing dialogue

Q&A Session

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.”

Other notes

  • Other

    Bakan comment: Advertising encourages us to think in terms of our own

    self-interest solely, and tries to paint corporations as “good

    neighbours”.

  • My

    personal rant: Will you people at this sort of Q&A session stop

    prefacing your questions with mini-manifestos? Just ask the damned

    question!

Categories
It Happened to Me

My notes from Cory Doctorow’s reading last night

Here are my notes from Cory Doctorow’s reading last night. I entered

the notes straight into my PowerBook in point form and fleshed them out

with a little sentence format and HTML last night.

The Reading

I arrived about ten minutes into Cory’s session, during a reading of what I later found out was Human Readable. Every seat in the Merril room was full; many were occupied by what The Onion

might term “high-profile Area Nerds”. Sci-fi authors Mike Skeet and

Karl Schroeder took their places near the back of the audience, while

closer to the front were Ian Goldberg (who has forgotten more about

computer security than I will ever learn) and his wife Kat. As the

reading went on, a guy sitting down in front of me drew an

impressionistic sketch into a handmade blank book. Everyone’s attention

was focused on Cory, who sat at a desk beside a large bottle of water,

looking trim (Atkins and a busy schedule will do that) in a two-tone

Blogger T-shirt. You never forget your first blogging tool.

My

timing was perfect. As soon I’d settled in and opened my laptop on top

of a low filing cabinet just behind the audience, Cory was hitting a

part of the story where two characters were conversing. One of the

characters quipped “When life gives you SARS, make sarsaparilla,” which

he took from a title of my older blog entries. As he read that line,

Cory threw me a “how do you like them apples?” glance. I must have been

beaming with pride. Later, at dinner, he would say “I only steal from

the best.” I’m honoured.

(This is the second time that my

something in my blog has served as fodder for one of Cory’s stories.

The first was the entry in which I had answer twelve essay questions

about general computer science and culture before this local company

would even grant me an interview.)

The story Cory read was my

kind of science-fiction: a hip mix of cultural references (Ethiopian

restaurants in Adams-Morgan, Star Wars, personal shoppers), mixed with

extrapolations of today’s ideas (copyright reform, Eric Bonabeau’s

ant-trails) and spiked with those little moments of human drama that

give you sense of deja vu.

On Toronto, America and Europe

  • Cory loves Accordion City! His upcoming novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is a love letter to Toronto.
  • Cory

    also loves America. He says its simultabeous best and worst quality is

    that the only industrialized country where ambition isn’t frowned upon.

    When he and I had dinner last week, he told me he suspected that

    subconsciously, the Americans realize that the Indians also have this

    ambitiousness, and it worries them.

  • In Eurpose, he says, it’s

    different. In the “Ambition vs. Commonweal”, the Euros tend to favour

    the latter. He then relates this idea in the form of a joke:

    • If

      you were to end washed up Robinson Crusoe-style on the East River and

      declare to the natives that you wanted to start a media empire that

      would grow to crush Rupert Murdoch’s and in the end do the thinking for

      most people in the developed world, the natives would gladly direct you

      to nearest investment banker.

    • If you were to make the same declaration after washing up on the Thames, you’d be laughed at
    • The

      declaration that would get appreciated in Eurpoe would be that you

      wanted to start a modest little publsihing house that published quaint

      little stories that would garner a small but elite readership of the

      type of people who hung out in the pub where Tolkien and C.S. Lewis

      gave each other wedgies.

On Wikis

Cory was asked about what he though about wikis. He said he liked them, and then went into a story about wiki ecology:

  • Being

    openly editable, sometimes people with opposing opinions turn wikis

    into little battlefields where each party redacts the other’s work.

    Someone makes an entry, someone else wipes out that entry and replaces

    it with their own, that redaction gets redacted, and so on…

  • An example of the most vicious battles of this sort are the Israel/Palestine entries
  • What edventually happens is that the hardliners start out fighting, each obliterating the others’ entries
  • But eventually, each side softens a little. One side does first, and then the other.
  • Eventually, what remains is a collection of facts that both side can agree upon, or at least can concede to the other side
  • Then both sides end up in the same camp, joining to fight off the “tinfoil beanie contingent” from both sides of the argument.

