Serenity

"Good answer."

Good movie.

Science fiction fans being what they are, I'm sure someone probably noted this and posted it weeks before the film even opened. But if you haven't read about it before, as I hadn't, then look for the hull number of another famous sf starship featured prominently in the movie.

A Stan Lee - Groundhog Day no-prize to any of my friends who spot that hull number and name the ship. No fair googling the answer.

Update: No, Shelley, I'm afraid it was not the ENTERPRISE. Here's a hint: Asking for the name was a bit of misdirection. This ship has no name. It does have a hull number though.

It was on the screen quite prominently more than one time, and was visible for several seconds each time.

I'll also note that Serenity had the main theater at my multiplex as well, but that attendance at the 7:30 showing was modest. I rather expect it won't remain in the big theater long. And the audio was bad throughout the movie. I don't know if it was the print or the theater's system, but it wasn't good.

Glass Houses

That modulation from fantasy to widespread buy-in without benefit of intervening critical intelligence is a core dynamic in the hockey-stick spike of the NewAge++ phenomenon.

Unlike the slow and arduous uptake of The Cluetrain Manifesto, burdened as it was by resistance attendant to the rigorous critical examination it received at every level.

One man's received wisdom is another man's snake oil. Markets being "conversations," and everything being "miscellaneous."

I will say this: Zen at least acknowledges that the finger is not the moon, and everyone is giving you the finger. Especially marketers.

Rat Race

The usual observation: Only the rats win.

A Tale of Two Horses

I almost wrote, "A Tail of Two Horses." Wouldn't that have been clever?

My son sold his '93 Ford Bronco the other day. I was a happy guy. Every time I turned around it was something else with that truck. He only got $3K for it, and he wanted to get something newer and more reliable. That pretty much means a loan, or a long search for just the right small car.

I did a lot of research, looking at cars I thought would meet his needs and his budget. I ran the CarFax report on each candidate, printed out the Consumer Reports review, plus the actual listing. I had eight candidates and, long story short, he didn't want to look at any of them.

Which is pretty much a repeat of my experience with my oldest daughter. I recall showing her Mazda Protegés, Toyota Carollas, and Nissan Sentras, but no, she wanted this Bronco II. I co-signed that note for her, and she made every payment. I think she really enjoyed that truck too, but I was glad to see it go when she bought her Volkswagen Jetta a few years ago.

So I took Chris around to a few dealerships yesterday to look at used cars. We were on our third dealership where we met Dave, the salesman. Now, my name is Dave, and Chris's actual first name is David. It's a pretty common name. Dave asked us what we're looking for, and I told him a sedan, $10K or less. He said he needed to speak to the manager to see what they might have.

While we were sitting there, Chris said to me that whatever he gets, it has to be either blue or black. I said, "You're buying a used car. You don't get to worry about the color."

Dave the salesman appeared about 30 seconds later, having not been in a position to have overheard that comment, and announced that he had two cars for $10K out the door, a black Civic and a black Mustang.

I had this sudden sensation that felt kind of like a giant tumbler falling home, and a lock beginning to open. I was afraid we were about to buy a black car. I suggested we go look at the Civic. Chris said he'd like to look at the Mustang. So we go look at the Mustang. It's pretty near immaculate. The only gross defects are one scratch that had been clumsily touched-up with paint, a similar effort to a chip on the front fascia, and a scratch that had been untreated. No dents. The engine compartment had been cleaned and detailed and looked brand new. 63K miles on it, and it's a 2002, so it's a little high on the mileage. V-6, automatic, CD AM/FM cassette stereo, alloy wheels, power windows and locks and working AC, something the Bronco didn't have, and the tires look pretty near new, lots of tread. Salesman Dave asked Chris if he would like to take it for a test drive. I tag along. We switched drivers at the halfway point. Ran good.

Okay, Chris was sold. He wanted this vehicle, he didn't want to look at anything else. His mom is going to co-sign for him on this loan. So he called his mom while I helped Dave get the paperwork started.

I'm paying for the insurance. I wasn't quite prepared for how much the insurance was going to go up, getting out of the Bronco and into the Mustang. Ironically, I think the Mustang is a much safer vehicle for him. Lower center of gravity, and he won't be jumping dirt mounds and going "muddin'" in this thing. I was shocked when they told me how much my premium would go up. It's safe to say I'll be paying more in insurance payments than he will be in car payments. Yeesh. And it's the kind of thing where, because it's on my policy, I can't set differing levels of coverage for each vehicle. I increased the deductibles on each vehicle to $500.00, but that didn't save much.

It took a while for his mom to show up, and then we had to go over and talk to the finance guy. After they were finished with him, I had to have the insurance company fax the finance guy a document showing Chris was on the policy. By the time I wrapped that up, I looked around and both Chris and his mom were gone. I guess he was a little excited to go drive his new car.

I headed home and called his mom after I arrived. She said he had gone to pick up his sister from her friend's house, anything to drive his new car. Caitlin reports that she loves the car and wants one too. Fortunately, she's at least 3 years away from driving and I hope to have Chris paying for his own insurance by then.

I had hoped to get him into a little four-banger of some kind, maybe with a five-speed as clutches are usually cheaper to replace than transmissions. Something that wouldn't suggest the "need for speed," every time he walked out to it, and would go a ways between fill-ups. A wise woman told me not to force him into a car he didn't like. He would hate the car and everything that ever went wrong with it would be my fault. As it is, I think he has a safe, reliable vehicle that he cares about. I won't have to get up in the middle of the night and try to figure out how to get it running, or take him home because we can't get it started. Although I'm still not over the shock of the higher premium, I'm relieved to have him out of the Bronco and happy that he's happy in his new (to him) Mustang. As he said, "It's a pretty pony."

Interesting Debate

Deepak Chopra vs. Michael Shermer.

I confess that I have a difficult time reading very much from Michael Shermer. It's the same sort of experience I have reading Daniel Dennett: the faint but irritating and ever present sound of an axe being ground.

I also confess that I'm much more sympathetic to Deepak Chopra, though I must say that I winced when I read this:

5. Worst of all, skeptics take pride in defending the status quo and condemn the kind of open-minded inquiry that peers into the unknown

I sometimes worry that I come off as a self-important petty nay-sayer who tries everyone's patience when I'm criticizing the ideas of some of the internet's most beloved figures. And it does occur to me from time to time that I may seem to be defending some aspect of the status quo. But that's not what this interminable screed is about tonight.

What Shermer and Chopra are each arguing against, though from radically different positions, is suffering.

Suffering is the difference between the way things are, and the way we'd like them to be. We can argue about this, but as a working definition, I think it's pretty good.

We are all ignorant to a very great extent, because the nature of ignorance is such that we can't know what we don't know. Much of suffering is related to ignorance. The way we are is ignorant. The way we'd like to be is not ignorant. Science is one way of coping with ignorance. The more we think we know, the more we're "empowered" to affect our own destiny. Or so it would appear. It seems we often don't agree on what we "know."

Because we all have the desire to suffer as little as possible, there are many people who promote competing ideas for alleviating suffering. In their broadest senses, science and religion are two competing ideas for alleviating suffering. And each actually works, to one degree or another.

Competition, by and large, is a very good thing. But it's not an exclusively good thing. It's not, for example, a good unto itself. Hopefully, that's stating the obvious.

Within our social structure, many people compete for rank in the hierarchy by exploiting our desire to reduce suffering. Some of this is meritorious, some of it is not. Some people in this competition exploit our ignorance and fear of suffering, and this is almost never meritorious. The thing to bear in mind is that in this competition for rank, when the objective of reducing suffering is secondary to the objective of increasing or maintaining rank, the outcome is sometimes (usually?) a net increase in suffering.

For a long period of time in our past, religion held a dominant position in the hierarchy of beliefs regarding how to alleviate suffering. In the last few centuries, science has overtaken that position. But that doesn't mean science and religion aren't still competing. And neither side is immune from exploiting ignorance or fear to advance their respective causes. Added to the mix must be politics and various theories of governance, that all rely to one extent or another on different appeals to both religious and scientific authorities. With so many entities vying to alleviate suffering, it's a wonder we don't already live in a paradise of one kind or another. I guess you'd have to wonder about what the primary objectives really are.

But then, I might say we already live in the best of all possible worlds.

I was not a very religious person for most of my adult life. I'm not willing to claim that right now, mostly because I don't really know what being a "religious person" means. Although I was raised a Catholic, I stopped going to church about my sophomore year at the Naval Academy. Although I had what I would call "conditioned" behaviors, in times of great stress I would pray, I never had any sort of personal relationship to anything divine in nature. By education and inclination, I was an engineer. I was always interested in science and technology, and I pursued many broad interests in science and mathematics. I won't claim that I was ever very good at them, but probably good enough. For most of my life, I had the idea that science and technology were the things that would most likely alleviate suffering, "make the world a better place."

Eventually, as many people do, I encountered a form of suffering in my own life that couldn't be alleviated by any sort of material solution. I could no longer distract myself with things, and I had run out of stories to tell myself to explain away my suffering; but I was fortunate that I was able to mostly steer clear of drug and alcohol abuse as a way of coping with the profound sense of unhappiness I was experiencing. I did abuse alcohol from time to time, but it was never a chronic thing. Ultimately, I had no choice but to confront the things I had been avoiding out of fear for too many years.

