 The other day I had lunch with George Coutts, a friend of mine. George has worked in sales most of his career, and is now a sales executive at Duro-Test Canada.
Sales is not my forte, but I recognize good selling skills when I see them, and George is one of the best. Over lunch, we shared some horror stories about incompetent salespeople we had known over the years, and some stories of outstanding sales success and sales technique. We discussed what it is that differentiates great salespeople from awful ones. We ended up trying to compile a list of the most important ‘rules’ for good selling. George came up with these ten, which I thought were outstanding, and well worth sharing with readers:
|
August 31, 2005
Ten Great Selling Tips
August 30, 2005
Could You Live Without Money?
 The modern ‘working’ family, whether one-income or two-income, is, by most standards, a lousy business model, with poor, fragile margins and a terrible (sometimes negative) ‘return on investment’. If you presented your household budget to an accountant without describing what it represented, he/she would probably tell you it wasn’t viable and to close up shop. For the average Canadian family (multi-person) household in 2003 per Stats Can, here’s what the ‘Income Statement’ would look like (for single-person households, these numbers would be modestly lower):
I have broken the expenses down into ‘work-related’ (extra costs you incur because you are working) and ‘fixed’ (costs you would incur whether you worked or not). Work-related food costs are the costs of fast-food and other restaurant meals, and pre-packaged and prepared foods. I have called all shelter costs ‘work-related’ because the average family has $120,000 in equity, and if that were invested in an all-season cottage far enough away from expensive cities, the rent and mortgage costs would disappear. In addition, if you didn’t work, you could spend time making your own clothing and furniture, providing a significant part of your own recreation, looking after your children’s education and care, and you would eliminate the cost of income taxes and insurance. What this table suggests is that the average family has 1.7 people working (often fierce hours doing something they hate) to bring in $73,000 per year of which $57,000 goes for expenses they wouldn’t have if they weren’t working. Or, to put it another way, those 1.7 people work about 3,300 hours between them for an after-tax, after-work-related-expense return of $5.00 per hour. No wonder the average family spends more than they can afford — they figure they’ve earned it. Yes, I know that ‘average’ numbers are nonsensical and that you could quibble with many of these costs and allocations, and that the numbers outside Canada will necessarily be quite different, but in general we incur a great deal of extra expense just because we work, and even more when both spouses work, to the point that the benefits of working so hard, and even of working at all, become dubious, especially when you start to factor in non-financial considerations (like quality of life). Now ask yourself: How much would you have to do for your wage-slave neighbours (making clothing or furniture for them, doing renovation work, lawn maintenance, child care, driving them around in their car, picking things up for them, educating their kids, running a bed-and-breakfast for their visiting family and friends) to earn a paltry $14,000 a year (or that plus your rent or mortgage interest if you choose not to move to an inexpensive community)? And suppose instead of just moving out yourself, you got together with nine other wage-slave families and pooled your resources and started an Intentional Community? Now you’ve got $1.2 million to invest between you, which is plenty to build an efficient and very comfortable place in the remote country to accommodate 17 adults and 8 children. Now you get some economies working for you: You can share vehicles, meal preparation, education and other duties, and the space needed for these activities (which make up much of the modern ‘single-family’ home, and which space is unused most of the day). You can wi-fi the place for the whole group. You can grow some of your own food and use solar and wind to take the place off the grid. By doing these things you could probably halve the per-family fixed cost in the table above to $7,000, and then create one or two small enterprises to earn the $70,000 per year the whole community needs to live on. Maybe work an hour a day, or one day a week each, for outsiders, and the rest of your time would be your own, to spend with those you love doing things you love doing. And suppose your Intentional Community provided useful services to other ICs in a ‘network’ that could give you things you can’t provide well for yourselves (food you can’t grow, say, or health care, or recreation) in return for you providing things that they don’t know how to do (say, carpentry, or sculpture, or technology education). It’s not inconceivable that after trading money for awhile and trying to track who’s done what for whom, you might decide the accounting is not worth the bother, and just stop using money altogether. So now instead of your day per week working for ‘outsiders’ you spend that day helping those in your ‘larger’ community. Imagine living in a society where the value of an hour of everybody’s time is exactly the same, and where a Gift Economy prevails because the old Market Economy is viewed as miserly, nitpicky and unnecessary! Of course it’s not that easy. My point is that it’s possible. And perhaps worth thinking about. So many of the things we aspire to do in our lives remain undone because we think they are too risky, too expensive, or impossible, when they are none of these things. What they do require is three qualities that our modern world seems to try to crush in us as aggressively as it tries to break our individuality: courage, self-confidence, and trust in each other. If we had these things we could live without money, and without wage slavery. Is it any wonder that the politicians, big businesses, the elites of the rich and powerful, work so hard to make us fearful, full of self-doubt, distrustful, and ‘just like everybody else’? |
August 29, 2005
Human Nature – An Unscientific Survey
 My parents raised my brother and me in the 1950s and early 1960s. My wife and I raised our two kids in the mid 1970s to late 1980s. They in turn are raising their families in the early 2000s. This weekend I got to thinking about how much, and how little, the world at the micro, social, community level has changed for most of us in the past half century. And I concluded that, at that level, for most people there were really only two significant changes in that momentous 50-year period:
