 I recently acquired, as a birthday present from my children, a set of books written in the 1980s and 1990s, books that were too far ahead of their time to have achieved much success when they were published, and which you won’t find in the bookstores because they’ve been pushed off the shelves by more recent releases. Some of my articles over the next few weeks will be reviews of these books, with my usual tangents. This article is based on David Edwards’ 1995 book Burning All Illusions, released in the UK (where Edwards succeeded in and then dropped out of the business world) as Free to Be Human.
The book is not my style — meandering, polemical, too psychoanalytic — but its ideas are very important. The core idea of the book is that we have been imprisoned by our culture, not through any corporatist conspiracy, but by ourselves, a complex and collective adaptation to the increasingly difficult circumstances in which our species finds itself. We have met the enemy and he is us. What’s worse, the chains that bind us are so evasive and subtle that we’re usually unaware of our own confinement. Our adaptation meets the needs of the day, so, as I’m so fond of saying these days, we do what we must. There is a framework, an unwritten set of unquestioned assumptions that this self-induced prison is based upon. Edwards harps on one such assumption — “the unchallengeable [capitalist virtue] of maximum economic growth through maximum corporate profit” — though I think there are others, shared by a large majority of people despite differences in their sociopolitical frames. These unchallengeable tenets are pounded into us through media propaganda, and the (mainstream) media filter their and our reality by virtue of five things (this borrowed from Chomsky):
Even when they employ investigative reporters determined to find the truth, the mass media can’t help themselves. These five filters define who they are, and reporters who don’t recognize this reality are tossed into the buzzsaw. There is no “freedom of the press”, Edwards asserts. He includes two wonderful quotes on press conformity: Thoreau: “There is no need of a law to check the license of the press. It is law enough and more than enough to itself. Virtually, the community have come together and agreed what things will be uttered, have agreed on a platform to excommunicate him who departs from it, and not one in a thousand dares utter, or even think, anything else.” [Consider this in the context of the recent furour against the NYT for daring to reveal to terrorists that the Bush Administration was illegally requisitioning everyone's private bank records, supposedly to trace terrorist money flows, as if terrorists would be surprised by this!]
John Pilger: “A group of Russians touring the US before glasnost were astonished to find, after reading the newspapers and watching television, that all the opinions on the vital issues were the same. ‘In our country’, they said, ‘to get that result we have a dictatorship, we imprison people, we tear out their fingernails. Here you have none of that. So what’s your secret — how do you do it?’ “ There is no freedom of dissent in business either, he asserts: The real choice is between obedience and expulsion. For this reason there is a powerful tendency for people to want to believe that their thoughts and behaviour at work are voluntary — the alternative of perceiving the actual conflict is simply too painful…A person will suffer more intensely the more he or she is strong and independent…Given the hopelessness of resistance, there is a powerful incentive for individuals to become less aware of their own feelings, beliefs and needs. Indeed the only rational solution may be to become dead inside.
And, he says, the education system further reinforces the propaganda, the learned helplessness and the futility of resistance through seven fundamental lessons (this borrowed from Gatto):
Through education, the media, and business we are indoctrinated into accepting the necessity and seeking the rewards of conforming to the political and economic system, hammer into anvil. What’s more, Edwards says, “the system has an interest in our believing that we freely choose these conforming goals”, and that there are no viable alternative ways to live. As a result, he says, “large numbers of people are necessarily in various states of psychological ill health”. Psychology plays its role, convincing us that our illness is our own fault, due to something in our past that precludes us from “adjusting properly”. “In our culture it is considered a virtue to ‘cheer up’, to hide our unhappiness rather than expose the truth” — the truth that it is this society that makes us ill. Learned helplessness is endemic in such a system. Edwards quotes EF Schumacher, describing response to his London Times article “Insane Work Cannot Produce a Sane Society”, as saying “The remarkable thing is that…there were no hot denials or anguished agreements; no reactions at all…People read it, sighed and nodded, I suppose, and moved on”. This alienation, disconnection and ‘dis-ease’ is the consequence of self-inflicted conformity of thinking, behaviour and belief. Realizing it only increases the anguish — better to sublimate it, or you’ll end up in the same state as Tolstoy, who wrote: At first I experienced moments of bewilderment; my life would come to a standstill, as if I did not know how to live or what to do, and I felt lost and fell into despair. But they passed and I continued to live as before. Then these moments of bewilderment started to recur more frequently. On these occasions, when my life came to a standstill, the same questions always arose: “Why? What comes next?”
Finally, Edwards gets around to solutions, what he calls a “chest of tools for intellectual self-defence”. You really have to dig for them, but it’s worth the effort. Here are the tools in a nutshell:
Some of these, of course, are easier said than done. But still, it’s an interesting list. The important lesson from all this, I think, is that escaping the prison is a life-long, constant, and often lonely journey. Back in the 1960s when we dissented and refused to conform, and we ended the Vietnam War, we figured we’d won, and rested on our laurels. And soon those of us who had rejected the system and moved out en masse to the Edge, started to get sucked back in by the black hole and all its seductions and promises and lies, until everything we had gained had been lost again. And what did we do? Rationalize. We said it was just youthful excess, and it was time to grow up and get real. Arrrgh! We had made such progress, so fast! Thanks to the Internet and the ability it has given us to access information and ideas that are not filtered by the mainstream media, and to support each other as we employ the 16 tools above, we have another chance. We can’t blow it this time — there is too much at stake. We cannot settle for just electing a Democratic or a New Democratic or even a Green political regime, and think the battle against conformity is won, that we are free. We cannot mistake milestones for the end of the journey. Perhaps most importantly, we must continue to push much farther out to the Edge, even if that means leaving those who are not yet ready behind, for now. We cannot wait for them. If that means the radicals have to shrug off the progressive moderates, and the ‘deep green’ environmentalists have to reject the ‘pale green’ technophiles as no better than the overt anti-environmentalists and corporatists, then so be it. If we allow ourselves to be held back, compromise, one step forward two steps back, we will get exactly nowhere. The Aha! moment for me was tool #15 above, a means of coping with Gatto’s ‘lesson of provisional self-esteem’. We all long so much for attention and appreciation (hell, it’s the lifeblood that keeps the blogosphere alive!) How did we allow ourselves to become so dependent on others for how we feel about ourselves? It’s such an irony in a society that prides itself on its rugged individualism. It’s a measure of how effective the invisible prison is, that we’ve been beaten down to the point that we’re afraid to be ourselves, to be different, to be authentic. We have such a long way to go! Those tools are going to get a lot of use.Fare forward, voyagers. See you, I hope, on the far edge. |
June 30, 2006
Escaping the Prison
June 29, 2006
That Aha! Moment
 “Then suddenly it hit me…” We use that kind of language to describe Aha! moments, realizations that seem to come out of nowhere, but immediately seem obvious. “How could I not have (a)realized, (b) considered or (c) thought of that before?”, we ask ourselves, incredulous at our previous foolishness. Hit yourself on the side of the head already, that it was stuck in there so long before it came out. Duh!