That marked the beginning of a significant personal transition in my life. I was able to find excellent help, but I still had to do "the work." And if I thought I was suffering before, it didn't compare to what I was about to endure as I confronted years of fear and denial. Those were some of the darkest moments of my life, and more than a couple of times, I tried to think of way I could end it, without hurting all of the people I loved. In some respects, that was the only thing that kept me going, and doing the things I had to do to put my life in order. There was no other way out, other than hurting people I had already hurt too much.

Much of what that transition consisted of was learning how to "know thyself," to confront the choices I had made and the reasons behind those choices. I had to disassemble and examine all the beliefs that propped up my rationales for my choices, most of which were either false or incomplete. A lot of it was learning how to pay attention, and what to pay attention to. Most of suffering is paying attention to "the difference." I learned about habituated thinking, and conditioned behaviors.

Because I still possessed my natural interest in science, I began to read a lot of books about how the brain works. It was suggested to me many times to undertake a course in antidepressant drug therapy, which I declined - perhaps out of fear, perhaps out of some stubborn desire to "do it myself." I sometimes wonder if the quality of my life at that time might not have been significantly better if I had accepted anti-depressant treatment. I know I would not wish what I felt on anyone else, and I want to be clear that it's no point of pride with me that I did it without antidepressants. It may well have been just stupidity on my part.

But I also began reading other things, starting out, unsurprisingly, with the leading "self-help manual" of that time, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Although I learned a great deal from Covey, what was more valuable to me, I think, was discovering Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, through Covey's book. That, in turn, led to other books in a similar vein, as I kind of hop-scotched between the science, self-help, and philosophy sections of Books-a-Million. I found Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and reacquainted myself with Emerson. I began reading books about Buddhism and discovered many of the insights I was learning from my therapy and the work I was doing, already laid out in an ordered, codified system.

All of which was good and welcome and fairly unremarkable. But remarkable things began to happen too. I don't write much about them, because they're not the kind of reports most people would find "credible." Certainly nobody cut from Michael Shermer's skeptical mold. But these remarkable things would happen at significant moments, and one always seemed to lead to another, as though they were meant to happen that way. Yes, I'm aware of the human mind's proclivity for seeing patterns in what are otherwise random events. But I was persuaded of something, that there is more going on here than meets the eye. One day a remarkable thing happened that I don't think I've ever written about, and I'm not sure I'm going to write about it now, except to say it was an experience unlike any other I've had in my life. I suspect others have had it too, from things that I've read. I don't think it makes me "special" in any way.

In the end, I would say that what it left me with is a different understanding of the idea of faith. To many people, faith means essentially the same thing as belief, but they're radically different. To say "faith in," is to say something essentially meaningless. Belief is an effort of will. In a way, it's an attempt to impose one's wishes on the universe. It's a way to deny ignorance, and that's a lie, or a delusion. Faith is an act of surrender, and an affirmation. It embraces ignorance and transcends it. Faith is saying "Yes!" to the universe. Or perhaps, "Not my will, but thine," if that's more to your liking.

I probably didn't explain that very well. But rest assured, it makes no difference. No explanation would be a meaningful substitute, you still have to do the work.

I still suffer. I often lose sight of my faith. But I know where to find it. I still have to do the work too. I still have to practice. And when I do, my life is better.

I used to tell myself that my life would get better when...(insert some externality here). It took me a while to learn that my life would never get better until I got better. Once I learned that, I began to get better and my life did too.

If I have one frustration, well, who am I kidding? I have lots of frustrations! But one of the ones that I have is that I find so many people who believe things will get better when...(insert your favorite externality here). Now, on my better days, that doesn't frustrate me. On my better days, I know everything is exactly the way it is supposed to be. And some days I recall that ranting away in Groundhog Day is not the same thing as doing the work. So that's all part of the work too, if that's not getting too "meta" about it.

The point is, the experience that I had has helped me to suffer less. It has helped me understand my suffering as a key to helping me better know myself. It's not something to be lamented, or ignored, or appeased, though I still do all those things from time to time. But it's not the kind of experience Michael Shermer's skepticism is likely to help guide you to. It certainly won't stop you, once you start down that path, unless you allow it to because you're really not ready to go down it. But that's not to say Michael Shermer's skepticism is a bad thing, because there are many people competing for rank in the hierarchy who are only too willing to exploit your suffering and your ignorance and your fear to promote their own agendas, to advance their own interests. So by all means, be skeptical, just don't be closed-minded.

In the end, I think Deepak Chopra did about as well as he could in the exchange, given the fact that he's arguing with a skeptic against skepticism. Did anyone think he could change Shermer's mind? But I know that Chopra knows some things that Shermer doesn't know, and won't know until he allows himself to go down a path that isn't clearly demarcated by physical evidence. Too many of us, myself among them, don't choose to go down that path until we feel we have nowhere else to turn, because we have nothing left to lose but life itself. I suspect everyone eventually gets there, because we all must lose this life ultimately anyway. I don't know that it makes a huge difference if you get there sooner rather than later. In my case, I happen to think it does, but I could be wrong. After all, the past is gone, and the future isn't here yet, all we ever have are moments to live.

Public Service

My hat's off to Shelley Powers who has volunteered to be a Red Cross relief worker in one of the many shelters housing people displaced by hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

It's probably not as hip, trendy or cool as doing something like attending LesBlogs, and it probably won't "change the world," but I expect it will make the world a little better for a few folks.

Hey, I Think Geena Davis is Hot

Everybody who diss'ed Commander in Chief can kiss my shiny metal ass. I'll take Geena Davis over Martin Sheen any frackin' day of the week.

The speech wasn't bad. What detracted from it was the loss of tele-prompter gimmick/dirty trick.

What I liked about Commander in Chief was that it makes us think about about the kind of country we'd like to be, versus what we've allowed ourselves to become. Same appeal as The West Wing.

Braver New World (Part the Third)

Imagine my disappointment that I was not one of the new billionaires, or even millionaires. You know, I'm just a "regular guy."

Braver New World (Part Deux)

Has it occurred to anyone else that in this very connected, hyper-linked world of ours, that really dumb (but very appealing) ideas can proliferate faster than ever before?

What's the check on that?

And how's that unit on Flying Spaghetti Monsterism coming? And where's my damn grant request?

Intelligent Design and "Knowledge as Conversation"

Being "collateral damage" from the Cluetrainwreck™.

An article in the Washington Post reports:

HARRISBURG, Pa., Sept. 27 -- Parents in federal court Tuesday described an atmosphere of intimidation and anger when school board members in Dover, Pa., last year decided to require high school biology teachers to read a statement that casts doubt on the theory of evolution.

Bryan Rehm, a parent who also taught physics at Dover High School, testified of continual pressure from board members not to "teach monkeys-to-man evolution." He said that the board required teachers to watch a film critical of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and that board members talked openly of teaching creationism alongside evolution.

The article concludes with this from Mr. Rehm: "Nine board members without degrees in science should not be dictating science curriculum."

One wonders what David Weinberger would make of the "degrees in science" credentials:

There is a big difference between a relativistic world in which contrary beliefs assert themselves and a conversational world in which contrary beliefs talk with one another. In the relativistic world, we resign ourselves to the differences. In the conversational world, the differences talk. Even though neither side is going to "win" — conversation is the eternal fate of humankind — knowledge becomes the negotiation of beliefs in a shared world. What do we need to talk through? What can't we give up? What do we believe in common that seems so different? What should we just not talk about? These are the questions that now shape knowledge.

I suspect that therein lies an argument for those who wish to teach Intelligent Design, indeed even Creationism, or Giant Flying Spaghetti Monsterism in science class. Because it's all just "a conversation," and the Constitution does guarantee freedom of speech.

Rest

Today's Other Stories

I watched the season finale of Battlestar Galactica last night. Pretty good cliff-hanger, and some pretty raw stuff. No new episodes until after the new year.

I happened to watch the season premiere of My Name is Earl last Tuesday, and I thought it was great. Which means it'll probably be cancelled sometime next week. It's a show about seeing one's shadow.

I chipped one of my front teeth last year and finally got around to having it fixed back in March. I'm heading north to upstate New York in two weeks to attend my 30th year high school reunion. So naturally, the tooth I had fixed in March chipped again last week. Basically, the repair just broke off, and they can't get me in until after I get back. Fortunately, it's just a small chip. Maybe it'll give my visage that charming, NASCAR-dad, redneck look that's so popular these days. Nothing against NASCAR, dads or rednecks, of course. Some of my best friends and all that...

My brother the rocket scientist may get an opportunity to work on the Crew Exploration Vehicle in NASA's new plan for returning to the moon. Pretty cool! That is, if the whole idea isn't "gone with the wind" now. Most recently, he was working on a way to make bricks out of lunar regolith.

My foot slowly continues to improve. Emphasis on "slowly." I may try to return to training next week. I have to do something. I think I've spent more time on the couch in the last few weeks than I have in the last year. And it's starting to show.