When I spend time with our two granddaughters I perceive the only important differences between their young lives and mine resulted from these two phenomena, one technological and the other economic. (For those who haven’t read The Two-Income Trap, the two-income family was a direct result of more and more families, starting in the 1960s and 1970s, chasing after scarce amenities like homes near good schools and quality health care. To compete for these amenities required two family incomes, which in a vicious spiral created high demand for other amenities like a second family car and quality child care. That high demand drove up prices to the point that today’s two-income families are really no further ahead than the one-income families of fifty years ago.) I can hear some of you saying that the PC and the Internet belong up there with these two changes, and some day they might, but I would assert that for most people neither the PC nor the Internet has fundamentally changed people’s lives to anywhere near the extent that reliable birth control and the necessity of two incomes have. I look around our house and, aside from the fact everything is bigger, there is more of everything, and everything is more complicated and has more ‘features’, there is an astonishing similarity between the house I grew up in and the house our granddaughters are growing up in. I am no more informed and no better connected than my father, although we have used different technologies to achieve knowledge and connection. Our children spend money less thoughtlessly than I did when I was their age, and complain about their children’s preoccupation with material things just as the previous two generations did. As my readers know, I am not convinced that people change, and they adapt to external exigencies (like the availability of reliable birth control and the need for two family incomes) slowly, and as little as necessary. The more I learn about human nature the more convinced I am that nature trumps nurture, and that not only are we reluctant to change, we are largely incapable of it. And we beget offspring that resemble us in more ways than just physically. While they can adapt to new exigencies quickly in their youth, that doesn’t make them fundamentally different in their makeup, aspirations and personalities from us, or from previous generations. Anyone who says, of something awful or wonderful that happened in the past, “that could never happen today” is deluding themselves. We foolishly ignore the lessons of history at our peril. If Kunstler is right (see yesterday’s post) and we will shortly embark on what will appear to us a march backwards through history, back through world wars and great depressions and rampant disease, back to the point where most energy is generated by our own muscles and by farm animals, where electric light is a luxury and night becomes once again a time for sleeping, where raising a family and maintaining a home is once again a respected, affordable, necessary full-time job, where we do things for ourselves instead of paying others to do them for us, where we conserve because we cannot afford to do otherwise, where we spend most of our lives in one place and walk or ride horseback when we travel at all, it seems to me that our grandchildren’s descendants will not find this so terrible (once war and disease have reduced our numbers to sustainable levels again, anyway). It is completely conceivable to me that they may consider this move towards small numbers, smaller personal footprint on the planet, living within their means, and reintegration with nature to be true “progress” and their history books may brand the 20th and early 21st centuries an era of massive psychosis and self-destruction. They may not even blame us for the horrific ‘adjustment’ they will have to go through to emerge in a world where humanity’s role and impact on the planet is steadily declining towards insignificance, and perhaps even extinction. My reason for this grim optimism is that I have a fundamentally positive view of human nature. I believe the vast majority of people are by nature generous, care genuinely for others, and want to do what’s best for the world and not just for themselves. And, following the logic that began this wandering essay, I believe we have always been so and will always be so. When I picture massive struggle and hardship, I picture my grandparents during the great depression giving everything they possibly could to the beggars that came to their door. I don’t picture Mad Max, or the tear-gassing of protesting workers, or the tortures and murders of Pinochet or Abu Ghraib or the Russian Stalags or the Nazi deathcamps or Mao’s atrocities. To me these are anomalies, perversions of human nature, behaviour against the grain of humanity. But I have often been accused of being naive, and perhaps I have been lucky in the humans I have met and conversed with and worked with and read about. Perhaps true human nature is different from that of the people I know (or think I know). So, dear readers, here is your chance to set me straight. In the comments below this post, please tell me your answers to the following three questions, and add whatever explanatory notes you consider appropriate. But please try not to compound my error by reflecting only the views of those you know of like minds — think too of the people you know who do not vote, who do not read, who are rather too caught up in themselves, or who beneath a quiet exterior seethe with rage and loathing. Here we go:
My answers will appear in the comments, after I’ve heard from you. Painting, Human Nature, from the Arcosanti Intentional Community, artist unknown. |
August 28, 2005
Living on Borrowed Time
 James Kunstler’s The Long Emergency is, at its heart, a story. It is a dystopia, but an entirely credible one. The pieces of this story have all been told before — the failure to learn from the lessons of history, the fact that nothing (including civilization) lasts forever, the scenarios of a world riven by cultural strife, and by the ultimate necessity to repay resource overuse and financial debts racked up in a reckless “tomorrow will take care of itself” spending spree. The story has a frighteningly familiar ring to it — it is a retelling of the stories our parents taught us about living beyond our means.
It is also a narrative about the laws of thermodynamics, and about what happens when we blithely assume that technology will magically find ways to overturn them. Its message is simple: we have to learn to live with less — much less, and very soon. Those that see Kunstler as a glum neo-Malthusian should consider that in this book he predicted, six months before it happened, the attack of Islamic fanatics on London. The law of supply and demand is as inexorable as the laws of thermodynamics. Chinese demand for oil is growing at 16% per year and accelerating. Saudi oil supplies are being taxed to the limit using colossal amounts of expensive injected seawater, ultimately shortening their lives. The US is currently codependent on both cheap Mideast oil and cheap Chinese manufactured goods. The debt level of the US government and its corporations and citizens is unprecedented in the history of civilization and requires low interest rates to be sustained indefinitely to keep all three groups from bankruptcy. China’s water table is dropping at a phenomenal 3 to 10 feet per year,while land available for agricultural production is shrinking rapidly, meaning that China is going to need to ratchet up its oil consumption not only to sustain its exploding manufacturing economy but its agricultural economy as well — and it has virtual no oil reserves of its own and is entering a period of sustained water crisis. Put these together and any economist could tell you the long-term price of oil will be (following huge short-term whipsaws) infinitely large, and the long-term value of the US dollar will be (following equally huge short-term currency instability) infinitely small. Kunstler begins the book by hinting at the future, kind of working you into it slowly and then, before his narrative takes full flight, he painstakingly deconstructs the myths that energy salvation will come from natural gas, tar sands, hydrogen, coal, hydroelectricity, solar and wind power, biomass, nuclear, and six other forms of energy I hadn’t even heard of. He is not dismissive (Kunstler is so pragmatic and cautious that he actually accepted there was some logic to Bush’s invasion of Iraq, due to Hussein’s unwillingness to grant access to the UN inspectors to the underground