It’s different with children. I’ve watched children learning something, or discovering something, or imagining or inventing something, and like adults they get that look (you know, the wide eyes and the index finger pointing upwards, which I’m convinced was the inspiration for the design of the exclamation mark, which the Spanish have the good sense to put upside down at the beginning of sentences to warn you to get ready for it). But with children it’s easier, more natural, less earth-shaking, more frequent. They don’t need warning. It seems to me there are three different types of Aha! moments:
Mountains of books have been written on how to “spark” all three types of Aha! moments. I’ve written about how to imagine and how to think differently (type 1) and about where to look for information whose discovery could innovate your business or a whole industry (type 2). Less has been written about the process of mental synthesis that leads to breakthrough understandings (type 3), producing whole shifts in how you see a problem or see the world, though much of what is involved in Presencing and in Open Space is about allowing such understandings to emerge, naturally and unforced. There are those who believe these sparks happen better in solitary moments, and others who believe they happen better through collaboration and brainstorming with others. I think there’s room, and need, for both. Notice that my definition of all three types of Aha! moments include the word “come”. Indeed, we use the term “it suddenly came to me” to describe all three types of moments. Mystics and consultants also talk about the process of “letting come”, opening yourself up to allow more such moments to occur, to “present” themselves to you. Perhaps its just because I’m a slow learner, but I’ve found that as I get older, such moments “come to me” less often. I still get just as many ideas (in fact, because I’ve been practicing in both a personal and business context and have acquired a lot more information to draw from, I get many more ideas now than I used to — I’m never at a loss for what to write on my blog). But I find I’m making fewer discoveries of important or useful new information (probably because I’ve spent so much time researching my writing and my work projects that I’ve already cherry-picked the best — and should look offline, in the real world, more often). And, more importantly I think, the Aha! moments of understanding are fewer and farther between than they used to be. They’re the ones that are so context-specific and dependent on all the baggage to be organized in your own brain that they are the hardest to share with others. Although reading Straw Dogs probably produced my biggest Aha! moment in several years (that neither I nor any group can ’save the world’ because it is not in human nature to change that fast), I doubt that my waxing rhapsodic about it has sold many copies of Gray’s book. In fact, all 15 of the bulleted selections in my How to Save the World Reading List provided me with Aha! moments of understanding, and it is readers who have waded through most of the readings in this list, or at least similar readings and experiences at similar points in their lives, who report having had similar Aha! moments. We have a shared context to produce them. As Daniel Quinn says “people will listen when they’re ready to listen and not before” — Aha! moments of understanding only come to us when the context for them is in place in our heads, and when the time is right. When I first read The Spell of the Sensuous a decade ago I tossed it aside, where now it is one of my favourite books of all time. At the time of the first reading, I just wasn’t ready for it. In that sense, while the first two types of Aha! moments are like small tremours that shake our world, the third type is like a tectonic shift, massive, disruptive, causing our old ‘world’ to crumble and causing us to rebuild new frameworks, new mental infrastructure for our lives. They reshape our world, and frequently produce ‘aftershocks’ that ripple through other aspects of our thinking and our lives, altering them profoundly. As the world becomes more complex and our lives more specialized and disconnected from others’, our shared context is being continually diminished — despite the increase in cultural homogeneity in our society. As a result, I think, shared Aha! moments of understanding are getting rarer, and harder to come by. We fall back on poor proxies for shared understanding — namely shared ‘values’, icons, and political and commercial brands. What ways have you discovered to provoke more Aha! moments in your own life, and in others? What’s the mostimportant Aha! moment of your recent life, and how did it come about? |
June 28, 2006
Damaged
I‘ve received a few e-mails lately that say I seem to be struggling on this blog to get past some obstacle, that I seem to be churning over a lot of the same ground, pushing myself to decide something, do something, take something in a new direction. As I’ve acknowledged, I have been under a lot of stress lately, but I don’t think the angst in recent posts can be attributed to that. Perhaps my recent habit of running 100 laps around the track in my back yard to end up substantially where I started is an allegory for my whole life. I’m a slow learner, making the same mistakes over and over until finally something makes it so obvious even I can’t fail to ‘get it’. More than anything else I am impatient with myself, even more than I am impatient with the world. That’s futile, but that’s me. As you’ll know if you’ve hung around here much, I’m not a great believer in our capacity for self-improvement. Capacity for learning, yes, but not transcendence. I’m a cynic, but I think believing we can change ourselves is just self-delusion. We do what we must, and learning helps us discover what we must do. We can change what we do. We can even learn to expand our capacities, alter our perceptions and our conceptions. But that doesn’t change who we are. Each of us is, after all, a chemical stew, a bag of organisms self-organized for these organisms’ self-perpetuation, and which evolved their brain for that purpose as a commons, a collective communication and memory device. It is they, not ‘we’, who are in charge of who ‘we’ are. I was going to write this post in the first person plural, about who we are and what our society (i.e. we, plural) has done to us. But I concluded that such a projection would be presumptuous. Who am I, a bag of organisms self-organized for their self-perpetuation, to presume to know who someone else ‘is’, or what our society has done to that person — to their bag of organisms? What I perceive as other people are, after all, merely figments of reality, pale, inadequate representations conjured up by my organisms’ brain to ‘make sense’ of their external world. We are all, in fact, utterly, terrifyingly alone. To presume to know anything about someone else is a preposterous arrogance. So I am writing the rest of this instead in the first person singular, a smaller conceit. I have this intuitive suspicion that the rest of humanity is, mostly, as damaged as I am, but my evidence is purely circumstantial, subjective, unprovable. In addition to being incessantly impatient, I am also sorry. Sorry for all the people I have hurt and disappointed. I have hurt people because I am, as I say in my blog bio, insensitive, and I have disappointed people mostly because I learn so slowly, I miss the point. I wasn’t paying attention. I didn’t catch your meaning. “I am a child. I last a while”, as Neil Young put it. No stamina. Living in a dream world. When I was young, I felt my emotional sensitivity slipping inexorably away, and I knew I would be, to all intents, emotionally dead before I reached the age of 25. I saw that death of emotion and sensitivity everywhere. ‘Old’ people made me shudder, pathetic, empty creatures hollowed out, zombies. Even in children I saw it being crushed, as they learned to play civilization’s brutalizing survival game. I watched children learn fear, learn to lie, learn to impose suffering on others, from insects to the weaker kids in the schoolyard. I watched as they became everybody else. I watched them become damaged, broken, and then die. And, not being strong, I died with them. I killed myself before they could get to me. I watched the adults, oblivious to all this, apparently already dead but still going through the motions, still pretending to feel, like those who have lost limbs still claim to feel something in the empty space where the limb once was. Not a takeover by emotionless aliens, just a slow decline, a gradual loss, a compensation. I never wanted to fall that far. I wanted to die physically long before I reached that sad state. My friends at the time, of course, thought this was seriously deranged, and outrageously judgemental. One of them went so far as to say I was simply projecting my own growing emotional debility and insensitivity on others, and that it was I, not them, who needed help. He said that I had isolated myself from my feelings as a defence mechanism, and had masked and excused that isolation with the pretension of intellectual superiority. At that time I was in love, far more deeply in love than I had ever been or probably have since. It was a desperate and consuming love. I attempted to cache all my remaining emotion in her, and, to some extent she did the same. We wound a cocoon around ourselves to try to keep all the hurt inflicted by the rest of the world away. It was a brilliant fiction. I had invented, in her, the personification of all the ideals left in my heart. We would escape together. We would transcend this brutal and beaten world. We would save each other. What a horrible burden to impose on another person! She did her best, as the object of my fierce and impossible affection, to live up to this expectation. I am not sure what she wanted or expected of me in return. I was too deluded by my invention of her to pay much attention to the real her, or her needs and desires. I am sorry for what I did to her, for how I let her down. I am sorry for what I did to all the others I have hurt and let down out of reckless insensitivity and uncompromising idealism. I should be made to wear a hazard warning around my neck. I still haven’t learned. I still expect too much of myself. Always over-promising and under-delivering. Not very becoming. What I do now, if I were honest with myself, is just filling the emptiness, passing the time. Having gone through the emotions, now I am just numbly going through the motions. I am the Dead Shaman, still reciting the words whose meaning I have long ago forgotten. I keep having this dream where I meet a young woman, pretty, athletic, eyes wet with tears of pain and love and longing, who persuades me that the best possible life consists of making love all the time, stretching it out so it fills every waking moment, until time and space lose their meaning. In the dream we never get bored of this; indeed, it feeds on itself so we want more and more. This is, of course, my subconscious re-enactment of the cocoon. The Box. Everything else has died, but the dream, the ideal, lives on, relentless. Pure madness. I’m convinced we were not meant to live the way we live in this pathetic, civilized society. Somehow I know this, instinctively, but I just keep playing along, dreaming of a way out, and doing what I must. Going around and around, repeating the same mistakes, playing a role in the movie that is my life, though I am now no more really alive than the images on the movie screen. Such brilliant self-delusion. I have become a figment of my own reality. I watch myself perform, as if I were still, really, here. But if you stop making believe with me, buying the illusion, just for a moment, and look closely, you can see — look! — all that is there is an emptyshell. Graphic is from the website of Synergy Communications, a UK company. |
June 27, 2006
The Productivity Myth
 If you read economists’ reports, you’ll find the word productivity mentioned a lot. It’s key to competitive advantage and a healthy economy, they say. Ours is dropping, compared to other countries where people work harder and/or work smarter, they say. Automation improved it for factory workers and agriculture, but we need to improve it for office workers, they say.