Copyright and Freedom

For

those members of the audience who hadn’t been following the story, Cory
told the story of the problems with Diebold voting machines and thge

saga of their memos. He brought up the fact that Diebold makes all

kinds of machines that spit out a paper ticket as proof that a

transaction had taken palce (for example, Diebold makes ATMs). Diebold,

for some reason, won’t do this for their voting machines (“Tell us more

about this strange hu-mon ‘paper’ you use,” he said, in a mock alien

voice). He also mentioned that the EFF is suing Diebold for abusing

copyright laws: they were never meant to allow “fradulent felons to

disguise their wrongdoings”.

He also told the story of how

Diebold tried to affect the IEEE standard for voting machines by making

the specs for their machines the official spec for voting machines (and

worse still, these specs described how the machines were built, not

what they were supposed to do).

He pointed out that the general

standards bodies is the mistaken assumption that we’re all on the same

side. The IEEE is made up of a large number of engineers who by and

large want to draft standards so that they can make things that work

and interoperate well. As long as that’s the goal, standards bodies are

great things. The problem arises when a company like Diebold tries to

use the stadards body to further their own business goals at the

expense of the common good.

“It was a close one,” Cory said, but

thankfully, an EFF grassroots campaign, where the EFF managed to

convince enough IEEE members to petition to stop the Diebold-drafted

IEEE standard from being accepted, was successful. If passed, the

standard would’ve been a major coup for Diebold because standards

adopted by the IEEE tend to be adopted by the world’s engineers. Cory

said — exaggerating only mildly: “the EFF, along with the IEEE, saved global democracy!

On Ad Hocracy (or “Shut up hippie, this is our room!”)

A

guy who’d gone to high school with Cory (they both went to SEED, an

alternative school where students had a lot of input into their

curriculum) asked about Cory’s opinion of ad hocracies, especially in

light of the one he wrote about in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

“At some point,” the friend said “you’re going to get some people who

aren’t ready for an ad hocracy. Maybe it’s my inner fascist…” and

went on to describe a situation in which his students, all around the

age of fifteen or sixteen cannot be trusted to govern themselves, and

sometimes a teacher needs to step in and bring order.

Cory

pointed out that the free school they went to was an ad hocracy of

sorts, and it produced a dispropotionately high number of people who

stand out and have excelled in their fields.

He then pointed out

that it’s not for everyone. Some people need more frameworks that

others. He also said “I don’t think ad hocracy is a universal panacea.

There’s a time and place for it.” However, there are times when you

need more formal structures, otherwise you get tyrannies of the

majority.

He summed up the problem with ad hocracies by telling a

story of the Anarchist’s Unconvention, which he attended fifteen years

ago. It took place at the 519 Community Centre on Chruch Street. He

remembers going to attend a meeting which had been scheduled in a

specific room, and when they entered the room, they found a guy sitting

on the table playing the flute. The flute player objected, asking the

meeting attendees “since when was ‘booking’ the room the accepted

procedure for claiming it?”. There comes a time, Cory said, when you

have to say “shut up hippie, this is our room!”

The State of the Union

Cory

admires the US for two of its finest documents: the Constitution and

the Bill of Rights (“with the notable exclusions of the Second

Amendment. For those of you who don’t know what that is, it’s the gun

one.”)

What disillusioned him about America, which he likes at

least as much as I do, is the fact that in Ashcroft’s America, people

on work visas can be secretly arrested in detained without counsel. He

told stories about getting job offers from Saudi Arabia a long time

ago; friends would advise him: “Good God, don’t go there, people on

work visas can be secretly arrested and detained without counsel!”

He

talked for a little bit about Bruce Sterling’s address at the recent

South by Southwest Interactive Festival, summarizing it. “In an oil

state, there’s no reason to pay for a civil society. You dig a big hole

and you put a fence around it. Then you put bayonets in front of the

fence to protect that hole. Then, you wait for society to collapse

around it.” The only difference between an oil state and a failed state

is that an oil state has oil.