bunkers beneath the dictator’s palaces). He sees a huge role for coal and nuclear power (with their attendant damages and risks) in mitigating the massive lifestyle changes that will be required to survive in the future with reduced, unaffordable oil. But ultimately, he illustrates, the problem will reach crisis because of cultural unpreparedness and inertia — the inability of Western ‘suburban’ culture to “entertain the possibility that industrial civilization will not be rescued by technological innovation”. This will be compounded, he argues, by “multidimensional turbulence” in the Islamic world — “religious, ethnic, ideological, economic, taking place on an underlayer of ecological desperation as populations in many Muslim nations grossly overshoot the carrying capacities of the places they inhabit”, compounded further by an end to free-ride handouts from those nations’ utterly corrupt and dysfunctional governments. The equation Kunstler lays out is simple: The more human food we have, the more humans we create to consume it. And vice versa. Most human food is now oil-dependent (without oil the 250% yield increases of the ‘Green Revolution’ will end, and we will be left with massively depleted soil — compounded by a severe water shortage). Less oil, less food. Less food, fewer people. The oil production curve in the top illustration above will be followed very quickly by an almost identical human population curve. Unpleasant, unpreventable, precedented, and predictable. Those in denial will not bother reading Kunstler’s book (though that won’t stop them from criticizing it). I’m not going to relate the evidence he provides to support his scenario, or the scenario itself, but here are a few of the lessons his story could teach us:
The last chapter tells the future story of the local economy of upstate New York, describing in detail how every part of their daily lives — commuting, shopping, producing and obtaining food, keeping warm etc. will change with the end of cheap abundant energy. He goes on to explain how the situation of big cities and suburbs will be even more dire (they are too remote from food supplies and too dependent on energy, and will ultimately become unsafe and unsanitary as infrastructure becomes unsustainable and begins to deteriorate. The best situated Americans, he says, will be those in small towns with fertile agricultural hinterlands (good food close), ideally located on rivers, with dense, walkable infrastructure, and buildings that are well-insulated and have roofs that will be easy to keep in good repair. “We will be compelled by the circumstances of the Long Emergency to conduct the activities of our daily life on a smaller scale, whether we like it or not, and the only intelligent course of action is to prepare for it.” The alternative, in his very compelling portrayal, is chaos, leading to a feudal economy and a society increasingly dominated by evangelical religion (these religions are less dependent on the oil economy than more centralized social infrastructure like central governments and large corporations, both of which could collapse as they become unable to afford or enforce continued operations). Kunstler’s story read likes progress and time read backwards — about a regression almost exactly mirroring in pace and attributes the steps we took to get to where we are now. Even the future need for masses of working animals to do what we humans cannot do on muscle power alone, is anticipated and presented in an astonishing plausible and credible scenario. What is most frightening to me about Kunstler’s scenario is that it sounds so much, in every respect, like the lead-up to and events of the Great Depression, except on a much larger and more enduring scale. We have all been here before. We had a sneak preview of our likely future, but it was too long ago, a lesson we have long forgotten. |
August 26, 2005
Saturday Links – Early
 Guess where this was shot? Read on to find out. Since I may not have time Saturday to post them, here is my list of most interesting links of the week, a day early. Another Service Decline: From Citizen to Patient: Benedict Carey in the NYT explains how dehumanization and loss of identity is hurting relationships in medical facilities and therefore reducing the quality of care. ”The point is that when they talk about quality of health care, patients mean something entirely different than experts do,” said Dr. Drew Altman. In an institution like a hospital, “the territories of the self are violated,” [Dr. Erving Goffman] wrote. “The boundary that the individual places between his being and the environment is invaded and the embodiments of the self profaned.” This is the second in a series of NYT articles on challenges in the health care system. An Exemplary Animal Rights Site: Humanefood.ca has been compiled by a coalition of organizations concerned with farm animal welfare. They’re using carefully-placed, non-sensational TV spots to draw people to the website (you can view them on the site). The site itself isn’t begging for money or stirring outrage. It’s communicating useful, objective facts and telling you (in the You Can Help section) precisely what you can do to help — and not just by writing letters to politicians and the media, but by changing your purchasing decisions and working with local grocery stores, restaurants and farms. The LifeStraw: Gizmag describes a new invention with no moving parts and using no electricity that could save tens of millions of lives per year, the lives of people who now die from preventable water-borne diseases that are caused by overcrowding and lack of sufficient money and infrastructure to treat water properly. Reintroducing Wilderness in the US: National Geographic describes a controversial ‘rewilding’ plan to create “ecological history parks” where the descendants of ice age creatures would be introduced into the plains states where human populations are declining. Good idea or bad? Thanks to Lavonne at BornFamous for the link. Natural Clothing for the UK: By Nature offers organic, environment-friendly clothing, gifts, housewares, cosmetics and foods for caring British and European consumers. Google Desktop 2 and Google Talk: If anyone doesn’t know already, Google Desktop 2 offers a side bar with news and other handy stuff (not yet very useful to me, though it’s open source so additional content may change that) and a Search Bar that shows results as you type each letter, and allows you to open those results without even using your browser to display them. Google Talk offers a stripped-down competitor for Skype, and for IM, and proposes that competitors match their IM tools to Google’s to eliminate all the separate and incompatible IM products out there. Utah Cops Go Nuts: Attendees at a recent outdoor concert in Utah, which had all the necessary permits, were assaulted by land and air by a small army of power-crazed and brutal police authorities. The cops injured dozens, terrorized the concert-goers and caused thousands of dollars in damage, in addition to violating just about every law imaginable. Screen capture from one attendee’s video is shown above. Must be a red state. TV Sports Without Announcers: As a consequence of the brutal CBC lockout, the management of the CBC has been trying out sports event coverage without commentators, describing it as “the stadium experience at home”. I used to get this experience on the ‘feed’ channels on the old Big Ugly Dish satellites, and it was wonderful. CBC viewers apparently agree. Now if we could only get this for gymnastics, diving and figure skating, and rid the world of the scourge of ‘colour commentators’ entirely. |
The Moral Hazard Myth