This is sheer propaganda. Productivity is a euphemism for profit margin. Of course the corporatists obfuscate this fact by defining productivity deliberately obscurely: as the amount of ‘output’ per unit of ‘input’. What this means is the ratio of revenue (that’s how right-wing economists measure ‘output’) to cost (that’s how they measure ‘input’). This is precisely the definition of profit margin. When neocons lament that worker productivity is inadequate, what they are really saying is that their corporate profits are inadequate, and that unless workers make severe and continuous sacrifices to increase these corporations’ profit margins from domestic operations they will take the money they gouged from consumers in this country and invest it all in struggling nations that are so desperate that they will do anything, . This is the Wal-Mart Dilemma, illustrated above in the red boxes, but taken to the next level. What Wal-Mart is doing to suppliers, forcing them to lower prices every year to keep their contract, until they are bankrupted, is what corporatists are now trying to do to workers, forcing them to accept lower real wages, fewer benefits, and work longer hours, or they’ll find another ’supplier’ for their labour — China. More specifically there are six ways you can increase corporate profit margins, oops, I mean productivity:
While of course none of these things is sustainable indefinitely (the Robber Barons tried a century ago), when you have corporations and governments conspiring together to do all six of these things, this race to the bottom can continue for years. That is precisely what is happening now. We now have a situation where year-over-year profit margins of the world’s largest corporations have been increasing by 20% or more every year for a decade, and are expected to continue to do so indefinitely. The average annual profit growth rate predicted by analysts for the S&P 500 stocks is about 23% annually, for at least the next five years, and it is on that basis that stock prices are so wildly overvalued and shareholder expectations are so relentlessly excessive. The return on investment for these companies is now at least three times a reasonable ROI for investments with commensurate risk. We, the citizens and consumers, are completely funding this windfall for the executives and controlling shareholders of big corporations, and we are expected to continue doing so indefinitely:
The chart above, which proposes a solution for the Wal-Mart dilemma by converting the red ‘vicious cycle’ into the green ‘virtuous cycle’, also suggests the solution for all of these corporate abuses. It would require our intervention, through citizen and consumer action as well as through our elected officials, to do all of the following (take a deep breath):
This is all, of course, dreaming in technicolour. All of these actions are perfectly reasonable, and could be put into place quite quickly and inexpensively. But it would entail the most massive redistribution of wealth and power in the history of civilization. Those who have ‘worked the system’ to gain a wildly disproportionate share of each nation’s wealth and power now undoubtedly believe they are entitled to keep it, by force if necessary. So it won’t happen, at least not in an orderly, reasoned way. But I’m not suggesting ideal, radical solutions here just to be provocative or to make you feel badly about their impossibility. The status quo is unsustainable, and eventually, by one means or another, these changes will occur. The next Great Depression, pandemic disease, global and regional wars, the End of Oil, global warming, and ongoing revolutions of various types will all force us to come to grips with the fatal flaws in our economic system and in the political system that enables it to continue. We will implement all these changes when, and only when, we have no other choices left. But the next time you hear corporate executives or government officials lamenting our lack of ‘productivity’ and blaming it on lazy or uneducated workers, just ask them why 23% annual growth in corporate profit margins isn’t enough, and by what magical thinking they believe such increases are somehow sustainable forever. Or better still, ask them to explain to their children why this year’s and next year’s profits are more important than leaving them with a world, an economy or a society that is sustainable, just,or even livable. |
June 26, 2006
Distance Running as Meditation
 As those of you following my progress on the Shangri-La Diet are aware, I began a running program on May 2nd, a week before I started on the diet. My interest in the diet was not weight loss — I’m well within the ‘ideal’ weight for my size and frame — but to see if I could reduce my junk food cravings. As I’ve shifted to a 90% vegetarian diet, I haven’t ‘missed’ eating meat at all, but the evening cravings (I’m a ‘night person’, metabolically) for salt, sugar and fat have always been irresistible and unhealthy. Many people on the diet reported a reduction in their food cravings, and I was interested in the whole ‘self-experimentation‘ aspect of the diet, so I decided to give it a try. I’ve lost ten pounds and an inch and a half off the waist, and look and feel much better, but the cravings are, so far, as strong as ever. My reasons for taking up running were entirely different. I have been increasingly impatient and stressed about my inability to find a ’second career’ at the intersection between my Gift, my Passion and my Purpose. On top of that, I’ve received some distressing personal and financial news several times in the last few months. So I was feeling down and pressured, and, as a failed meditator, I’d found running therapeutic for dealing with stress in past. I was so out of shape when I started that I could only manage 3km, but now I’m up to 10km three times a week. To do this, since I hate distractions, hills and traffic when I’m running, I set up a 100m oval ‘track’ in my back yard, a completely private area. You can just make out the outline of it on the edge of the forest in the photo above. I’ve now set up a small tent beside it, where I go to think, recuperate, and get inspiration (it’s just on the fringe of my wi-fi reception area). Several of our neighbours think I’m crazy to run 100 laps of the same track, but to me it’s perfect — beautiful, precise, and literally right on my doorstep. I can even run nude if I’m so inclined. I’m not a running addict by any means — I schedule it Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, the same way I schedule other jobs that must get done, like mowing the lawn. I look forward to it, but it would not bother me if I missed a day. The 10km takes me just under an hour (I’m built for sprints, and have never been very fast as a distance runner). I don’t like the actual running — as I get closer to the point of exhaustion, it is tedious to the point of discomfort — but I love the feeling afterwards. It’s all about getting through it. I count laps on my fingers and scribble down my times after each 1km. I am barely conscious of the beauty around me, even the curious looks from the birds and wildlife that abound in the area. In hot weather like we’ve had most of this month (24C to 34C, with humidex 6C higher than that), I try to time my runs for clouds, wind and light rain, and right after my cool-down I dive into the swimming pool — better than an orgasm. But while I’m running it is not fun, and there is no ‘high’. If, as some athletes confess, running is very much like masturbation, then I guess I need to learn to be better at the build-up technique! How do I describe the feeling after I’ve finished running? I walk differently, a natural gait with a slight bounce to it. The birds and animals react differently to me — they come closer, they interact with me as if I were another wild animal, they seem less afraid of me. On one occasion a wild turkey actually ran a whole lap about ten paces ahead of me — man, those ungainly creatures can move. As unaware of my surroundings as I am while I’m running, I’m much more aware of them afterwards. I see nuances of colour more intensely, I hear more acutely. I am somehow more connected to the Earth. I can smell the weather changing. I can taste flavours in the water I drink that normally I never notice. My whole body vibrates, quivers, glows. To some extent the exhilaration is due to accomplishment — the steady improvement to how I look and feel that I know is directly attributable to this effort. But it’s more than that. There is something primeval, instinctive about running. In his book Why We Run, Bernd Heinrich, the brilliant observer of animal behaviour, explains that we evolved the ability and passion to run because it made us more successful, and now it is part of who we are. The exhilaration that comes from running is a celebration of our animal being, of running as something inherently human, necessary, right. Marathon runners tell me that I won’t discover the true zen of running, that state of euphoria while running, until I get far enough along in my training that it becomes ’sort-of’ effortless, second nature. They may be right. I used to run 10 miles a day in my twenties, and it was never effortless, even ’sort-of’. We will see. The scientists say that the endorphins your body produces from long-distance running are comparable to those that give you the buzz from marijuana, or from chocolate, or from meditation. As someone who just hasn’t the patience, concentration and/or self-discipline for meditation (I’m still not sure which — damn I’ve tried), whose pleasure from chocolate only lasts as long as the flavour on my tongue, and who falls asleep before he gets high when he tokes, I canonly take their word for that. I’ll be content with being more connected, aware, relaxed, and closer to the Earth. |