Braver New World

Interesting discussion going on in a number of weblogs. I won't call it a "conversation," because it isn't one. But it is interesting. Favorite quote from a comment by Tom Coats:

Well if that's true, then I find it completely depressing, and will look forward to my friends dropping in brand associations in telephone calls in the future so that they can scrabble for a few extra pennies at the cost of any respect I had for them.

But I maintain that this is the logical conclusion of the metaphor that "markets are conversations." There is no distinction between the social and the mercantile, no boundaries. In effect, the mercantile becomes preeminent, and the social merely exists to support and facilitate the mercantile. The social fabric becomes social capital, and every relationship is valued mainly as a business opportunity. We then pay attention to people, not because there's anything intrinsically worthwhile in paying attention to people, but because we don't want to miss a potential competitive advantage. And if it's to our advantage to ignore some people, then we will by all means do so. Compassion is something that is outsourced because it's not part of a competitive core competency. Education becomes the means by which we prepare people to enter the work force, not to help prepare people for something as soft and mushy and inane as life.

Doc says that people gather in the marketplace to make culture. That may be true, but it's also true that the market destroys culture in order to constantly create new culture more readily exploited by the market to meet the needs of the market. Culture has almost always been created to serve the top of the hierarchy, whether that may have been the divine right of kings, or the church, or the proletariat. Now it's serving the almighty dollar.

Every idea can be bent to meet a marketer's needs because, "it's just marketing." Nothing is really off limits, as long as there's some fine print. "Closed course. Professional driver. Do not attempt this." If someone claims authority while simultaneously denying responsibility, there's no problem there! We haven't diminished the idea of authority. We haven't discounted the notion of responsibility. We haven't confused the issue at all. Because, "It's just marketing!" and "Don't be so literal."

But if "markets are conversations," then what isn't marketing? Well, nothing.

I'm ahead of Tom Coats. I'm already depressed.

Actually, I'm not. I'm just feeling very sad for the people who think life is business. Don't take it personally, "It's just business."

Welcome to the braver new world. Same great "brave" taste, with half the courage.

Rise and Shine

"He's barking mad."

And now, a word from our consonant.

Doug Miller: Check This Out

Onlife.

via InVisiblog.

Headlines You Never Read

Sony plans to cut costs to save 10,000 jobs.

If I Could Talk With the Animals

Deconstructing the Conversation (Part 2)

Two's company.

If you and I wish to have a conversation, it's a relatively straightforward affair. I can speak for myself, and you can presumably speak for yourself. If you ask me, "How are you doing?" I can say, "Great!" without first checking with someone. This is because our responsibility for a conversation is congruent with our authority. No problem. Well, no more than the usual problems people have when they're trying to communicate with one another.

It gets a little more complicated when we consider communicating with others in their role as a member of a group. If I'm a single guy and I ask my friend, also single, to go down to the local bar for a beer and some pinball, he or she will either say yes or no. But if my friend is married, then he might say that he has to check with his wife first. Some guys do, some don't. This isn't to suggest which is the "right" thing to do, it's merely to point out that once we're a member of a group, however small, authority and responsibility are divided in some measure. While married friends can have conversations, and presumably do all the time, it gets slightly more complicated when the talk gets past the weather, sports or politics, and starts dealing with doing something together, essentially forming or acting as part of another group. Sure, you're still having a conversation, but you aren't just talking with your friend anymore. You talking with your friend and whatever other people he may be attached to.

The larger the group, the more distributed is the attention, authority and responsibility among the members. It is this divided or distributed aspect of attention, authority and responsibility in groups that leads to the "inertia" of bureaucracies, and our frustration with "customer service." Yet it is an inevitable consequence of trying to get a number of people to work together toward a set of common goals. If everyone shared an equal amount of authority and responsibility, achieving the goals would become an impossible task, as people would focus their efforts on those responsibilities that most appealed to them, most probably trying to be the CEO, while ignoring those that least appealed to them, to say nothing of everyone having their own idea of how something should be accomplished.

Attention, authority and responsibility are distributed, most commonly, along hierarchical lines. Again, this isn't an argument for or against "flatness," it's merely to point out that those at the lowest part of the hierarchy usually have less authority than those higher. There are some exceptions, usually related to safety or quality issues in a production line, where nearly everyone has the authority to stop production to deal with an issue related to either safety or quality. But we understand this hierarchical distribution, almost intuitively, and we demonstrate this understanding every time we ask to speak to someone's supervisor due to our unhappiness with the service we may be getting.

In Doc Searls' idyllic market, each "buyer" and "seller" is an autonomous human being, speaking and acting as individuals with complete authority over their respective parts of the transaction. In the real world, it's vastly more complicated than that, and all the more so when one considers that often even the "buyer" is someone acting as a member of a group with a specific responsibility and limited authority as well.

Three's a crowd.

If markets are conversations, just who, or what, is doing the "talking?" If we consider the broad sense that "conversation" merely involves an exchange of information incident to a transaction of authority (or wealth), I think we can identify many of the parties to the "conversation."

Obviously there is the person who wishes to "buy" something. There may be a person with something to sell, or, more often, it is a company or a corporation, groups of people, with something to sell. There are regulatory authorities that have something to say with respect to taxes, or regulations on what goods or services may be sold to which individuals. There are competing companies or corporations that probably want to participate in the "conversation" in some fashion. There are the firms that specialize in navigating the regulations and requirements imposed by the regulatory authorities, like accounting firms. There are other companies that help to manage risk by offering insurance, or loss prevention services. There are people who review or analyze the products and services offered by individuals or companies, and they usually have something to say, as do former customers. And there are probably a cast of thousands of bit players like the property owner, the power company, the telecom company, the water company, pest control services, all with something to say to someone in the marketplace in any given transaction.

Sounds pretty complicated for a "conversation," doesn't it? It looks to me much more like a rather complex web of interacting entities that participate in making the marketplace possible. If it's a "conversation," I hope everyone doesn't try talking at once!

A pair of cheap sunglasses.

But it's even more complicated than that. Human beings behave differently when they're acting in some capacity as a member of a group. I've written about this before, and I always refer to the Stanford Prison Experiment. But let's take some more prosaic examples, as people often love to object to academic studies.

Consider the case of Mr. Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft. He's about as high in the hierarchy as you can get in a very large, very powerful corporation. He's a man with a great deal of authority, and a lot of responsibility. How then to explain his performance in the infamous "monkey boy dance?" If you watch the video, notice his overall posture, particularly the movements of his arms and his vocalizations. In my untutored opinion, these are not the gyrations and cries of a relaxed individual surrendering himself to the joy of the moment. This is the behavior of someone who is in a position of leadership, with the attendant authority and responsibility, who knows nothing about leadership and who is very uncomfortable with having to perform in that role before the group he leads. Do you think Steve Ballmer bounces around like that all the time? Probably not.

That behavior was evoked in the explicit context of his role as the leader of a group, specifically when he had to appear before it. If that's not very persuasive, consider the "developers, developers, developers" chant. The linked video is a remix of the "developers, developers, developers" chant with the monkey boy dance, set to music, but they were separate events on different dates. In the "developers" chant, notice the signs of perspiration evident on Steve Ballmer's shirt. Again, it's just my opinion, but I don't believe that's all due to exertion. Some of that is anxiety. Finally, there's the most recent example from this sworn statement: "At that point, Mr. Ballmer picked up a chair and threw it across the room hitting a table in his office," Lucovosky recounted, adding that Ballmer then launched into a tirade about Google CEO Eric Schmidt. "I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f***ing kill Google."

Again, one rather hopes Mr. Ballmer isn't in the habit of throwing chairs and vowing to kill things in his day to day life outside his role as CEO of Microsoft, where again I think it isn't very clear that he's terribly comfortable in a position of leadership or that he's displayed any particular talent for it. Then you also have to wonder what the tenor of the "conversation" is between Google and Microsoft.

People behave differently in their roles a members of a group, than they do as individuals outside of that context. So even though you may be talking to someone you may know personally outside that context, once the interaction touches on their role, you're probably not talking to the same person. This is a subtle point, but it bears consideration. In a conversation, I think one generally believes one is talking with an individual. When the communication turns to the subject of the group, you're now talking to a member of a group, and there's a difference.

Just doing my job.

There are other examples. Consider this recent one where Wal-Mart filed suit against an employee, a woman who was permanently disabled in an automobile accident where she was hit by a truck. She sued the trucking company and received a cash settlement. Now Wal-Mart has filed suit to recover her cash settlement in accordance with the terms of her Wal-Mart group health insurance, despite the fact that she'll require a lifetime of institutionalized care that will exceed the cost of her award.

Do you suppose the person who works for Wal-Mart who had to file that suit is the kind of person who's routinely disposed to taking money by litigation from the permanently disabled? Is there any way shape or form that this idea doesn't stink? Well, if you're part of Wal-Mart management, maybe there is. Someone is "just doing their job." I'm sure someone rationalized this by referring to the terms of the health insurance agreement, and the fact that, presumably, the victim knew what she was getting into when she agreed to take the insurance. Or perhaps they felt that they had to pursue this disabled woman's cash settlement because it was the only fair thing to do for all the other Wal-Mart employees.