 Malcolm Gladwell’s latest article in the New Yorker explains why it is that:
There is overwhelming evidence that people with no, or inadequate, health coverage are sicker, that this illness translates into poor physical appearance (bad teeth especially) and low self-esteem, and therefore these people have great difficulty getting decent-paying jobs and hence don’t qualify for health insurance. The perfect vicious cycle. The reason for this, says Gladwell, is the perpetuation of a neocon myth in the US that isn’t accepted anywhere else in the Western world. That myth is called “Moral Hazard” and it says that having insurance changes the behaviour of the insured. If you have generous health insurance, Moral Hazard says you’re going to go to the doctor and the hospital more often, sometimes unnecessarily, just because it’s free. The evidence is all to the contrary, but the myth prevails in the US nevertheless. What’s more, there is evidence that in the few areas where people actually do avail themselves of health care services that aren’t absolutely, critically needed (like dental checkups), the preventative value of these services exceeds their cost, so such ‘abuses’ actually save the health care system money. In some areas of insurance, Moral Hazard actually has some validity. For example, the S&L failures in the 1980s were caused to some degree by reckless lending due to generous FDIC government guarantees. The assurance of bailouts if loans failed actually encouraged some S&L’s to lend irresponsibly. But this simply doesn’t apply in the health industry. Most people don’t frivolously use medical services just because they’re available free. And users of Medicare, the only aspect of the US health care system based on the social insurance model (which equalizes financial risk between the healthy and the sick) — the model used in every other Western nation — are consistently vastly happier with their plan than Americans with private health insurance. Bush’s new Health Savings Accounts, nevertheless, presupposes Moral Hazard is the principal reason the US health system is in crisis, and its effect will be simply to reduce the use of the health system by the country’s sickest people. Instead of the social insurance model it uses the discredited actuarial model (like car insurance, where cost is related to the perceived risk of making claims). So many Americans with expensive medical conditions cannot get insurance at all. Stanford economist Victor Fuchs says “this reduces the social redistributive element of insurance” and that Health Savings Accounts are hence the antithesis of universal health care. Rather than technical arguments, Gladwell says, Americans should be asking themselves these questions:
That’s not to say that there aren’t people who abuse the system. But to punish 45 million Americans (at least) because of a mythological belief that people are naturally inclined to abuse anything they can get for free is not only cruel and inhumane, it’s ideologically obsessive, wrong-headed and irrational. But then that’s the very definition of the Bush administration and their cronies. Tragic, and disgraceful. |
August 25, 2005
Three Philosophers: Noam Chomsky, Doug Rushkoff, George Carlin
 Earlier this week I wrote about the work of environmentalist Bruce Sterling, one of the interviewees in David J Brown’s Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse. Three other philosophers interviewed in the book steal the show, and for those unfamiliar with their work and ideas I thought I would summarize what they told Brown. Noam Chomsky (his blog is here) seems to get both more political and more pragmatic in his thinking as he ages. He remains one of the US’s most conspicuous, articulate and controversial anti-war activists, although he sees war not as a moral issue but as one that is foolish simply because history shows it is incapable of achieving the war-mongers’ intended results. Chomsky loathes our cynical political system and wasteful, ruinous economic system, but blames these as much on human passivity, ignorance and indifference as on ruthlessness and abuse by the power elite. In his interview with Brown, he warns “there are major efforts being made by the corporate owners and advertisers to shape the Internet, so that it will be used mostly for advertising, commerce, diversion, and so on.” I recall in the early days of the Internet there was a plan by major corporations to create a more secure, business-oriented “Internet 2″, which they would own and control. Now we’re facing court cases holding software vendors liable for what customers do with their (free) products, laws banning certain uses of the Internet like online gambling, and other restrictions. What interests me about this is not that corporatists want one set of rules for themselves (a completely untrammeled, unregulated, amoral ‘market driven’ corpocracy) and another for everyone else (laws indemnifying them from litigation by victims of their criminal conduct, expanded rights to sue and invade the privacy of customers, and hamstringing the Internet to the point of dysfunction), but that political leaders are rolling over so meekly and acceding to these inequitable and discriminatory demands, and that the public is not up in arms about it. The reason for this, Chomsky tells Brown, is that “3/4 of the population regard presidential elections as essentially a farce — just some game played by rich contributors and the PR industry which crafts candidates to say things they don’t mean and don’t understand… The same has been happening in Latin America and much of the world… John Dewey once said that politics is the shadow cast over society by big business, [and he called for a shift] from industrial feudalism [which we still have today] to industrial democracy.” Chomsky warns that nuclear war “is not far away”, and “if you were watching from Mars, a rational person would be amazed that the species has survived this long and wouldn’t put very high odds on it for the future”. Being hopeful “doesn’t really matter”, however, he concludes: “We should do exactly the same things no matter what our [guesses about the future] are”. Media commentator Doug Rushkoff (his blog is here) is on a mission to convince the world that we’re each more powerful than we think, and that our ‘learned helplessness’ can be unlearned. “The corporation doesn’t really exist”, he tells Brown. “The corporation is paperwork. It’s a list of rules, through which people are supposed to interact, or priorities that they’re supposed to follow, but there’s nobody home”… Rather than actually taking down a corporation, [all that is necessary is] just demonstrating to everyone in a community that they don’t have to buy their stuff at Wal-Mart. That they have a say in what goes on. That they can choose how they think. That they don’t have to work seven days a week. That they might have enough stuff. That there are ways to have fun without buying products. That they can get laid without buying those jeans.” He continues: I come from a tradition. The tradition is not one of media theory so much as a trickster tradition. The object of the game to me is to exist in this kind of liminal space between the way things are and the infinity of the way things could be, and help people open their minds to other possibilities… Most people are afraid of possibility because they can’t deal with a shifting reality, and they can’t accept their own responsibility for the way things are… So they would rather shut down, and agree to the consensus reality where they are victimized and unhappy, than accept a more plastic, open-source conception of reality where everything is possible.