June 25, 2006
What Progressives Are Missing
 There has to be more to the progressive movement than a set of shared beliefs. While worldwide we are around 25% of the human population, we are outnumbered by the combination of 25% conservatives, ideologically opposed to and determined to undo everything we try to do, and 50% (and growing) afflicted with anomie, who either think political belief and action is useless, or just don’t care. We progressives urgently need to pick up the pace of change, and to do that, we need to do much, much more than just vote. We need to acknowledge that most political power worldwide is firmly in the hands of an elite who are happy to control most of the world’s wealth and power and use it to acquire even more. Some of those wielding that power masquerade as progressives — running under Liberal, Democratic, Labour or People’s party banners, and talking a moderate progressive line just before elections, but their actions, most of them quiet and done in back rooms or written into legislation no one reads or understands, are designed to retrench, to prevent substantive change. Even more of the world’s political power is in the hands of those who are not elected at all — corporate leaders who simply buy politicians, and buy mainstream media, and with them, acquire far more political power than is represented by the ballot box. So progressives need to acknowledge that, unless they devote most of their time and energy to activities other than electing and lobbying politicians, they will continue to accomplish nothing. Indeed, they will accomplish less than nothing, since in the meantime the corporate and political elite will be busy dismantling, rolling back, bribing their way out of, and circumventing laws and regulations, a much easier process than getting them passed, and enforced, in the first place. As much as I admire what George Soros and Daily Kos are doing, it is largely futile. I would guess that the money leveraged for neo-conservative and neo-liberal causes of all kinds, when you add in those of right-wing religions, big corporations looking for concessions and favours, and anti-regulation ideologues, would have to be at least a thousand times greater than what the handful of rich altruistic progressives like Soros could muster. And the progressive political parties and the progressive blogosphere are utterly preoccupied with getting people who they think represent their values and interests elected, which, even if they were wildly successful, which is doubtful given the agnostic political realities of the day, and even if most of those politicians didn’t turn out to have a very different and more status quo-preserving agenda from what they campaigned on, would not begin to offset the political power of the unelected. Progressives need to find another way to bring about change. The effect of strikes and demonstrations, the traditional progressive alternative means of expressing dissatisfaction with the status quo, has been reduced to the point of impotence by anti-democratic laws, anti-democratic enforcement authorities, and media propaganda. Case in point: the response of the majority of Americans to the Latin American demonstrations in the streets earlier this year was to become even more xenophobic and favour more draconian anti-immigrant legislation. So I’m not talking about rallies or sit-ins either — even when the police open fire on demonstrators and when it’s caught on film, the media still spin it is a defensive response to ‘provocation’. What we need to do instead is starve the status quo. The existing political and economic power structure is like a black hole — it has an insatiable and ever-growing need for consumption to keep it growing. Its Achilles’ heel is that if it stops growing, it dies. It is terrified of anything that threatens its growth, which is why when eBay and Amazon created a vast market for used goods, and file-sharing took off, legislation was quickly introduced to try to kill the Internet by allowing the telecom monopoly to favour big corporations (who pay for the privilege) in the allotment of bandwidth, and to charge huge tolls for all high-bandwidth applications. The fight for what has come to be called Network Neutrality is now the pivotal political battle of our time, ultimately more important than any election. We must not lose it. Here’s what else we must do to starve the status quo:
This seventh point is the one that drives me crazy, because you’d think with the Internet it would be easy. But the truth is, most of us unwittingly contribute far more to, and hence support, socially and environmentally irresponsible governments and corporations far more than we think. We buy stuff from companies we don’t realize are opposed to everything we believe in (usually because the parent company’s name is deliberately unpublicized). We have no idea what our investment funds are actually invested in. As customers, we are deliberately deceived and lied to, but in the face of that we are utterly unorganized. I buy Consumer Reports because it teaches me a lot about shoddy products and practices, but they can’t even afford to put their information up online free for subscribers. When we shop, we have no way of knowing by who, how, or sometimes even where products are made, and whether we’re helping or hurting working people and the environment when we buy them. What we need, as I’ve argued before, are networked but local free-for-all consumer information exchanges, that tell us our choices and the impact of what we plan to buy, and share information and experiences with other consumers about the quality and responsibility of products, services, and the companies that provide them. What we need as well are networked but local free-for-all citizen education exchanges, that allow us to learn from other citizens, at organized face-to-face meetings and seminars, what’s really going on in the world, what we can do about it, and how we can become more self-sufficient and wean ourselves off our addiction to the systems and suppliers who oppose and undermine everything we believe in. I spend a lot of time online, researching and checking out resources that readers and friends have pointed out to me, to become more self-educated about what I can and should do. But I’m constantly finding more, and I am overwhelmed at the amount of information that is available and the extent to which the vast majority of us are ignorant of it. I recently got some material from Berrett-Koehler publishers*, a small and distinguished independent publishing company that “advances social and economic justice…through a unique combination of thoughtful analysis and progressive alternatives”. They have a partnership with the Social Value Network, a community of socially responsible entrepreneurs that, like BALLE, I bet you’ve never heard of. BK are best known as publishers of the work of David Korten, Thom Hartmann, Ken Blanchard and Henry Mintzberg, and the recent best-seller Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. But here’s some other titles they’ve published that I’d never heard of, and wish I had:
We need to know this stuff! And there are other publishers like Chelsea Green (whose purpose is “to stop the destruction of the natural world by challenging the beliefs and practices that are enabling this destruction and by providing inspirational and practical alternatives that promote sustainable living”) and New Society Publishers (whose purpose is “building an ecologically sustainable and just society not just through education, but through action”) who also have a whole suite of books that all progressives need to read and know about. So progressives are missing two important things:
The first thing, the program, needs to be built around starving the status quo. That is something that is practical, effective, and well within our power. It begins with working to ensure Network Neutrality is preserved, and then using the seven points outlined above, as individuals and as communities, to liberate ourselves from the political and economic machine that is leading to our collective ruin, and starve this machine to death. The second thing, the network, needs to be built around better information management. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, the Wisdom of Crowds has its place, but coping with the vast firehose of information available to us today is not something that can be left to collective wisdom (del.icio.us and its well-intentioned kin notwithstanding). We need to create a bottom-up network, global in scope but locally-focused, that (a) reviews, sifts and evaluates all of the information available to progressives, and creates dynamic libraries of the best available resources on each front of activism, and (b) shares and deploys the learnings from these information resources, not only by promulgating the best available resources lists, but by face-to-face seminars and meetups that teach us all how to make use of this information, and facilitate collective organization and action to make it happen. Perhaps we could create a model that would enable the authors of this information to be funded to travel from community to community to help in this sharing and deployment process. Imagine Jim Merkel (Radical Simplicity) visiting your community to explain how others have reduced their wasteful consumption of resources and achieved a happier and more fulfilling life. Imagine Ben Cohen or Laury Hammel working with you and others in your community to help you create a sustainable and responsible business. These wouldn’t be book tours, but rather change tours. If we really want to make the world a better place, we have to start doing these things. Otherwise we’ll just be fighting a continuous rear-guardaction against a much more powerful opponent. * Full disclosure: BK are seriously looking at publishing my book, The Natural Enterprise. But I’d be praising them even if they weren’t. |
June 24, 2006
Links for the Week – June 24, 2006
 Quorn, a non-animal protein made from fungus. Politics: The Parallels Between Baghdad and New Orleans: The NYT reports the decline into near-anarchy of New Orleans as the Bush Administration continues to leave it up to the ‘free market’ to rebuild the city’s devastated infrastructure — though the ‘market’ has no incentive or intention of doing anything of the sort. The parallels between Baghdad and New Orleans — two cities destroyed by horrific damage, where the troops were sent in to “restore law and order”, as if all the rest of the problems of rebuilding would somehow solve themselves, and which now sink further and further into desperation and lawlessness, are obvious. But the Bush Administration, which is directly responsible for both because of its ineptitude and inaction on rebuilding public infrastructure, remains oblivious. Why the US Should ‘Cut and Run’ from Iraq Now: An editorial in the Guardian argues it’s a full-scale “military balls-up” and that, as humiliating as withdrawal would be now, waiting until later will only make it worse. Does anyone remember Vietnam? US Supreme Court Cops Out on Government’s Environment Regulatory Authority: In a case that “came close to rolling back one of the country’s fundamental environmental laws“, the US Supreme Court split acrimoniously over the right of the government to impose environmental regulation over private property. The four right wingnuts — Thomas, Scalia, and the Bush nominees Alito and Roberts, basically argued that private property trumps government regulation, and the environment be damned. The four remaining moderates on the court offered a more reasoned balance between the two extremes. Neither side won, with the ninth judge, Kennedy, kicking it back to the appeals court. The extremism of Bush’s new nominees in their early decision sounds an ominous note over how this unbalanced group will rule on matters to come — like the outcome of the 2008 election and perhaps even some of this fall’s critical Senate and gerrymandered House races. Four Anglophone Countries Seek to Scuttle UN Aboriginal Treaty: Canada, the US, Australia and New Zealand, four countries whose treatment of aboriginal peoples has been among the most disgraceful, have banded together to try to block a new UN global aboriginal rights treaty. The opposition to this long-overdue international treaty is all about two things: money, and fear of giving the right of aboriginal communities to true self-determination. Liberate aboriginal communities from the control of dysfunctional central governments, and who knows what other communities might get it into their heads that they can run their lives better than Big Brother? The Elite’s Plan For China: Steal Everything, Then Move to North America: An interesting review in the independent Chinese journal The Epoch of the growing chasm between the tiny rich elite and the billion-plus poor in China, and the degree to which that elite is plundering the country for its own personal benefit. Remind you of any other country you know? How would you like a $375,000 unmonitored limit on your credit card? Oh, well, when they bring their stolen billions here it will help balance the trade deficit (and help make housing here unaffordable). …And the Elite in the US Gets Richer Still: American CEOs now earn an average $11 million a year, versus the average American worker salary of $42 thousand. The Canadian comparatives in US dollars (the Canadian dollar is rapidly creeping up on US dollar parity) are $1.1 million and $50 thousand, 23:1 versus the US 263:1. Here’s what all that means for the US economy, from EPInet. Bush, Secrecy and the Abuse of Power: Great recap from Salon’s Mark Follman on how Bush is using the ‘need for secrecy’ to conceal the most massive American abuse of power in a century: Abduction, torture and spying on Americans through phone taps, e-mail surveillance and prying into personal financial records. Time to Break Up Wal-Mart: Also in Salon, Andrew Leonard makes the case that, with four of Wal-Mart’s top ten suppliers driven into bankruptcy, the company needs to be broken up before it does any more damage. What is really needed of course is anti-combines legislation with real teeth, like the US had before Reagan dismantled it, to restore at least a vague semblance of competitiveness to the oligoplogy-plagued US economy. Why Are So Many Non-Profit International Organizations Corrupt?: James Surowiecki in the New Yorker tackles this question with an analysis of the despotic and patronizing FIFA president Sepp Blatter, and why the soccer world puts up with him. The Wisdom of Crowds: A Brawling Debate Over Wikipedia and the ‘Hive Mind’: Film director Jaron Lanier throws the baby out with the bathwater in his dismissal of Wikipedia and other online collective information sites on Edge. Fortunately, Edge has opened the discussion up to its member-commentators, and while the original screed leaves much to be desired, the ensuing conversation is illuminating. Bottom line: There are things The Wisdom of Crowds does brilliantly, and others it does not do well at all. The trick is knowing which is which. An additional take on this in my article tomorrow. Thanks to Robert Pitkin for the link. Environment and Energy: British Company Commercializes Fungus That Looks and Tastes Like Chicken: Wired reviews Quorn, a fungus meat-substitute (pictured above) that has soy and mushroom producers in a flap, but which could be the most important invention in decades. At this stage, unfortunately, it’s only available in pre-packaged (over-packaged) ‘prepared’ foods with other ingredients not suitable for vegans. Meanwhile, a competing idea is to grow meat from stem cells instead of live animals. Thanks to Dale Asberry for the links. Global Directory of Renewable Energy Programs: The Renewable Planet allows you to find, and post, ways that people in your community can take advantage of and invest in local renewable energy projects. Please help populate this long-overdue resource. Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Stevia: I use stevia, the natural South American chemical-free zero-calorie sweetener, instead of sugar. Monsanto doesn’t want you to know about it. This beautifully-designed site comes to the rescue, and includes some great, mostly-vegetarian recipes. Petition for Laws to Eliminate Toxic Chemicals: It’s a Canadian petition, from Environmental Defence, and it’s wasted on the global warming denying Harper government, but there probably isn’t a country in the world that doesn’t have it just as bad. Our governments and corporations are poisoning us, for profit — It’s that simple. Learn more. …But Don’t Compensate by Living in a Sterile Environment: A CBC report suggests that the current epidemic of allergies, asthma, arthritis and auto-immune diseases could be due to lack of exposure at a young age to substances that would allow our bodies to build up resistance to them naturally. So the despicable practice of getting rid of your pets when you have a baby, or soaking your home and lawn with toxic antibiotics, could actually make your family sicker. Thanks to Dale Asberry for the link. Just for Fun: If you have the opportunity where you live to catch the BBC series Hustle, do so — you won’t be disappointed. Light-hearted fun with a group of grifters who outrun the police while sticking it to greedy and corruptcorporate and government bigwigs. Those old enough to remember The Rogues will know the idea, and it never gets stale. |
June 23, 2006
Our Imperialist Heritage