Someone had the responsibility and authority to file the suit, but they probably didn't have the authority not to file the suit; and they probably weren't willing to go up the hierarchy to seek it. Again, people behave differently as a member of a group than they do as individuals, and it isn't always for the better. It can be for the better, but it isn't always.

Because we care.

Contrast the previous example with Wal-Mart's actions in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. They seem to be vastly different, so what accounts for the difference? I think it's in the nature of the distributed attention and authority of a corporation. The authorities at the highest ranks in Wal-Mart's hierarchy are as keenly aware of the effects of Hurricane Katrina as everyone else is. The personal tragedy of a former employee probably comes to the attention of only a few people much lower in the hierarchy with much less authority and a responsibility mainly to the corporation, not the employee, to carry out its policies and instructions.

In any event, it's a fairly trivial matter for those with the greatest authority, high in the hierarchy, to perceive the tragic events attendant to a natural disaster and note the opportunity it presents to seek advantage in matters of public perception. Even then, the thought process is sometimes interesting:

Q: How are the markets reacting to the hurricane?

Patsky: It gets that specific. What they were trying to do was get some comment from somebody on Wall Street that Wall Street would not react negatively to the company donating money. I said Wall Street will consider this a one-time event and will not penalize a company for being generous at a time of tragedy in the United States. I was amazed that they had to go through that much to convince senior management.

You were saying something?

Not only do companies or corporations "think differently," they can't think as fast as you or I can. Consider the case of the Kryptonite Bike Lock company documented by that stalwart defender of Microsoft and all things "conversational," Mr. "Blog or die!" Robert Scoble and his co-author Shel Israel in their book Naked Conversations. In the e-mail exchange with Ms. Donna Tocci, we learn that Kryptonite had focused nearly all of its collective attention on addressing the actual design and mechanical defects of its product, leaving few resources to engage with the wider blogosphere, which was roundly criticizing Kryptonite; though it wasn't always clear if the criticism was directed at the defective bike locks, or the fact that Krypronite appeared to be ignoring the blogosphere, which seemed to demand that they join in "the conversation." From my perspective, Kryptonite comes off looking like they tried to do the right thing, and the petulant, hyperventilating conversationalists of the blogosphere appear to be behaving like a bunch of "true believers." But, opinions may vary.

Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.

We tend to anthropomorphize companies and corporations. In many ways, corporations are treated as though they were individual human beings under the law, which kind of legitimizes an otherwise erroneous characterization. Corporations aren't individual human beings, and while they may be said to possess certain overall characteristics, commonly referred to in the aggregate as a "corporate culture," they can't be said to possess or exhibit "values" the same way that individuals do. Here's a paragraph from a blogcritics review by Scott Robarts of the book, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, by Joel Bakan:

An example that Bakan uses is the story of Anita Roddick, founder of the Body Shop. Roddick always refused to separate her personal values from her business, indeed, that is what made the Body Shop different; that it was a kindlier, gentler corporation. It was, and Roddick was extremely successful using this business model. Then in 1982 an initial public offering of Body Shop stock was floated on the London Stock Exchange; the money raised was needed to grow the business. Later, in the 1990's the company began to have troubles, and came under pressure from stockholders to revise it's business model. Outside managers were brought in to head the company and it was reorganized to make it more efficient. Roddick to her credit responded to the changes by working hard to maintain the companies progressive values and programs. Things came to head when during the Seattle protests against the WTO, Roddick wanted the Body Shop to take a public stand against the meeting, but the company leadership refused. "Roddick then realized that her once maverick, eccentric, unusual Body Shop had become all to usual" Bakan writes, she now looks at the initial stock offering as a "pact with the devil". The underlying moral to this story is how no matter how altruistic the goals of the executive they must always ultimately succumb to the will of the corporation goals of increasing shareholder value and the bottom line.

Again, an outcome of the distributed nature of authority, with the ultimate authority theoretically residing with shareholders, whose most commonly shared "value" is presumably profitability. Another worthwhile review of this book may be found here. The point is, even as a metaphor, "conversation" doesn't illuminate in any meaningful way the nature of the relationship between companies and corporations and their customers. Corporations cannot communicate the way individuals do, even though they try to give the appearance that they can. And when they do communicate, it is always with an aim to seek some type of advantage. To be repetitious, this is neither good nor bad, but bad outcomes may obtain if one isn't mindful of it.

I never metaphor I didn't like.

A metaphor, especially if it's a new one, can help to place a familiar subject in a new light, illuminating aspects of it that were previously hidden or unclear, and giving us a new way of relating to that subject. In this regard, "conversation" fails miserably. It illuminates nothing, and what it purports to show is actually a misrepresentation of what the subject really is.

Doc Searls objected to the "battlefield" metaphor, presumably because of its implicit violence, explicitly zero-sum outcome, and the associated ideas and beliefs surrounding warfare, like "take no prisoners," or "scorched earth," or "unconditional surrender." It's all very hostile and not very compassionate. Well, there are hostile and not very compassionate aspects to markets, and they're not incidental either, they're significant features of them.

The battlefield metaphor at least accurately reflects the competitive nature of the marketplace, and the potential for suffering by those who engage in it. The conversation metaphor utterly ignores competition, and the aspects of that activity that have the potential to cause suffering. By making markets appear more friendly than they actually are, the metaphor actually makes suffering more likely, because it creates a false expectation, one that marketers can seize upon and exploit. It's not a metaphor, it's a vacuous assertion masquerading as a pithy aphorism. As a "meme" it certainly has sprouted legs, but that's more a reflection of its appeal than its truth. Dave Weinberger offered that it really means markets ought to be conversations, and much of the appeal of the "metaphor" is along those lines, which are projection or wish fulfillment, not, at least as far as I am able to discern, its truth value.

Oddly enough, Doc Searls discussed a better metaphor briefly before dismissing it:

"Another is markets are environments. In The Death of Competition, James Moore speaks of markets as ecosystems where companies and categories evolve, compete in a habitat, for resources like plants and animals, and evolve or become extinct."

This metaphor actually works. Companies and corporations are very much like living organisms, and they do compete for resources with other companies and corporations. They exist in habitats, the real one we all share, legal and regulatory habitats, as well as a kind of "eco-system" that can "evolve" around platforms, like Windows or the iPod. If we regard markets using an environment metaphor, we can see much of the activity taking place in it, and our relationship to that activity, in something of a new or different light, and think of our relationship to it in a different way.

I believe that in the environment of the marketplace, the consumer is actually the consumed. In an e-mail correspondence with a friend of mine, he suggested that we are less like chicken, free-range or otherwise, and more like sheep, where we're valued for our wool and we're periodically fleeced. Of course, we're not like sheep, though we often do act that way. This is another objection I had to The Cluetrain Manifesto. It tends to flatter its audience. I don't think I underestimate the intelligence of human beings, but I believe the authors overestimate the role of cognitive thought at the expense of conditioned behavior, and intrinsic, natural behaviors that marketers exploit at every opportunity to sell their goods. For reference, please see Influence: The Psychology of Persusion, by Dr. Robert B. Cialdini, which carries the cover blurb attributed to the Journal of Marketing Research, "For marketers, this book is among the most important books written in the last ten years." Well, it's a pretty damn good book for us consumers too, and it's written for consumers. You'll note that didn't stop marketers from using it too.

If we regard markets as environments, we can observe and recognize the differences in them and, through our awareness, understand how we might wish to alter our behavior as we move through them. If you're in the real wilderness in grizzly bear or mountain lion habitat, you'll be on the alert for signs of their presence; and, if you're wise, you'll behave in a way that minimizes your risk from those predators. These might be like the fraud artists and high-risk investment brokers with get-rich-quick schemes. If you're in a state park with no large predators but maybe large numbers of racoons, you'll be at pains to secure your food at your campsite, or else you'll find the cute little bandits have made off with all of it in the night. These might be the payday loan companies, pawn shops and used car lots that line the roadsides of less affluent parts of town. If you're in the municipal park, you might enjoy a picnic lunch with no more inconvenience or concern than the occasional ant colony or a sudden shower. This might be like shopping at a mall with reputable retailers. The point is, we're aware of different hazards in different environments, and we conduct ourselves accordingly in order to protect ourselves.

In this "markets as environments," metaphor you can't "talk to the animals." Doc Searls isn't Dr. Dolittle. Companies and corporations, while obviously made up of human beings, are not human beings in themselves, and you can't communicate with them in the same way you and I can communicate with one another as individuals. And I think we seldom appreciate the difficulty of even that very familiar process. If you want to think about how to communicate with a corporation, think of a class action lawsuit as a kind of cattle prod.

I think that the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto clearly perceive that there is something wrong in the marketplace. But they try too hard to sell their appeal, and they appeal to the wrong authority. Reading the book, it's clear they expect companies and corporations and the marketers that help them compete for resources to change, based on the "new" authority of the web-enabled "empowered" consumer. Those companies and corporations and marketers will change, they always do, but their nature will not, indeed it cannot. They must compete. They must get attention. They must consume some of our authority, usually in the form of wealth, though we surrender other forms as well. Bears bear and bees be, the leopard can't change his spots. If you don't understand the fundamental nature of what you're dealing with, you may be unaware of the danger it can pose.