Rushkoff also has an interesting metaphysical take on what happens to us after our deaths: “The only way for a person to have anything approaching a consciousness after [physical] death would be, while that person is alive, to learn to identify so profoundly with something other than his or her own ego that when the self dies, the identification goes on. But most of us believe in the illusion of individuality. We believe who we are is us… The only way out would be to get out while you’re here. I don’t think you can get out after you’re dead.” George Carlin (his website is here) also talks about how we as individuals have abrogated our responsibility to the Earth by turning it over to ‘those in control’. “I think we’ve turned everything over — mankind in general, not just our culture — to the high priests and the traders. Everything was turned over to those who wanted to control us through mysterious beliefs… They twisted and distorted that into these narrow, superstitious belief systems, where you have this invisible man in the sky who’s judging you.. And then the traders, the businesspeople, the commercial, the merchant class, they turned everything into acquisition and ownership, to having the latest thing… We’re given many choices to distract us from the fact that our real choices have been diminished in number. [Oligopoly control over political machinery, oligopoly ownership of the media and every industry but] 35 flavors of popcorn.” Carlin is a cynic about our current situation. “There’s no real enlightened self-interest”, he says. “I don’t think [recent wars] have anything to do with spreading democracy and giving people free choice, because there are no free choices… There is an ownership class in America… People say, What about the antiwar movement and Vietnam? Yeah, how long did it take? And it didn’t happen until the ownership class decided it was no longer in their interest. Same thing with the civil rights movement… People are dreaming if they think they have rights. They’ve never had rights. There’s no such thing… These are privileges, temporarily granted to the people to keep them placated so that the market economies [and corporatist political systems] can function.” And people say, Oh, your conspiracy thing. Listen, don’t be making fun of the word “conspiracy”. It has meaning. Powerful people have convergent interests. They don’t always need a meeting to decide on something. They inhabit the same clubs. They sit on the same boards. They have all this common ownership and they are very few in number. They control everything, and they do whatever they want. [Their] two-party system keeps the people at bay. They give them microwaves, fanny packs, sneakers with lights in the heels, dustbusters, to keep them distracted, keep them just calm enough that they’re not going to try something.
You know, of course, that he doesn’t think it’s that hopeless. “Scratch a cynic, you’ll find a disappointed idealist. That really rang a bell with me. Within me there is this flame of wishing it were better, wishing people had better lives, that there was more of an authentic sharing and harmony with nature. So this thing that sometimes reads as anger to people is largely a discontent, a disappointment in what we have allowed to happen to us as a species and as a culture.” Carlin’s prognosis for the future reflects this ambivalence — cynicism tinged with idealism: Some sort of cataclysm will alter this thing. There are too many people… I’m a little bored with the almost Christian fervor of [environmentalists]. I do like vandalism, by the way — spiking the trees and vandalizing the SUVs, that’s fun. But the idealistic sitting around kind of bores me. But I also understand that Earth is an organism and that life is completely interdependent, everything upon everything… We will always overstep. We will always use our brains to our self-disadvantage, ultimately. And there’ll be a tipping point. Either it’ll be environmental, or one of these lovely germs will get loose… And then the systems will be compromised enough, and the numbers reduced, so that there will be — not a fresh start, because it won’t be that — but a regearing. Maybe there’ll be 100 thousand people left. Maybe there’ll be 10 million… I have no idea. But let it be violent, and let it be funny. That’s all I ask.
If there’s a common message of these three eloquent gentlemen it is that the power, influence and control of the rich elite in our society is substantial but far from insuperable, and that we as individuals and collectively have a lot more power to act and change things than we might think. And that no one is really in control — we cannot expect our leaders and big corporations and governments to get us out of the mess we have created for ourselves, even if they are inclined to do so. It’s all up to us, and it’s fraught with danger, but it’s possible. As Carlin says “Those who can dance are considered insane by those who can’t hear the music.” We need to help others to hear the music, and then it will be more than possible — there’ll be no stopping us. [If you've clicked the links above, you know another thing these three guys have in common is that they all have crappy websites. What is it about celebrity that changes good people from a willingness to converse with real people to a preoccupation with touting their books? Is it just that there's only so much bandwidth for any human to share with others, and once you reach a certain level of popularity you run out of that bandwidth and shift automatically from two-way to one-way communication?] Image ‘Chemical Bonding’ by David Nash |
August 24, 2005
Blogs and the Gift Economy as ‘Disruptive Innovations’
 In The Innovator’s Solution, Clay Christensen identifies two types of disruptive innovation in business:
Christensen’s definitions are rooted in the Market Economy, and hence don’t exactly apply to blogs and other ‘products’ of the Gift Economy. Or do they? ‘Free’ is certainty ‘a lower cost’. Readers are clearly ‘overserved’ by newspapers of which they read and care about 10% or less of the content. And blogs offer ‘benefits not available at all’ and ‘previously inconvenient’ to newspaper readers — the ability to comment, respond and discuss articles with the authors, and hotlinks to previous articles, backgrounders and more detailed reports on the same subject. But blogs don’t quite meet the definition of a Low End Disruptive Innovation (LEDI) because the incumbents do care about losing business (readership) to bloggers. And they don’t quite meet the definition of New Market Disruptive Innovation (NMDI) either, because blog readers are not ‘new’ to newsreading — they were mostly (except perhaps for ‘pure’ personal diary bloggers) already avid consumers of news in another format. The legacy media initially ignored blogging as a fad, and then as blogging has continued to grow, they have taken potshots at it (“a million guys in pajamas”) and tried to coopt it with their own blogs. A few have even formed partnerships with bloggers, using them as ‘extensions’ of their print and online editions. And many newspapers now offer stripped-down tabloid size editions free to commuters, funded entirely by advertising and full of teasers to additional information only available in the paid editions. Many magazines have done the same thing — embargoing each edition so that paid subscribers get the ‘scoop’ first, or offering some articles only to subscribers. But bloggers persist because the legacy media can match neither the price (zero) or the variety (virtually infinite) of entertainment and information that bloggers offer. And the legacy media persist because:
What then is the future of blogs? Much has been written about what blogs could become or might evolve into, but as interesting as this is to read, most of it won’t happen because of the three constraints bulleted above. In fact, the newest reports indicate that the proportion of blogs that are active is dropping sharply (lots of people find they just don’t have that much to say, or the time to say it to people they don’t know well) and that the ratio of blog readers to blog writers has plateaued and is now also falling. I’ve written before about what I think will happen to blogs as a medium for business knowledge sharing, and I think it just makes sense to let selected people browse and search a well-ordered, context-rich archive of business colleagues’ electronic filing cabinets, and to use RSS digests of this content as a means of selectively communicating with and even selling to customers. I see business blogs migrating from their current reverse-chronological format to a more dynamic format to suit this business purpose. Non-business blogs, I believe, are likely to become mainstream not as a source of useful and interesting information (which they mostly are now), but as a means of very dynamic social recreation. They are a greater threat, therefore, to television, radio and other forms of recreation (the telephone, the movie theatre, the shopping mall, sports, even recreational reading) than they are to the news and information media. We are, at heart, far more social than political creatures. We care more about social interaction than about learning (admit it — you too!) And that means there will be more of an appetite for new technologies and products that enhance human interaction than there will be for those that inform us. As a consequence, look for blogs to go conversational, multimedia and ‘live’. Consider what Skype has started doing to telephony — it threatens to bury the VoIP ‘industry’ before it can even be born. You can now call land lines in most of the West, and talk as long as you want free of charge, even with people on the other side of the digital divide. Video add-ons to Skype allow you to chat with Grandma in Britain or the kids at university in Australia, free. The videophone has long been predicted. But now that it is free, and drawing people who previously had no use for computers, watch it take off. That functionality will extend multimedia blogging from its current state of evolution (podcasting) to seamless conversations between and among bloggers and blog readers. Why would you want to watch the news of what’s happening in Paris or Honolulu or Sri Lanka or Iraq or Caracas when you can ‘blog in’ (hey, I want credit for inventing that phrase — I used it first in this context!) to a live conversation (with video, and text transcription produced by voice recognition software) with someone who is right there and can tell you and show you first hand, and chat with you about what it means? How about from the perspective of us introspective blog writers, though? We like to spend the time carefully crafting our posts, with useful links in them, and we’re more comfortable writing our thoughts than communicating orally real-time, right? Well, that’s probably true, but what if you found that if you spent the time in selective conversations (right people, right topic, right time) instead of writing:
This is what I think will happen. When you turn on your computer in the morning, your e-mail and RSS will have many fewer articles and many more invitations to join real-time conversations (with video) scheduled at various points during the day on specific topics that you are interested in and/or acknowledged as informed about. It will have some live audio and video feeds with commentary from the areas where breaking news is happening, hosted by a blogger who lives there or has traveled there. You’ll be able to see for yourself, and ask questions of the host blogger. Some bloggers will be offering live travelogues you can ‘blog in’ to and chat with them about. Blog posts will evolve into blog events, ‘programs’, from an impromptu kaffee klatsch about a book you (or someone you trust) just read, to an hour in the life of a blogger’s family in Riyadh. Your blog will look more like a program schedule (with multimedia tapes and transcripts of the programs and events) than a journal. What’s fascinating to me about this is that the word ‘diary’ will still apply to these evolved blogs, but in the future-oriented sense of ‘daily agenda’ rather than past-oriented sense of ‘daily record’. This should spell the end of talk radio and TV (why listen or dial in when you can participate as a peer?), and the end of reality TV. It will disruptively innovate all ‘canned’ programming — TV and movie drama, comedy, documentary — because you’ll have the option to be part of a ‘live’ program instead, somewhat less polished but including you as participant, part of the ‘cast’. It will profoundly blur the lines between the different parts of our social networks, and deepen and broaden those networks. It will drag the rest of the world across the digital divide to see what all the commotion is about, and to play. And it will all be free. Blogs will then become both LEDIs and NMDIs — but not so much to the news media as to the entertainment and recreation industries. The software developed for multi-player gaming apps will be adapted to manage multi-participant blog events. Just think what this capability could mean for business conferences, university courses, amateur sporting events, investigating reporting, live theatre, real-time real-space games, shopping trips, dating, Friday-night poker, parties. And like all disruptive innovations, the incumbent providers and arrangers of entertainment, recreation, communication and other forms of social interaction won’t know what hit them until it’s too late. I believe every aspect of the burgeoning Gift Economy has the opportunity to be a similar disruptive innovation. We have already seen this in open source and file-sharing. Software vendors disrupted by open source technologies have responded by refocusing on large corporate accounts (their ‘high end’) where they can offer customization and services that open source cannot — a classic response to LEDI. They will survive as long as those high end accounts continue to thrive — even fat cat companies can only say ‘no’ to ‘free’ for so long. Record, movie, and now book vendors (Amazon and the publishing industry are balking at Google Print, which provides free full text of books in print) have tried to sue customers who use technology to make personal-use copies of their content — a foolish and fruitless approach. These industries need to follow the lead of the software vendors and respond to the file-sharing LEDI by offering something that file-sharing cannot — like concert tickets, personalized content, and personal interviews with the performers. As consultants have learned, you give away your recorded content free, as calling card and publicity for a personal, personalized appearance, something that cannot be copied. But most industries disrupted by Gift Economy LEDI and NMDI will probably have to learn the hard way. They will have to learn that:
Last word to Jeff Jarvis (thanks to Dave Davison for this timely link) who wrote yesterday: Distribution is not king. Content is not king. Conversation is the kingdom. In our media 2.0, web 2.0, post-media, post-scarcity, small-is-the-new-big, open-source, Gift Economy world of the empowered and connected individual, the value is no longer in maintaining an exclusive hold on things. The value is no longer in owning content or distribution.The value is in relationships. The value is in trust.