 Caveat: This is a rant. I had to get it out of my system. Nothing very constructive here, I’m afraid. Probably the biggest lie that we in the affluent nations tell ourselves is that those in the world’s struggling nations have the power, in their own hands, to establish traditions of constitutional liberalism, democracy and free market capitalism and hence join the ranks of the world’s affluent nations. It’s a variation of the same lie we tell the poor and powerless in our own countries — that they can accomplish anything if they work hard at it, and that their economic suffering is something they should be personally ashamed of, rather than angry about. Imperialism is defined as “a policy of extending control or authority over foreign entities as a means of acquisition and/or maintenance of empires”. In practice it is as old as civilization, and has prevailed intermittently throughout most of the world since civilization began. Its basis is inequality of wealth and power, and the use of that wealth and power to amass more and to subjugate those who lack it. It is a form of continuous economic warfare, often accompanied by political warfare. We have been waging this war for a very long time. I watched a documentary the other day that showed the front lines of this war. Two African boys, brothers age 10 and 12, described the life they live as mine workers. Six days a week, fourteen hours a day, they work with pickaxes breaking up rock and sifting it for tiny pieces of copper. Then they spend hours immersed waist-deep in toxic sludge sluicing the sediment to extract the ore. At the end of the day they are paid, not by the hour, but by how much copper their work has produced. On a good day they make enough to buy food from the mine’s store to feed their starving family. Most days they do not, and they walk home to tell their family the bad news and fall asleep, exhausted, until dawn starts another workday. The mine is owned, through a convoluted series of numbered companies, by a huge Western mining conglomerate traded on the NYSE, whose executives earn salaries and bonuses in the millions of dollars per year. The copper the boys’ slave labour produces may well end up in the jewelery you are wearing, or in the computer equipment that allows you to read this. The reality is that much of the area of the world’s struggling nations is an environmental holocaust: Horrific overpopulation relative to the carrying capacity of the land, soils depleted to baked clay and desert from overuse and misuse, toxic waste of every imaginable type, most of it the product of unconscionable and irresponsible practices by Western-owned corporations and massive, unregulated dumpsites for Western chemical and technological garbage, water degraded to the point it is undrinkable, corrosive and cancerous, air fouled by exhaust and dust-storms, forests razed for crops totally unsuited for the soils left behind. These environmental atrocities were exported from our affluent nations. We discovered that the most ‘economical’ way to deal with environmental regulations and the pollution and waste from our industries was not to clean it up, but to shift it to struggling nations, away from the eyes of our own regulators and voters. We bribed the political and economic elite of these nations to take our poisons and to exploit their own people as slaves for our industries. We bought up all their best land — farmland and mineral-rich land — at fire-sale prices before the poor, ignorant and desperate owners had any idea of its economic value, and then milked it for all it was worth. All of the food and minerals were harvested to feed our needs, not those of the natives, who could not afford them anyway on what they were earning. Instead, we sold them our Western foods, government subsidized to the extent of $300 billion per year (paid for by taxes from our workers) — unhealthy, overpriced, overprocessed crap like (irony of ironies) baby-formula, the one product they need least of all. We sold them our Western drugs for the diseases that our pollution and waste had given them, and then shrugged when these drugs were unaffordable and ended up in black-markets making even more money for the corrupt local elites — elites that we had mostly installed in power because they allowed us to continue our imperialist exploitation. And of course we sold them our Western weapons, trillions of dollars worth, vital to keep the peasants and dissidents suppressed. Despite this, there was opposition. We countered it by training ‘friendly’ governments how to subjugate, torture, terrorize and ‘disappear’ their opponents. We assassinated ‘unfriendly’ governments, and financed and organized their military overthrow. We used the IMF and other international economic bodies to keep the ‘friendly’ governments in line. “You owe us billions for the armaments and other destructive and useless crap we’ve sold you, and if you dare cross us, or spend money on domestic infrastructure instead of buying more crap from us, we’ll call the loans and bankrupt you. Let us show you what happened to the last country this happened to…” We used the WTO and GATT to institutionalize this theft and intimidation, bullying countries into signing ‘free trade’ agreements that prohibited governments from implementing or enforcing social or environmental regulations in their own countries if those regulations exceeded those of the most lax signatories. We used the huge multinationals to globalize the race to the bottom, forcing suppliers in struggling nations to lower their prices for what they were selling to us every year, despite the increasing cost as the resources began to get exhausted, or lose the contract to some even more destitute country that would. We did a lot more than this, but you get the idea. The end-result is the story of the two African boys, multiplied by a billion. The end-result is that the struggling nations of the world no more have their fate in their own hands than the victim of a mugging stabbed and left for dead in an alley is to blame for not healing himself. Our affluent cities are not sustainable. They produce a tiny fraction of what they consume. While some of that deficiency comes from our own horrific factory farms, our own soil-exhausted and oil-dependent grain and fruit and vegetable farms, our own increasingly-depleted forests, our own reckless and environmentally disastrous mining ventures, much of that deficiency in our brave new globalized world is made up by the people of the struggling nations, staggering under the impact of our heartless and ruthless imperialism. Its cost is their suffering, their grinding poverty and malnutrition and disease, the horrific despoilment and ruination of their land, air, food and water, the creation of suicidal anger and resentment among their people. The copper on your wrist and in your PC is only a billionth of what our imperialist heritage has wrought. Just one more unsustainable deficit, looming larger every year, that the next generation and the generation after that will have to repay. Empires never last. They become harder and harder to keep together as the spoils run out and as more and more new lands must be subjugated to keep the fatherland in the lifestyle to which the rulers have become accustomed. And when empires come apart the result is usually not pretty. Despite all of this, and despite the fact that we work to ensure that the people of struggling nations will never be sufficiently educated to understand what we have done to them, there are growing signs, at least in Latin America and the Mideast, that the people won’t tolerate it much longer. The empire can’t even afford to provide its puppet regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq with sufficient infrastructure to quell the unrest of their people. That cost would be at least two trillion dollars, and it will never be paid. The vast majority of their people are hostile to our empire, and will inevitably be ruled by governments, good or bad, that are hostile to our empire. This is no ‘clash of civilizations’, it’s a global insurrection, starting with those who have the least left to lose. The empire is stretched too thin, and the breaking point is near. The elites know this, which is why they are pillaging and hollowing out the corporate and government treasuries they control, hoarding everything they can before the collapse. According to the EPI, executive compensation in the US is running at 250-300 times average worker compensation, an unprecedented level. I am reminded of an old (and newly relevant again) cartoon that shows three immense jowled General Motors executives at a meeting of disgruntled shareholders and employees. The executives are beaming withself-satisfaction. Each wears a big ‘GM’ badge. The first reads GM: Grievous Misconduct. The second reads GM: Gross Mismanagement. The third reads GM: Got Mine! That might be an appropriate epitaph for the Empire. |
June 22, 2006
taking caer
 it was theatre night in clan comri, a biweekly event that caer never missed. she walked along the lane from the commonplace, the lovely cluster of stone thatched-roof huts where the clan’s shared property was housed, and which included the windfarm and the solar heaters and the clan’s last remaining computer, with its rich naÔve history of the ancient civilized world, in the old, awkward tongue that, when ’spoken’ by the elders who still knew how, scared the children with its gruffness and severity.