The appeal must be made to individuals, customers or consumers, call them what you will; and they must not be flattered, they must be challenged. Telemarketers telemarket because it works. Those annoying business reply cards are stuck in all our magazines because they work. Marketers won't change their approaches because we ask them to, or because we chatted with them about it and we all think it's a good idea. They will only change when we change. The appeal must be made to the authority of individuals. The nature of markets and the relationship of the individual to them must be made plain. "Markets are conversations" does none of this.

But "environment" is an often controversial, emotionally-freighted term these days, and is probably less appealing than the more benign term, "conversation." Ironically, I believe the decision to embrace "conversation" as a metaphor was ultimately a marketing decision. It was, in effect, easier to sell.

Just as with our physical environment, and the effects of human activity in it, there are aspects of this market "environment" that are troubling, and that require some attention. The ever greater concentration of wealth into the hands of an ever smaller number of people, and the increasing number of people living in poverty in this country might be of as much concern as, say, the increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The efforts of those with the authority of wealth, using the methods of the marketplace to turn that into political authority in order to preserve and secure their gains and positions of privilege, might be as much reason for concern as declining global fish stocks or species loss. These are all troubling aspects of a natural competitive environment that focuses on the values of the marketplace ahead of all other values.

It's not a question of "good" versus "evil," but of reality versus fantasy. It's a question of understanding the nature of something, versus indulging in projection or wishful thinking. It's a question of facing up to difficult questions and seeking honest answers, versus continuing a meaningless dialog intended to dodge those questions for the sake of some ephemeral veneer of "conversation."

Talk is cheap and what I've seen of the "conversation" is mostly talk. Tending to our fields is hard work. I think we need less talk and more effort.

.Mac Groups

If you happened to notice a post called "Meta-against" appearing briefly here, it will be back, perhaps with a different title. It got sync'ed to my .mac account while I was doing something else and not paying close attention. It's not finished yet. If you didn't see it, you will soon.

Anyway, I set up a .mac Group for my family to explore that feature a little. So far, I can't really say I'm over the moon with it. It offered me the opportunity to add a picture to the Group home page, but it uses a web interface that isn't iPhoto savvy and the virtual albums that exist on my local hard drive. That's probably a limitation of being a web app. Same issue with respect to publishing other photos to the Group site. iPhoto needs to be updated to be Group-aware, so I can publish photo albums to my Group site that I wouldn't necessarily make strictly public, right from iPhoto. I think that will be forthcoming in a future update, but I would be disappointed if it weren't.

There's a message pane that appears to be the usual html summary of mailing list traffic. That's probably okay, but I sort of expected that it might be an actual discussion board. I'm not sure if you can interact with one another in a single .mac browser session, or if you'd have to go through another e-mail client, either local or web-based, in order to respond. I rather expect the latter. I'll try to find out when I'm online at work tomorrow.

It's pretty clearly a 1.0 release, but I welcome the opportunity to try to extend the virtual connections with my extended family. About half of my family uses a Macintosh of one kind or another, including my oldest daughter's recent platform switch; but the Group feature supports wintel users as well. At this moment, I'm working to get my brother and my parents added to the group to gauge their experience, before I add my sisters who are all on the wintel platform. One of my other brothers is on a Mac-based dial-up connection, and the remaining one relies on a work-provided account on the wintel platform. Once we get everyone hooked up, we'll assess the utility and ease of use.

Pleasant Surprise

Woke up this morning and my .mac account now has 1GB of storage at no extra charge. Nice. I was thinking about spending the extra $50.00 for 750MB more storage when it's time to renew next month, so I could add more audio clips and the like. Now I don't have to. That's kind of like finding $50.00 in the pocket of a jacket you haven't worn in over a year.

Well, not really. But almost!

The Revolution Will Be Misspelled

Don't give much thought to the title of this post, it just tickled me.

This post is really about learning I didn't know how to spell hijack. Cutting myself some slack, "highjack" is an alternative spelling. Since words have so many "alternative" meanings, it only makes sense that there are alternative spellings.

I pause to wonder if the problem isn't that too many people are literal-minded, but that too many people aren't literal enough. I mean, what's the point of being literate, if we don't have some appreciation for the literal? A question for another day, I think.

Okay, enough meandering, on to the motivation for this post. I'm still working on Deconstructing the Conversation, Part Deux; (Note the use of the semicolon. Probably incorrectly.) but, and I don't mean to wave my arms here and say, "It's complicated," but (waves arms), it's complicated. While I'm sort of wrestling with that, I need to give my pea brain a break every now and then and think about something else for a minute or two.

Herein I confess to a certain ego-centricity that, while I've never denied, I've been at some pains not to feed. But it's kind of like Lays potato chips, "Betcha can't eat just one." (Somewhere, some marketer is feeling good. A slogan just got trotted out as a cultural reference.) Anyway, indulging myself in self-indulgence, I happened upon this post from a blog called ::HorsePigCow:: Life Uncommon. I love the name. I spend much of my life trying, and failing, to avoid embarrassing myself. I should just stop trying. Oh wait... I did.

As usual, I digress...

Anyway, Ms. Rogue digresses, and what's not to admire about a meaningful digression? But don't get me started on that!

Anyway, (Part II), the money quote? "I love this guy!" Hah! I rhetorically high-five all other short, pudgy white middle aged males within the sound of my "voice." We rock!

It's all I can do to suppress my Vic Velour alter ego (As opposed to my Jacques LeCoque alter ego. Ladies, ask me what that means en Français.) drop my voice an octave, and utter those familiar words... "Yeah, chicks dig me."

Oh wait... Damn!

Well... Take that! Halley Suitt! "Alpha-males," my shiny metal ass.

Anyway (Part III), to return to the original point of this post. Well, actually, the original point was to give my pea brain a break. And now that my ego has (temporarily) released the controls, maybe we can return to something other than that. Enough about me!

Anyway (Part IV), Ms. Rogue writes:

And, I believe, the Cluetrain isn't a tome on how to market smarter, it's more like a treatise on respecting the individual's attention and authority.

Well, yeah. I guess so. But at the end of the day, it's kind of like the respect attendant to eating "free-range chicken." We can all feel better about having more respect for the life of a chicken, but it's still "finger lickin' good!" (Marketers! High-five!) Marketers can respect people all they want, but if they're marketers, they must consume someone's attention; and if they're doing their jobs, their employers must consume someone's authority.

So there you go.

Is it still happy hour? I'll be at the bar. Romanticizin' some pain in my head. (Obscure cultural allusion not credited to marketing. Clue: Blue. Not to be confused with Blue's Clues.) I think I missed my train.

Bored of War

I saw Lord of War tonight. Very depressing film. Couldn't stop thinking about the whole "markets are conversations" metaphor watching this movie about an arms dealer. We should be so lucky just to talk ourselves to death.

"The liars lie, the killers kill, and the victims die."

These are a couple of audio excerpts from an interview with Elie Wiesel on the Diane Rhem show last Thursday. (The second may take a while to load.) It's worth listening to the whole thing.

E.M. Forster

Happened to catch this at Niti Bhan's Perspective weblog, while doing some self-indulgent ego-surfing. Favorite line:

But reliability is not a matter of contract - that is the main difference between the world of personal relationships and the world of business relationships. It is a matter for the heart, which signs no documents.

Deconstructing the "Conversation" (Part 0)

It occurred to me that it might be better if I explained why I'm rather adamant about disputing the notion that "markets are conversations," before going on. So I've parked Part 2 for the moment, to discuss the basis of my objection to the idea.

I think Doc Searls makes it clear that he, and his co-authors, are unhappy with the current state of the marketplace, where people are treated as consumers and not as people. Doc understands, through his knowledge of the work of George Lakoff, that how we view the world, and how we orient ourselves within it, is in some measure based on the metaphors that we use to understand the world. These metaphors are revealed in the language we use to describe the world. Doc has mentioned several metaphors that have been used, still are in fact, to describe markets, including things like war, real estate, theater, even beings. But Doc feels that each of these is deficient, and presumably leads to some unwelcome result. "Conceptual metaphors such as markets are battlefields are huge reservoirs of bad meaning."

What seems to motivate Doc is some distaste for his former work as a marketer, and a belief in the market as an idea and an ideal that has never really existed: "A networked world built by a gift economy, where product categories and their competing occupants all grow, often at nobody's expense." Indeed, it is hard to imagine what the word "competing" means, absent somebody's expense. The piper must be paid, and the house always wins, a couple of other aphorisms that come to mind when thinking about things like "gift economies."

I'm not a socialist, and I'm not against free enterprise or free markets. I'm not against the law of gravity either, but that doesn't mean I enjoy falling on my ass. So I don't have to be opposed to free enterprise or free markets to suggest that if people aren't careful, they can be hurt by them. You can't wish away the law of gravity as a remedy for breaking your coccyx, which is about what asserting "markets are conversations" amounts to.