But in this new age, you donít want to own the content or the pipe that delivers it. You want to participate in what people want to do on their own. You donít want to extract value. You want to add value. You donít want to build walls or fences or gardens to keep people from doing what they want to do without you. You want to enable them to do it. You want to join in. In this model, newspapers have a problem: They want to control information and the means of sharing rather than enabling that sharing. Book publishers are inefficient as hell: They have to guess what the audience wants rather than helping questioners find answerers. Entertainment producers are doomed to support extravagant costs: They have raised the bar to success beyond their own reach. Cable companies and broadcasters are lost: They have no idea how to serve people, only masses. Marketers and their agencies are befuddled: They have evolved into beasts without ears. And ó hereís my favorite ó AOL has it utterly, completely, spectacularly wrong: It wanted to control content and distribution and controlled nothing at all. |
August 23, 2005
Environmentalists vs Environmentalists
 Technophoria is the irrational, overexuberant belief that technology can solve all the world’s problems. It has existed for over a century:
It is a tempting and seductive delusion — it is comforting, positive, and sexy. It is also dangerous. Technophoria is precisely the blind faith that has caused many the problems it promises, on the flimsiest of carefully-selected evidence, to solve. It is absurdly naive and idealistic, and ignorant of how and why things are the way they are. It is the progressive’s version of The Rapture. And Bruce Sterling, pioneer member of the Well and Wired, sci-fi writer extraordinaire, digital culture icon, and big supporter of the two most popular environmental blogs, WorldChanging and TreeHugger, has fallen victim to this not-so-new groupthink technology religion. Let me say at the outset — I’m a fan of Bruce Sterling. Here are a few excerpts from an interview with him in David J Brown’s new book Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse that show how clever and informed Sterling is: When you have complete corporate dominance, nobody’s going to innovate. [In the contemporary oligopoly-based economy when] you already have 95% of the market, there’s no reason to do anything much except post armed guards and clip stock coupons [he might have added, and hire lots of patent lawyers]… It’s tough to find anybody who will actually loyally work for a modern corporation… They’re just an inherently unstable way to try to run human affairs.
Computation has very little to do with what human brains do. We’re abusing the term “intelligence” as a kind of smear-over, conflating term to try to unite cognition and computation… There’s just no good technical reason for [AI] machines to behave in a way that resembles human cognition. That’s like asking “Why won’t this jet flap its wings?”… So you can call what a jet and what a bird does “flying” but although they’re bound by similar laws of aerodynamics, they don’t scale, one to another… I never argue with hard AI guys because they’re more set in their ways than the Jesuits. It’s theological, it’s blue-sky handwaving, it’s not practical. I think the most important technologies of the 21st century are going to be whatever technologies allow us to keep 9.5 billion people on the planet without drowning in our own spew — feed and educate people, keep the plagues at bay while we’re doubling our numbers and causing a really serious biosphere problem. [The biggest threat to the human species is] the greenhouse effect… The thing that worries me is that there may might be just a few hundred thousand [human survivors by the end of this century] in a world that’s so severely ruined that they’re sliding into some kind of posthistory. Civilizations do crumble. Civilizations have been known to fall. Most of them have, always. And if you have one global civilization that’s everywhere and it makes one really big mistake you could have one very large barbarism in pretty short order. I like to quote Havel on [the subject of hope]. He says that “hope is not the conviction that things will turn out well, but the conviction that what you are doing makes sense no matter how things turn out”. [So my objective is] to become more like myself. This doesn’t mean you should aspire to be perfect. You’re not trying to become soulful, morally better, or angelically good. You’re not subjecting yourself to some kind of idealistic framework from outside time and space. You become more willing to recognize yourself as a mammalian, physical, living entity, moving through time, having mass and occupying space. I think since that’s the truth, you should come to terms with that, and you should arrange your life in a way in which that knowledge makes some sense.
Of course, many people claim not to be convinced by climate change evidence. That is because they are shortsighted sociopathic morons who don’t want to lose any money. Worse yet, they have a vested interest in obscuring and distorting the truth about climate findings. Plus, they carry out intensive campaigns of personal smear attacks on the integrity of scientists. This practice is Lysenkoism, which all serious intellectual workers must hold in contempt and abhorrence.
and his movement’s principles: Very few people earn their daily bread by pointing out malfunctions, bugs, screw-ups, design failures, side-effects and the whole sad galaxy of trade-offs and failings that are inherent in any technological artifact. To counteract this gross social imbalance, a wise designer and a wise critic will make it a matter of principle to look at the underside first. Every design process is incomplete unless it takes into careful consideration what could be done with the product by a dictatorial megalomaniac in command of a national economy, a secret police, and a large army.
are brilliant, witty and buoyant. But… Then there’s this — a keynote address at the recent SXSW conference, with a prediction that technology will solve all the world’s problems by 2060, in which Sterling sounds like a Stepford Environmentalist, spouting an “everything’s rosy” we’re-gonna-fix-it-all with-bottom-up people-centred-design mantra that could have been written by the Davos corporatists for Lomborg. Talk about “theological, blue-sky handwaving”! And then there’s this — a smug and supercilious attack on James Kunstler’s The Long Emergency, in which Sterling shrugs off Kunstler’s argument that: No combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run American life the way we have been used to running it, or even a substantial fraction of it. The wonders of steady technological progress achieved through the reign of cheap oil have lulled us into a kind of Jiminy Cricket syndrome, leading many Americans to believe that anything we wish for hard enough will come true. These days, even people who ought to know better are wishing ardently for a seamless transition from fossil fuels to their putative replacements… The widely touted ‘hydrogen economy’ is a particularly cruel hoax. We are not going to replace the U.S. automobile and truck fleet with vehicles run on fuel cells. For one thing, the current generation of fuel cells is largely designed to run on hydrogen obtained from natural gas. The other way to get hydrogen in the quantities wished for would be electrolysis of water using power from hundreds of nuclear plants.