Plans

Cory’s plans are:

  • To move to London and live and work there for at least a couple of years.
  • Work will consist of writing (3 novels on the go) as well as being the EFF’s man in Europe.
  • One

    mission: To “completely and utterly destroy the worst elements of the

    broadcast treaty” that is under discussion there right now. They’re

    trying to give creative control of works to people whose only

    contribution to the works were providing the transmission medium!

  • To

    knock out the bad parts of the Pan European Copyright act: without

    evidence, you can claim infringement, which gives your the right to

    confiscate the accused infriger’s computers for 31 days, which in turn

    will probably be used as a legal-but-wrong means of destroying your

    competition.

  • The problem with copyright acts, says Cory, is

    that when they’re often bad, and once one place adoptes them, other

    places copy them. It is, he says, “a race to the bottom”.

  • Also plans to do some work with the BBC archives, which are being opened up to the Web
  • A goal: to get 10% of Slashdot readers to buy my books.
  • A final goal: “to find what I did that made the reviewer at The Onion hate my last work”.

Categories
It Happened to Me

FGFEB

“Just a Gwai Lo” Richard writes that “Dive Into” Mark Pilgrim writes:

Last weekend someone told me that there was no male counterpart to female intuition.

i.e. There was no such thing as male intuition. Which is crap. Men may

not be the brightest bulbs in the bunch, but we can sense one thing:

when we are being introduced to our girlfriend’s next lover. Trust me.

I’ve been on both sides of this.

I concur. In fact, I have mentally referred to some losers as my “Future Girlfriend’s Future Ex-Boyfriend”.

On days during which I’m feeling particularly arch, I wear an US Postal

Service workshirt that used to belong to a former FGFEB. That’s right,

I stole a girl away from a guy who belongs to the world’s most

dangerous demographic.

Balls of steel, yo. I clank when I walk.

Categories
In the News It Happened to Me

Notes from the "The Corporation" presentation, part 2

The Film and The Book

  • Bakan called himself the content maker, giving credit to Achbar and Abbott for their filmmaking skills.
  • Tried

    to make the book less driven by dry analysis and driven more by

    stories. He wanted to draw the the points he wanted to make from the

    stories, which really serve as metaphor.

  • Some of the stories in

    the book are same as in the film, some are different. The media are

    different and require different approaches.

  • Ray Anderson is

    major in the film, but not the book. Anderson had an epiphany in 1993;

    became a “sustainable business” kind of guy. “People just fall in love

    with him” on the screen. Bakan was able to say cover his story in 2 or

    3 pages in the book. In the film he’s in and out because he’s

    “incredibly compelling”, and works well in the “emotional medium” of

    film.

  • To use him in the book as often as in the film would “seem strange”.
  • Wanted to make the book not just informative, but interesting and fun to read.
  • Joked: wished he could’ve got a “push button book” in which you can hear Ray Anderson speak.

Psycopathology of the Corporation

  • Bakan did psych as an undergrad, many psychologists in the family (both parents, an uncle).
  • In Psych 101, you learn a “psychopath” (someone with antisocial personality disorder) has these qualities:
    • Pathologically self-interested
    • Incapable of concern for others
    • No feelings of guilt or remorse
    • Relationships are limited to ones in which they use other people
    • No moral obligation to obey laws or social norms
  • In Law School, you learn that:
    • Corporations are legally required to serve their own self-interest
    • Decisions had to be made to maximize the wealth of shareholders
    • Corporations are persons in the eyes of the law (something drilled into to you on the first day of Business 101)
  • The

    corporation as a person is one that has been programmed to have a

    psychopathic personality. “We created this artificial person and we’ve

    required it to be self-interested.”

Categories
It Happened to Me

At least I’m a cute drunk

The Redhead writes about my phoning her whilst in the middle of some serious St. Patrick’s Day imbibing (from which I am suffering no ill effects).

Don’t scoff: you’ve all made drunken phone calls before. And hey, it was to the current girlfriend.