We live in a competitive world. Nature makes it so. Whether we know it or not, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, each of us is competing in some fashion; if not to advance ourselves, then to hold onto what we have. About the only exceptions that come to mind might be Buddhists with their begging bowls, but I have more than a suspicion that there is sometimes competition even among begging Buddhists. Such is the nature of human nature.

In our society, much of that competition has been channeled into the marketplace, where the creation and acquisition of wealth has fueled enormous advances in science, technology, and the "standard of living." So much so that the American economic engine has become the model for most of the rest of the world. I think it's safe to say that much of the "global conversation," that is, what hasn't already, is about to become marketing.

Our success is not without its own unwelcome aspects. As an individual, you, the customer, the consumer to use the word Doc doesn't like, have two resources that people and companies in the marketplace compete with one another to have you surrender to them. One is your authority, the other is your attention, and the two go together. With authority must also come responsibility and accountability, but more on that another time.

Your authority is vested in your control over your time, whatever wealth you've managed to acquire, and whatever wealth you're deemed potentially capable of acquiring, extended to you in the form of credit, a privilege for which you will be asked to surrender all that future wealth, and then some. You also have authority over your attention. It's no accident that you are often asked to pay attention. While you can be extended credit when you find yourself a little short of wealth, attention is a finite resource and when it's gone, you can't get a refund. Something worth thinking about, I think.

In order for the marketplace to get you to surrender your authority, it must first seize your attention. Our marketplace has developed entities that specialize in helping that process along, chiefly in the form of entertainment. There's nothing wrong with entertainment, in fact, it adds much enjoyment to life and some entertainment can be a worthwhile and enlightening experience. But success in the marketplace breeds more competition in entertainment, especially as technology changes; and that means that ever more entities are competing ever harder for your attention.

Entertainment has become a defining part of our culture, such that we seem to feel that we must be engaged with it in order to feel connected to others in society at large. Music, movies, television, now weblogs and podcasts, we engage with these media in order to be a part of the larger culture, to feel connected to it; and we surrender a significant portion of whatever attention we have left that we haven't already devoted to our jobs, to the efforts of others competing to seize and hold our attention.

Speaking of jobs, as an aside, the competitive American marketplace has Americans taking the least amount of vacation in the industrialized world. Do we love our work that much? Your call. Me, not so much.

Back to your attention. People compete to seize your attention so they can then sell it to others. Ford Motor Company probably doesn't know squat about producing situation comedies, though some might argue that the current situation at Ford is a comedy, well, maybe a tragicomedy, but they do know how to build cars. So they have marketers buy some of your attention during the situation comedy you enjoy, so they can then try to present you with a "message" about their cars; presumably one that will hold your attention when the pretty girl with the big boobies is off the screen. Some of those work better than others, but you get the idea how it works.

So you're surrendering your attention to people who are competing for it, who, in turn, sell it to marketers who try to send you messages. What are those messages about, anyway?

Well, they're not about any silly notion like the truth. We know this, which is why Dave Weinberger thinks it's no big deal that Technorati claims it is "the authority on what's going on in the world of weblogs," while disclaiming any responsibility for that authority. Hey, it's just marketing. So, I guess the idea is that most of what's going on in the global "conversation" is people saying things that aren't really true, but we're all supposed to kind of give it our attention anyway. This is not a good thing, I think.

Marketing messages are mostly about emotions, creating impressions. Technorati claims they're "the authority" ("We're number one! All others are number two, or lower!" Name the movie...) on weblogs. "Well, Biff, they must know what they're talking about, they claim they're the authority." Of course, we don't actually, cognitively believe this, but it does add to the impression that Technorati is trying to create. And, unless you're an ornery curmudgeon like me, it usually mostly works. Hell, we let Robert Young (Marcus Welby, MD) tell us about the health hazards of caffeine, and it sold Sanka coffee for years. Does that make sense? Well, it shouldn't, but it works, and it does make sense when you understand some other things; but more on that in later installment.

The problem is that more and more of our language is being influenced by the methods of marketing, where explicit meaning is deprecated in favor of an emotional impression. Where the truth of the assertion is less important than how you feel about it. I wonder if the day won't soon be upon us when we won't be able to carry on a rational discussion because we won't agree about what the words mean. We can already observe the effects in the nature of our political discourse.

Marketers are smart people. They study human psychology because the more they learn, the more competitive they can be against other marketers. And their goal is not to advance the truth, or to illuminate the nature of our existence in some meaningful way, it's to get you to surrender some of your authority to whatever entity employs them. And while there is only one of you, there are ever more companies and ever more marketers and ever more media competing to seize your attention and deliver their messages to you, and those messages are becoming more and more effective. It's not a conversation, it's a highjacking. How's that for a metaphor? Does it evoke the proper emotion? Perhaps I'll commission a focus group.

If you want a conversation, and I think you should, then you need to get off your dead ass and go talk to your spouse, or your neighbor, or the old lady walking the dog by your front yard every day whose name you don't know, rather than surrender more of your time, your attention and your authority to the person who just wants to sell you something. Ever have a salesman ask you if they could have "just a minute of your time?" Has that ever been all they wanted? Ever gotten any of those minutes back? Didn't think so.

Here's the thing, "markets are conversations," makes them something approachable. It's a typical marketing metaphor, it evokes a feeling of false intimacy, a personal connection that doesn't really exist. Thinking that "markets are conversations" actually facilitates people devoting more attention and surrendering more authority to them, not less. You can't buy a meaningful life. You have to live one. How much time do you really think you have?

And it's worse than that. Greed is the word that used to describe the unbridled pursuit of wealth or selfish self-interest, usually at the expense of others. We don't hear much about greed anymore, I think everybody's pretty much onboard with Gordon Gecko these days. Government and political authority has a role in moderating the negative effects of the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. But these days, those with the most experience in acquiring corporate wealth and authority have turned that expertise to acquiring political authority in order to facilitate the continuing concentration of wealth in the hands of the wealthy. Which is why the "inheritance tax" is now called the "death tax," and it's going to be repealed. Face it, they're just better marketers, and we've forgotten how to think in any other language. The rich get richer, while the poor grow more numerous. Someone will be along shortly to sell you on why that's not such a bad thing, and it's really their own damn fault anyway.

There's more to life than marketing and competing. The real "consumers" in this marketplace are the companies and corporations and marketers in their hire who consume your attention and your authority. There is no "conversation" taking place, and none is possible. That's not a "bad thing," per se, no more than gravity is a "bad thing," but what negative effects accrue won't stop unless or until people begin to understand the nature of authority, their responsibility to themselves, human nature, and begin to assert their own authority over themselves and their attention. Later on I'll discuss another metaphor that might help to ameliorate the worst deficiencies of the other ones, and help people to orient themselves conceptually in terms of their relationship to the marketplace. (Here's a hint: It's actually in Doc Searls' post linked near the beginning of this piece.)

Saying "markets are conversations" or even that they "ought" to be, will no more save your ass than wishing away the law of gravity. Just my opinion, and I'm not here to sell you anything. I'm not an economist, nor a marketer, nor a philosopher. I'm just a guy with an opinion. The truth isn't for sale, even if it isn't strictly "free." If somebody tries to sell you the truth, don't buy it. You have to look for it, you have to find it, and nobody can do that for you. If somebody offers to do so, ask them what their responsibility is to you. Don't be surprised when you're asked to sign the waiver, and just walk away.

On the other hand, "You pays your money, and you takes your chances..."

Deconstructing the "Conversation" (Part 1)

By way of preface, I want to note that I think Doc Searls is a really nice guy, with perhaps the most even disposition on the internet. But I think the assertion that "markets are conversations" is false, and actually works against the presumed aims of the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto.

To begin, we need to think about the nature of the activity that takes place within a market.

Doc establishes pre-industrial revolution markets as a kind of ideal in terms of what the "true" nature of markets is supposed to be. In The Cluetrain Manifesto, he writes:

The first markets were filled with people, not abstractions or statistical aggregates; they were the places where supply met demand with a firm handshake. Buyers and sellers looked each other in the eye, met, and connected. The first markets were places for exchange, where people came to buy what others had to sell -- and to talk.

The first markets were filled with talk. Some of it was about goods and products. Some of it was news, opinion, and gossip. Little of it mattered to everyone; all of it engaged someone. There were often conversations about the work of hands: "Feel this knife. See how it fits your palm." "The cotton in this shirt, where did it come from?" "Taste this apple. We won’t have them next week. If you like it you should take some today." Some of these conversations ended in a sale, but don’t let that fool you. The sale was merely the exclamation mark at the end of the sentence.

Don't let that idyllic description fool you, the whole point of that market was "the sale."

Doc goes on to describe how the industrial revolution changed this pre-industrial idyllic ideal,

The economies of scale they were gaining in the factory demanded economies of scale in the market. By the time it was over we had forgotten the one true meaning of the market, and replaced it with industrial substitutes.

Except "the one true meaning of the market" isn't the one Doc wishes it were.

In Doc's description of the pre-industrial revolution marketplace, one gets the impression that it is filled with peers, stalwart men of integrity gathered to shoot the breeze and do a little business. That market never existed.