the new generation of the clan had evolved a new language, which was sung rather than spoken, with each sound, depending on inflection and tone and duration, representing an idea, object or action and its qualifiers. the elders said that it was only natural that the comri invent a language based on song, since their old tongue was sing-song-like anyway, and everyone knew the comri had the best voices in the world. the young had picked up and enriched this new language, and, through the nomad network, had spread it to other clans. it was said that the comri could understand and communicate with the birds. caer loved this lane, rich with wild berries and currants and surrounded on all sides by the deciduous forest that had reclaimed most of the great british island since the demise of civilization over a century before. she spread her arms wide to touch the leaves and branches of the trees on either side as she walked, and delighted as the cool drops of a recent rain showered off the leaves into her hair and onto her breasts and legs. <<ye walk like a wild filli, so ye’re perfect for the role of the black beauty>>, one of the elders had told her, and after her experience acting as that famous horse on theatre night, caer had fallen in love with acting, and studied each performance she attended with delight and intensity. nearly all of the sixty members of clan comri were there for theatre night, along with several young nomads, students from other clans who were visiting, learning the comri ways, sharing the learnings of other clans, and bringing the disks with the latest lore for the computer. as the actors set up in the round clearing surrounded by the flat limestone outcrops on which the audience would sit, the members of the clan sang to each other, and were entertained by musicians and magicians, to the delight of the rosy-faced children. the chef-artists had prepared a vegetarian feast of leeks and cabbage, potatoes and onions, apples and pears, wild mushrooms, berries, and oats, and of course bara-lawr, the exquisite bread made with oats and native seaweed that had sustained the comri peoples since long before the civilization had come and gone. at one time these feasts included lamb and bacon, but since the time of the prion-diseases the eating of farmed animals had become deadly, so comri resourcefulness had substituted vegetable oils but otherwise kept the recipe unchanged from what it had been for over a millennium. in the centre of the stage was a wicker-framed coracle boat, a prop that indicated that the play was set in a foreign land near the sea. a tartan draped over the boat suggested that it was set in the loch-lands. caer had spent some of her nomad time at clan moray in those lands. some of the actors were wearing kirtles and doublets — so strange that the ‘civilization’ people saw fit to wear clothes, so uncomfortable and disguising of the beauty of the human body! caer had had to wear a costume when she played the black beauty, and found it frighteningly constraining and uncomfortable. and it covered up all her tattoos, adornments and body jewelery, the very epitome of her individuality! never in her twenty years of life had she felt so imprisoned, and by mere cloth. several of caer’s friends and lovers had joined her on the limestones around the grassy stage, and now the play began. it was the story of a laird and his wife, rich and ambitious people from civilization time. when the actors sang their parts, the children in the audience shrieked with laughter at the trills and flourishes that they added to the words of their songs, as their parents explained to them that such extravagances in language and fashion and manner were common in those days. the story was very violent and disturbing to caer and the other young members of the audience — the laird, urged on by his wife, killed many people to become and stay as ‘king’ of their clan. the next play was meant for children, and was a short play based on an ancient fable about creatures called ‘tribbles’. at first the tribbles were cute and adorable, but soon they multiplied so much that they overran the stage and got out of control. the play was traditionally used to introduce children in the clan to the importance of using birth control. after the theatre, there were drinks and potions and more magic tricks, and then the people slowly made their way back to the communal sleeping area. caer played with her friends for awhile, and then went for a walk with zan, a young man she was especially fond of. she presented him with a poem in the old tongue that she had found on the computer, and which, she said, blushing, reminded her of their time together. she loved him, she said, and the red lipstick she had used to paint and accentuate her pubis was an expression of the joy that love brought out in her. they then made love, slowly, gently, caer laughing and joking and urging zan on with loud joyous songs, zan more restrained, focused, serious. as they lay in the afterglow zan sang that he wished he could have her all to himself, and caer began to cry. <<ye nae like yeself much, that ye must hae me as a personal trophy, as a possession>>, she sang, miserably, her voice breaking. <<i’ve said before, tis unhealthy, that>>. <<i just can’t bear others hae’ing yer body>>, he replied plaintively. <<the thought of ye laughing and coming with them as they’re inside ye, just makes me crazy! i can tolerate when yer loving wit’ the girls, but not wit’ other boys>>. <<there be lots of me to go around>>, she sang back, with great distress, <<tis not like ye have to wait in line for me! i’m here for you and we can play whenever you like. but look ye i have to be free. ye lock me up for yer exclusive use i’ll just be miserable, like a caged bird, no good for ye nor anyone. don’t ask me to make such a sacrifice!>> they lay down and slept at the edge of the commonplace, in the comfort of one of the solar heaters. when caer awoke, zan was gone. he had left her a note. . . . . . <<he’s gone>>, she sang to her mother. <<become a nomad again, he has. what is’t wit’ some people — the jealous young and the senile old and the angry in-between — that they be obliged to make others so unhappy, and for naught? is’t a disease of the head, and what causes it? haen’t we learnt enough from the history stories, like the show last night about ambition and last month’s show about ishmael and the great forgetting? is’t some tragic flaw of gaia that she inflicts on us to make us wary, or what is’t?>> her mother thought for a moment, and then replied: <<i think it’s gaia’s trick on us. she is a great experimenter, always inventing those that is a little different from the rest, to see what works and what doesn’t, in her evolutionary way. that is what has led us to be what we are now, you know. as she learns what works and what doesn’t, so do we, and that’s important, learning, to keep us from another great forgetting, such as those poor folks back in civilization had to endure, before they blew themselves up in despair, and most of gaia with them.>> <<your poor boy zan>>, she continued, <<tho’ I know ye love him dearly, is a messenger to ye and to us from gaia that we must never again forget who we really are, never allow others to imprison us in a world pretend-controlled by humans. your friend’s departure is gaia’s trickster wink at us, my love — she is teaching ye, and us, the critical art and skill of letting go.>> caer hugged her mother, crying, and walked away, along the narrow lane between the thick woodlands towards the commonplace. and soon she heard the whisper-song of invitation, the laughter of her young friends and lovers seducing her into the forest and away from the sadness. she sighed, smiled, reached out an arm, and was drawn in, surrounded by hugs and kisses of love and consolation — and then suddenly tagged with the yellow die that made her ‘it’. she gasped in surprise, andlaughed, and chased after the others to join the game. (As regular readers will have guessed, this story segment is practice-writing for one of the chapters in The Only Life We Know.) |
June 21, 2006
Doing Customer Anthropology When Your Customer is the Public
 In a recent article, I provided an overview of Customer Anthropology, one of the hottest research and innovation tools in business today. The essence of this approach is that customers often don’t know what they need, so by spending time observing them using your products (and your competitors’ products) you can often identify many business opportunities (and threats) that sales analysis, interviews and customer satisfaction surveys won’t reveal. If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, your first important task is to find an unmet need, understand why it is not currently being met, and assess whether you and your partners have the capabilities and resources to meet it. Customer Anthropology provides a terrific means to do this task. It allows you to see, first hand, what people need that isn’t being provided by current products (users cursing, complaining, and working around deficiencies in the existing products is a great clue). And it enables you to see why the current products aren’t meeting the need, which can help you determine why the very smart incumbent producers are missing the mark. Of course, you also need to understand the production economics and the technology limitations, but observing customers will get you off on the right foot. Most of the examples of Customer Anthropology in the literature are business-to-business. Steelcase uses this approach to design effective workspaces for its customers, which are, at least directly, other corporations. Medical technology companies use this approach by visiting hospitals and medical facilities, and they’re observing the doctors and staff, not the patients. Once corporate customers appreciate the benefits of Customer Anthropology, they’re often more than willing to allow their suppliers to observe their people at work. And they’re curious to learn about how to use the technique with their customers. But what do you do when your customer is the public, or when, although you may sell your product through intermediaries, it is the public’s use and satisfaction with the product you want to observe, not the intermediary’s? In one sense, because you don’t need to get permission to access corporate offices, Customer Anthropology with the public is easier than with corporate customers. But there are a number of issues to address:
Let’s take each of these issues in turn. Respecting Privacy On the privacy issue, it’s important that you be honest and open with those you are observing, even though to some degree that may compromise the accuracy of your observations. If the customer knows you are observing them using their product, they’re less likely to throw it across the room in frustration. This is an issue that anthropologists deal with all the time. They need to gain the trust of the people they are observing. That trust requires absolute honesty. If they’re using your product (or a product similar to something you’re thinking of producing) for dubious purposes, or if they’re awkward using it, they need to know you won’t rat them out or ridicule them. They need to know you’re observing them solely to help you design a better product for them to use, and they need to have given their consent to be observed. And you, as the anthropologist, need to have the judgement skills to know when what you’re observing is bona fide behaviour, and when it’s a performance for your benefit. As observer, you need to make yourself as inconspicuous as possible. If the use of the product you’re studying occurs in public places, you can of course do some observation without the knowledge or consent of the people you’re observing. But there are serious limits to such opportunities. One of the key elements of Customer Anthropology is the follow-up interview with those you’re observing to clarify behaviours that you didn’t understand simply from watching. You can’t go up to a stranger and say “I’ve been observing you trying to use that cigarette lighter to start your barbecue. Can I ask you a few questions about why you’re doing that?” It can be useful, if you can afford it, to offer some incentives to those you are observing, to encourage them to allow you to let you eavesdrop on them. The Nielsen company did this for years to get the right to monitor exactly what parts of what programs and commercials customers were watching on TV. The customer got various gifts and monetary rewards, and Nielsen got the unvarnished truth, which turned out to be a lot different from what people said they were and weren’t watching in surveys. One of the cleverest incentives I’ve heard of was providing the customers under observation with digital cameras or even movie cameras, and inviting the customers to use the cameras to film themselves and their friends using the product in question (I believe it was a sports shoe). That way, the observer and the observation were less obtrusive, and the customer got to use the cameras for other, personal purposes during the observation period, and to keep the resultant footage. The possibilities for getting around the privacy issue and getting cooperation from those you are observing are limited only by your imagination (and your research budget). Gaining Access Suppose you’re a great admirer of Interface Carpets (full disclosure: I’m a great admirer, and I have a few shares in this company). You like the fact that they make cradle-to-cradle carpet products (no virgin material, everything 100% recycled) for the industrial/commercial market, but feel that there is a need for something similar but customized to the residential market. One of the advantages of the Interface model is that their carpet comes in 1′ square pieces, like tile, so that the carpet in areas of heavy wear and with unremovable stains can be replaced without having to replace the entire carpet. You want to see if this model might work in private homes, but how to get inside? Do people still buy carpet for their homes, or is everyone going to hardwood, composites and tile? You might settle for just visiting the homes of people you know. You might hang out at carpet stores and eavesdrop until you wore out your welcome. You might buy data from an insurance company on what percentage of residential floors have each different kind of flooring (they do compile this data). Now, use a bit more imagination. Who sees the carpet in thousands of people’s homes? Carpet and flooring installers. So you might offer some incentive to an installer to do your observation for you. Even better, you might volunteer to ‘apprentice’ with an installer for free for a couple of months on a part-time basis — the first day on each new job. You help with the grunt work — removing the old carpet, carrying in the supplies etc., and in return you get to gather first-hand information about all the flooring in the homes of people who are replacing their existing flooring — precisely your potential customers. And as ‘apprentice’ you can chat with the homeowner and the installer and ask some questions to feel out the market for your idea. Defining Your ‘Customers’ Here’s where the need/affinity matrix pictured above comes in. There are three steps to sussing out unmet needs to fill:
This is a complex process, and one that is often poorly done by researchers and marketers and designers and advertisers who try to reduce this to a merely complicated process. They’re content to know the ‘demographics’ of their users, a very rough cut at segmenting the market for a product. But such demographics leave out or bury the most valuable information, information on why certain groups have this need. Market surveys are inadequate to unearth this information, or even to identify the precise affinity groups that share a particular need. They don’t fit within the parameters of simple/complicated ‘choose one answer’ survey questions. Observation and one-on-one interviews provide a much richer mine of information about needs. Since your brain, unlike surveys, is capable of embracing complexity, interpreting Customer Anthropology and follow-up interview data can allow you to put together a much more precise need/affinity matrix than most of the big players in any industry would have either the ability or the patience for (what may be a very comfortable and lucrative niche for your business is likely too small and too risky for big competitors stretching for huge, high-margin growth every year). The graphic above shows an example of this process, the plastic decking (like Eon or Trex) and fencing materials that are eating into the market of outdoor wood decks and wood and metal fences. A number of years ago, some enterprising individuals identified several unmet needs in this area: Outdoor decks and fences that didn’t need a lot of regular maintenance (painting and repair), were relatively simple to install, and did not use creosote or other preservatives shown to be hazardous to health. The ‘job to be done’ was a safe (to human health) surface for summer recreation or privacy fence that would last a lifetime with no maintenance. None of the existing wood products did this precise job. Two companies in particular, Eon (a 100% recycled plastic product) and Trex (a recycled plastic/wood composite product), developed products that did this job. They succeeded where others failed because they accurately assessed not only what the ‘job to be done’ was that existing products didn’t do, but precisely who needed that ‘job to be done’ and why. The buying affinity groups weren’t defined by traditional demographics but by (a) their concern for health and safety of their personal recreation and entertainment area (and, to some extent, for the environment) and (b) their lack of time and/or skill for carpentry work. These products were designed, developed and marketed to these specific affinity groups, not to the traditional home-handyman types, as their successful differential strategy canvases, shown below, demonstrates: As an entrepreneur, deciding which of the millions of potential customers to observe is part of the iterative process of finding the sweet spot where you and your entrepreneurial partners’ talents and passions (your Collective Genius) intersects with what there is an unmet need for. The trick is not getting so enamoured with what your Collective Genius could produce that you don’t ensure there is a real, unmet need for it. And not getting so enthusiastic about finding a solution for a real, unmet need you have uncovered through your research and observation that you end up trying to do something outside your Collective Genius (something you’re not especially good at, or which you don’t really relish the thought of spending a lot of your waking hours doing). Trust your instincts to know who might have needs that your Collective Genius could address, and therefore who to observe and interview. Trust your instincts, too, to know when your Customer Anthropology is not working, and to try something, or someone, else. And always pay attention: Good anthropologists don’t turn off their observational and listening skills when they go home at night. Some of the world’s greatest ideas have been serendipitous. And, as I keep emphasizing, I think it’s essential that you not try to do this alone. Collectively you have a lot more Genius than any one person alone can muster. Collectively you have different passions, that allow you and each of your partners to do exclusively what they love. And between you, you have a lot more eyes and ears to observe and research what is needed, and to assess those observations and that researchobjectively. |