with this bizarre and irrelevant retort: “That [Jiminy Cricket] insect is one of those nagging, mindful, spiritual, conscience-driven coffee-cup enviro types… Even if hydrogen storage and transport turn out to have insuperable problems, that doesn’t make hydrogen a hoax. A hoax is a deliberate fraud.” Huh? What happened to the principles? Has Sterling been ‘persuaded’ to don rose-coloured glasses, or gone through one of the spiritual make-overs he used to disdain, or has he just been seduced by the groupthink of technology-will-overcome idealists who have picked him as their poster boy? It is really distressing to see technophoric environmentalists dismissing as doomsayers and conspiracy theorists fellow environmentalists who are justifiably dubious of technology’s promise to solve urgent social and environmental problems in the face of a political and economic power structure determined to ignore, trivialize and discredit any attempt to change the status quo. In the face of megapollution apologists, environmental crisis-deniers, and perpetrators of junk science who smear the work of legitimate scientists, the last thing we need is an open and hostile feud between ‘optimistic’ and ‘pessimistic’ environmentalists. I can almost hear the ‘bright greens’ calling Kunstler a ‘dark green’ and the ‘deep greens’ calling Sterling ‘green lite’. So let’s agree on bright (Viridian) green and deep green as the labels of our shades of our shades of difference of opinion, and agree that there is room for more than one shade under the green umbrella. So perhaps WorldChanging and TreeHugger are ‘bright green’ blogs, and How to Change the World is ‘deep green’. We need each other, and we have to work toward common goals. My point is that wishful thinking, accompanied by ‘happy news’ reports of promising potential new technologies and inventions (many of them exaggerated to obtain research grants) will not be enough to solve global warming, pollution, loss of biodiversity, habitat destruction and the degradation of our land, water and air. Of course we should buy environmentally friendlier products and celebrate substantial scientific breakthroughs. And I think we all agree there is no point filling our blogs with the depressing and endless litany of environmental bad news that is constant and everywhere. And that echo-chambers of indignation, and hand-wringing and letter-writing campaigns aren’t nearly enough either. But the resurgence of technophoria, the faith that we can just invent our way out of the mess we have created, is dangerous — it gives those who look to us for leadership, information and inspiration false comfort, saps our energies and divides us. And plays right into the hands of the “shortsighted, sociopathic morons” and “Lysenkoists” that Sterling warns us about. |
All of this strikes me as entirely reasonable, sober, pragmatic. And Sterling’s Viridian Green movement August 22, 2005
Eulogy: Learning to Let Go
 On Friday our beloved Chelsea passed away. She was about age 11 (we don’t know for sure — she was a pound rescue). She died of massive liver cancer, complicated by abdominal bleeding and a sudden onset of critical anemia, and she was already dealing with chronic and worsening arthritis and hypothyroidism. Until Tuesday (when the picture above was taken), we had no inkling of what brave Chelsea was dealing with. She was always stoic — as my previous story of her encounter with a woodchuck indicated. Her sudden appetite loss got us worried enough to take her on Thursday for blood tests and X-rays, and our vet immediately arranged fast-track admission to the Guelph University Veterinary Hospital — one of the best equipped and most respected on the continent. That night Chelsea paced and panted heavily the whole night long — never lying down or even sitting, so I knew she was in a lot of discomfort, though she never uttered as much as a moan. I sat up with her all night, out on the deck in the light rain. Friday morning I had to lift her into the car, and back out again when we arrived in Guelph. Another battery of tests ruled out Cushings Disease (an adrenal malfunction) as the cause of her fatigue, panting, and badly swollen liver and abdomen. Cancer had claimed most of her liver, probably causing the sudden anemia, and it had spread to other organs and was causing accumulation of blood in her abdomen. Her liver function was almost gone and the tumors were so large and pervasive they were inoperable. There was serious risk of the larger tumors rupturing at any time and causing massive internal bleeding. The wonderful staff at Guelph, Doctors Kate Berger and Danielle Richardson, patiently explained the diagnosis, what they had done to confirm it, and what the options were: Hope against hope through exploratory surgery (itself dangerous because of the severe anemia, even after transfusions), weekly chemotherapy to buy her a bit of time. Anita, I and the doctors were all in tears. They described the options carefully, in great detail, with the risks and possible outcomes, answering all our questions, not steering us towards any decision. When we made the most difficult decision of our lives (money was not a consideration for us, and played no part in the decision), they prepared us, and had us go in to see Chelsea just before they administered the injection (we were concerned that we wouldn’t be able to keep up the brave and cheerful front, and that Chelsea would become alarmed about possible separation from her ‘pack’ — a pet’s greatest fear after loss of freedom — if we were to be there with her too long without appearing to be taking her out of there). Animals have such great instincts for this stuff. When she saw us there was great tail-wagging, licking of faces and fuzzy hugs, and then as they gave her the injection she died quickly, peacefully, painlessly, with a smile on her lovely face. It is the first time I have ever been present at the moment of death of any living creature, and I was overwhelmed. The tears had all been earlier, when we heard the news — now we were just quiet, moved to a sense of wonder at the experience, and at how much Chelsea had once again taught us foolish humans. Such courage, such grace, such dignity. The doctor agreed with me that in many ways we are (most of us, anyway) more humane in our treatment of animals at the end of their lives than we are with our fellow humans. As I sat there stroking Chelsea’s soft fur it occurred to me that if I were that sick and facing the same prognosis and alternatives after a full and healthy life — alternatives like ‘extraordinary measures’, procedures that had almost no chance of working and would be painful or humiliating to undergo, days or months of being prodded and subjected to invasive and unnatural procedures just to buy a bit of time, to decline more slowly, to prolong the inevitable, I would want my loved ones to choose for me exactly what we had chosen for Chelsea. But because I am a human, for them to do so would have been against the law, a crime punishable by imprisonment. There is something very wrong with us. Damn the laws and religions that deny us simple dignity, choice, and peace. Chelsea was loved by our whole neighbourhood, and at our annual neighbourhood BBQ Saturday, as we answered the “Where’s Chelsea, the greeter and co-host?” questions, we had many guests with tears in their eyes. There is a big empty space now in our lives, and in theirs — one that can never be filled. But our lives were so much richer because of her, and we learned so much from this modest, magnificent creature. I am now even more in awe of nature and her sacred and endless wonders. I am a better person, and I have Chelsea to thank for the time she graciously spent with me, putting up with my human foibles and patiently showing me how to pay attention, how to trust my instincts, how to live in the moment. And finally, how to let go. |