Let's leave aside the economic realities of feudal economies and indentured servitude, and just consider this: The phrase caveat emptor means, "let the buyer beware." I don't know when it originated, but the New Oxford American Dictionary suggests that it originated in the early 16th century. The industrial revolution is dated around the late 18th and early 19th centuries. So for nearly three centuries, long before the assertion that "markets are conversations" was even a glimmer in a marketer's eye, there was an aphorism that suggested that someone trying to sell you something was someone you might have reason to be wary of. So there's a disconnect here between the notion of "conversation" between peers, and deception or fraud in the act of selling.

Doc's market never existed. And it likely never will.

And why is that? What is the real activity of the marketplace? It is, most assuredly, not conversation.

Human beings are social creatures. We cannot live alone, by ourselves. Even today's hermits rely on some of the products created by human beings who exist in society. We live in a society, and we are inescapably bound by the dynamics of a social existence. It's a little like water and fish. The key feature of society, at least as it relates to markets, is hierarchy.

Now, hierarchy is neither good nor evil, but it is essential. We can argue about how "flat" we'd like hierarchy to be, but large groups of people don't operate efficiently without one. See Hurricane Katrina relief efforts for Exhibit A. Within a society, there may be many social groups. Within a social group, or society, there may be more than one hierarchy, and there are hierarchies at different scales; all of which is just to say that there isn't just one hierarchy that each of us competes in. And all of us, whether we are aware of it or not, are competing for rank within those hierarchies. Even if we believe we are not competing for rank, it's a pretty safe bet that we're working to ensure we don't lose rank in the hierarchy.

Hate your job? Why not just quit? Because you have a mortgage and a car payment and if you quit your job and couldn't find another one right away, you might lose your house and your car. Well, what's essential about being a human being and owning a house or a car? Nothing really, but you would almost certainly be considered "homeless." Perhaps even "poor." And then when the water rises, what will you do? We're all competing for higher rank if in the hierarchy, and at all times we're working to ensure we don't lose the rank we have. That's neither a good thing nor a bad thing, it's just the way it is. Now, not knowing about it, that might be a bad thing.

So what determines rank in the hierarchy? At root, I have come to believe it is authority. Authority is a means of getting others to act or behave in a way that is in accord with your wishes or design. A police officer has the authority to pull you over when you're driving your car. A doctor has the authority to persuade you to buy and consume a medication. If someone tells you to do something, and if they aren't part of your immediate social group such that you're implicitly aware of their rank in the hierarchy, you immediately search for a sign of their authority.

Force is a form of authority. If I'm big and strong enough, I can make you give me your lunch money. But physical violence between members of a social group isn't good for the group and makes it vulnerable to other social groups that aren't experiencing the same levels of physical violence in settling issues of rank in the hierarchy. More of my thoughts about the nature of authority can be found here.

Being clever social animals, we developed various means for settling issues of authority, most of which don't involve violence; though violence is still a means that is called upon very often to assert authority, and someone capable of physical coercion is almost always the final arbiter of authority. But the most universal, the most ubiquitous, and the most successful means of settling issues of authority is the invention of wealth. You've heard of the Golden Rule? He who has the gold, makes the rules. Money is the medium of wealth, and wealth is an analog for authority, so money is a medium for authority.

Barter is a way of making an authority transaction in a market, but it's not terribly efficient. Let's say I'm a cooper and I so I make barrels. You're a cobbler and you make shoes. Well, all coopers need shoes, but not all cobblers need barrels. So as a cooper I have to get something from someone who needs barrels, that a cobbler needs so I can get shoes. Or, if I'm a big strong cooper, I can beat the cobbler's ass until he makes me shoes. Money makes that all much easier, and better for everyone.

Money is a liquid form of authority. I can convert my skill (a form of authority) as a cooper into something that can persuade a cobbler to give me a pair of shoes without having to go through several intermediate and inefficient transactions first. Makes all sorts of economic activity much more efficient, and all economic activity is about competing for rank in the hierarchy.

So what is really going on in a market is a transaction of authority; and all of those transactions are, at root, efforts to hold onto or increase one's rank in the hierarchy of the society the activity takes place in. It is not a social activity that has the pleasure or enjoyment of the mutual exchange of attention, which is what a conversation is about, as its fundamental objective. To the extent that conversation takes place, it is to facilitate that exchange of authority - to make the sale. It is most often to seek an advantage, which may or may not be a fair one. And from this effort to seek advantage, the aphorism caveat emptor derives its meaning.

Coming up (whenever I get around to writing it) in Part 2: Dr. Dolittle and Talking to the Animals, wherein I discuss how Doc Searls almost had it right. Later, we'll return to issues of authority, responsibility and accountability.

The usual disclaimers apply: I'm an authority on nothing you've read in this piece. I have an opinion, and I happen to believe it's an informed one. But I'm not responsible for what you think or believe, nor will I be accountable for it. Do your own thinking. It's important to figure this stuff out, and nobody else can do it for you. And note that I'm not trying to sell you anything either.

Going Forward

Shelley Powers has been offering a series of thoughtful and insightful comments regarding Katrina, and the discussion in the comments has been pretty good, and pretty civil as well. (Hope I didn't just jinx that.)

(I also wonder what Shelley thinks about recent conclusions that theropods, the two-legged dinosaur predators like the velociraptor were almost certainly feathered...

Looking Forward

An interesting post about how we might go about restoring and rebuilding New Orleans. (From Steve's No Direction Home Page weblog.)

Many Thanks

I've received a few e-mails regarding last night's post, and they've been very kind and that's much appreciated. I also indulged my own ego-centric curiosity and used Bloglines to see if anyone else had read it and responded to it, and I was very gratified to see a number of positive reactions, certainly more than I usually get.

I did get some feedback that, I think, suggested I was too despairing at the end of that piece. And I think that's legitimate criticism. My father even urged me to "keep the faith" tonight when we spoke on iChat. I will endeavor to do better. It does take effort, but that's kind of what it's about, isn't it?

I just read the post again, and I am unhappy about my rampant comma abuse and awkward sentence construction. I may do something about that later. I will only note that I was not a liberal arts major, "I are an engineer."

Fascinating Reports

Al Hawkins has been posting reports from Dr. Ken Mattox at the Houston Astrodome about the medical issues facing the displaced citizens and the health care professionals serving them. The link is to the first report, if you go to the main page you'll find more recent reports (as well as some kind things Al said about last night's tome.)

Happy (Belated) Birthday

Happy birthday greetings to Karl Martino and Ken Loo, both of whom are still in their 30s. I think I'd like to be in my 30s again!

(Note to fellow blogging friends whose birthdays I have failed to note: I'm terrible about birthdays, even with all this technology at my disposal. I'm mentioning these because both Karl and Ken happened to mention them in their weblogs, and they're a happy and welcome occasion to observe.)

Rock On

I am more hopeful.

Change

There is much discussion underway in weblogs and in opinion pieces in the press regarding what changes the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the dismal performance of the leaders of our government may bring. This is a good thing.

I'm not sure what I have to add to that discussion.

One of my most persistent frustrations with writing and maintaining first Time's Shadow, and now, Groundhog Day, is that I am not a disciplined writer. When I am motivated to write, it is often because of some emotion, usually negative. As a result, I'm often writing against some idea, and I know people enjoy reading more positive things, or at least the occasional respite from a constant litany of complaint. I have made at least one change in my writing habits, and that has been to file many of my more vituperative posts in a topic that never gets published, which I call The Cooler. Sometimes a post will make it out of there after I edit it a bit, but usually they just stay there.

This is another instance where the throbbing vein in my temple seems to compel me to put down in photons my thoughts about a particularly bad idea. If I wait to calm down, when I try to write, it becomes more laborious and I become more pedantic. I begin to bore myself. So, I'm going to struggle here to try and keep this piece out of The Cooler, try to make something of a compelling argument, and try to stay interested while doing it.

The thing that's got me rather exercised right now is a link Doc Searls pointed to in the Wall Street Journal. I'll go back to beating up the idea that markets are conversations some other day, but right now I want to beat something else up.

I went to the piece in the WSJ because Doc called it "instructive lessons," and I wanted to see what those lessons were. In fact, there are no lessons there. Instead, there is the usual justification for the predictable response of the Journal, and that is that we should outsource or privatize the business of disaster preparedness. This is a knee-jerk, ideological response that will gain traction among those who always seem to believe that the private sector has better answers than the public one.

Well, I don't know about anyone else, but I've seen the private sector at work in things like Enron and Halliburton and Merck and Boeing and Microsoft and oh, I don't know, check with New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, he might have a couple more he could name. But I don't happen to think that the private sector has a monopoly on virtue. And bureaucracies exist in the private sector just as much as they do in the public one, which is just one of the many reasons why markets are not "conversations." There is no immunity to inertia through incentivization.

For a while, after 9/11, some pundits opined that the event would mark some watershed in American history, that it was the end of the Age of Irony. They were wrong. We do have a problem in this country, but it's not going to be solved by a particular economic "sector." There's no faith-based program to address this particular need. There's no catchy slogan, no social software solution, no pill, no gene therapy, no stem cell, no Supreme Court decision that's going to fix what's wrong with this country. But then, there doesn't need to be, because what's wrong can be fixed by you and I. Indeed, it will only be fixed, if you and I fix it.

I'm not an ideologue. I don't have any particular view of the world that I want to promote, other than maybe two ideas: First, know thyself. And second, you must become the change you wish to see in the world.

I'll tell you a sea story. Maybe two.

I'm pretty sure I've told this one before either here or in Time's Shadow, but that's in the nature of sea stories, they tend to be repeated.

When I was executive officer of USS JOHN HANCOCK (DD-981), I had to perform my first burial at sea. Up until that time, I don't recall having ever done one before. I certainly hadn't participated in the ceremony. That was about to change.

My job as the XO was to commit the decedent's cremains to the sea. Cremains are what are more commonly called "ashes." There's a burial at sea ceremony spelled out in some navy instruction or another, and the Captain presides over it. It was conducted on the fantail (that's the ass-end of the ship) and there were people there to render honors and there was a gun salute, and the whole thing was videotaped to provide a record for the family. So at the end of this rather somber, somewhat elaborate ceremony, I ceremoniously marched to the stern of the ship, removed the top of the container and poured the cremains over the side.

And the first time I did it, the wind swirling around the stern caught the ashes and blew most of them back up onto me in my dress blues and the deck of the ship.

I was not a happy guy.

It's pretty creepy having some guy's ashes all over your face and your uniform. But I remained "in character" until the end of the ceremony. Needless to say, I was glad it was over and I sincerely hoped I'd never have to do it again.

Except I did have to do it again. It came as a surprise, but shortly after we did the first one, we were tasked to do another one. Then they started coming in twos and threes. I worked with the Officer of the Deck to ensure we placed the ship in a favorable position with respect to the wind such that I wouldn't repeat my first experience, and while it was something of a pain in the ass, it wasn't a huge deal either. Just one more thing I had to do, so I just did it.

After each ceremony, we boxed up a national ensign, a chart showing the location of the burial, the videotape of the ceremony, the shell casings from the gun salute and a letter from the CO and sent them to the family. My navigator, who was also the admin officer, was in charge of that. I don't know how many we had done by this point, but Murphy's Law finally made its appearance and at some point we sent the wrong mementos to the wrong families. They were, understandably, rather upset and they conveyed their unhappiness back through the chain of command, whereupon I received direction that I would personally inspect the contents of each package before it left the ship and it would be sealed in my presence. Which, again, is no big deal, but it was a kind of pain in my ass.

And for a while, that's pretty much how I regarded doing burials at sea, as a pain in my ass.

Except I kept having to do them. I don't recall exactly how many I did, but it was more than thirty, maybe close to forty. And there was a rehearsal for each one, and of course there's each ceremony. Plus the packaging up of the mementos, which had me reading these guys' DD-214s or other discharge papers, and getting just the barest glimpse of what had been a life. So I began to think about this whole thing a lot. I found out that the reason why we were doing so many burials at sea was because many of the families of these guys couldn't afford a casket burial. Some of the "families" were really fairly distant relatives who were kind of stuck with the disposition of the body after their relative died. A few were really old guys, most were veterans of WW II or Korea, a few more recent. But the more I thought about these guys and the fact that, for many of them, there was nobody available to see to their end, to the final disposition of their earthly remains, the more I began to feel as though I had some sort of responsibility to them, to these guys I had never known and who never knew me.

Now, I don't know if any of these guys had ever given any thought to how they were going to be treated after they'd died. For all I know, they didn't care. Maybe some of them did. I don't know. I don't know if any of the families thought that the Navy would do for their relative what they couldn't do themselves in a manner that they would care about. About all I ever knew about these guys was their date of birth, date of death, period of service and an address to mail the package.

But they became something different to me. I don't know, I guess I thought that if it were me, I'd like to think the guy doing the thing would do it right. I can't really describe what the change was, other than it was no longer a pain in my ass. I won't say that I felt like it was a privilege, because, truthfully, I didn't want to do it. But I began to feel like I owed something to that box of ashes, which is about as irrational a thought as I've ever had, and I've had a few. So while it wasn't a privilege, I did see it as a duty, and one to be taken as seriously as any other important duty, perhaps more so in some respects.

I don't know how many burials I did after coming to that, less than half I'd say. But that experience was to kind of play a role later on when I began to understand something else I'd never really thought about before.

So here's another sea story, although this one doesn't strictly take place at sea. I was on shore duty at the time. And again, I'm sure I've probably told this story before too. Hopefully, the inconsistencies aren't too obvious or damning.

I was the XO of Fleet Training Center, and at the time of this story, I think I was the acting CO. I had two periods of three months' duration when I got to be the acting CO after my boss had retired without relief. Didn't mean a great deal different for me, I still got the same paycheck, and I didn't move my office; but I did have to preside over the various ceremonies in the capacity of the CO, rather than the XO, which means I was usually the guy doing all the fun stuff, like handing out the awards and stuff.

Anyway, one day, one of our sailors was getting ready to retire, and we usually have a fairly elaborate retirement ceremony for them. As the CO, I'd be the guy to present the award and all the plaques and letters and stuff a retiree normally gets. Usually there's a guest speaker, someone from the retiree's career or life who gives a speech about the retiree's career and tells a few embarrassing stories and what a great person they were and all that, as you might imagine.

So this sailor comes into my office one day and asks me to be her guest speaker. Now, I've never served with this individual before, and we've only been together at FTC for about a year, but she wants me to say a few words about her at her retirement. It floored me. I'd been to dozens of retirement ceremonies before, usually as a member of the audience, a few times as the master of ceremonies, but I'd never been asked to speak about someone before.

So that was a hard one. Of course I said I would, but I really had no idea what I would talk about. I pulled her personnel record and reviewed her career. I thought about what I knew about her from our time together at FTC. And then I got to thinking about this whole retirement ceremony thing.

I'd never really thought about it before. Of course, my own would be coming up a couple of years later, but I wasn't thinking much about that at the time either. If you'd asked me what I thought about them before then, I'd have told you they were just another one of those things I had to do as a part of my job.

When I began to think about it, one of the first things that occurred to me was the burials at sea and what that ceremony ultimately "meant." And I went on to think about the nature of ceremonies and why we went to the trouble of having them. To be honest, I had never thought much about it before. They were always just a part of Navy life. You don't have to think about what it means, you just have to show up. But somehow, when you have some part to play in it, you tend to think about what it means, or what it is supposed to mean.

I began to think about the word honor, because we did these things, supposedly, to honor, the person who was retiring. And so I wondered what that meant, because I had never really thought about that before either. So I did what I often do, I consulted a dictionary. Honor, the verb, means to regard with great respect, or to fulfill an obligation, or keep an agreement. It was the second sense of the verb that I focused on, perhaps because of my experience with the burials at sea. I had, without really thinking about it, been acting to fulfill an obligation to those dead veterans, and I thought about what that meant to me.

And I thought about the retiree, who was, most assuredly, still alive at her ceremony. What was my obligation to her? What was my role? Why was I going to be up there in front of the rest of our command? And from those questions, I found answers that eventually turned into my speech for her. It must have been a pretty good speech, because afterward, a lot of people came up to me to talk about it and I ended up getting a lot more requests to speak at retirement ceremonies.

And that's probably enough sea stories.

What follows isn't that speech, but it's based on what I learned when I was thinking about it. There is something that keeps a group of people together that is more than just a paycheck. We "honor" individuals within our group as a way of renewing and strengthening that thing that keeps us together. It's about faith, which is a word that is much abused of late. It's about keeping faith with one another, and the really important things we believe, even if we don't think about them much. To honor someone is to keep faith with them. Honor, the noun, is the quality of having kept faith with one's fellows.

Leadership is the act of renewing and strengthening that faith. Leadership is embodying that faith and living it, having it be a part of one's life, recognizing that each of us is a part of something greater than ourselves, and that's not our company or our corporation.

I couldn't be incentivized to care about the people whose ashes I consigned to the sea's embrace. I got the same paycheck whether I cared about them or not. I couldn't be incentivized to talk about things like faith and keeping that faith with one another. I could have stood up there and told a few jokes, highlighted the achievements of my retiree's career and gotten away from that podium without ever breaking a sweat.

It was easy, when we would be working hard training at sea, to understand why we were working so hard. If we didn't work hard during a main space fire drill, we knew many of our shipmates might die, and we might lose the ship. There's no place to run in a fire at sea. We knew when we were working hard during general quarters drills why we were working so hard, because otherwise shipmates, both our own and those on other ships, might die if we didn't get the job done. The fear of death is a pretty good incentive. But there are a million things we do that are inconvenient, many that are hard, that have nothing to do, directly, with staying alive. But they have everything to do with being a part of something larger than ourselves. We lose sight of those things too often. Indeed, for myself, I never had sight of them until I was put into the middle of them and had to wonder why I was doing this? Who cares about a box of ashes of some stranger? Certainly, he was beyond caring.

Being in the Navy, or any branch of the military, is a form of public service. Part of what some people call the public sector. Something we've