Chris Blanc: Play and Projects: Blog

I read Doc Searls whenever I get a chance:

Ralph thinks We the People means We the Government. So do most of your basic Democrats. Your basic Republicans think We the People means We the Market. So Democrats like solving problems with Big Government while Republicans like solving problems with big market. ^{^}

This is an interesting division that reveals how politics is not duality, but a circularity. If Democrats on the left believe in government, they’re all for centralized power, which I’d always thought as a tenet of the right. But as Searls says, the Republicans on the right believe in emergent forces and markets, which makes them more like anarchists with credit cards in my book. When I read stuff like this, I feel less compelled to see politics as anything but a show projected on the wall of the cave, while the real power lies in demographic change, convincing masses of people of ideas, technologies and markets.

To this we add some Malthusian mathematics:

Adding together the component partial utilities, the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another…. But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit — in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all. ^{^}

We each want that house in the suburbs, and we’re all using politics to duke it out. It will be interesting to see how this is resolved from 2015-2020 as oil supplies pass the profitable retrieval point using today’s technology.

From William Gibson:

I suspect I have spent just about exactly as much time actually writing as the average person my age has spent watching television, and that, as much as anything, may be the real secret here. ^{^}

You will meet many “artists” in this life. Most of them are not serious about writing for four to six hours a day, or even for three, or even writing at all. Gibson said what all of us are thinking when we see this phenomenon.

I was looking for a word today to describe an optimal situation in design, where a proposed idea matches its function exactly. It means part efficiency, part good design, part relevance to the task (even if the client isn’t fully aware of it). I found:

Arete (areth): Appropriate form to or for purpose, with strong overtones of ideal good

When it comes to technology design, it doesn’t get any clearer than that.

The first time someone told me that television was free, I was blown away. All of those programs? For free? How?

They explained advertising to me and I was equally floored. People pay all this money… just so people know what products are there? It was only after that I found out that most products are not necessary for survival but are essentially luxury items, and so advertising helps convince the befuddled to buy. Aha.

Since the internet is so new, it still goes through spasmodic re-assessments as people who make a living from AdSense try to figure out whether or not it’s real. That’s why every month there’s a new article about a trend.

Some persist, like the “Long Tail” or “The Cathedral Versus the Bazaar” or other restatements of the same basic idea that funds TV: the only real commodity is selling attention span, or for the existentially paranoid, selling your time. About all you can do is sell the attention of others, because that enables you to sell them other things. It is a circular theory, almost a tautology.

People are now talking about applying this theory to the sales of movies and pop music.

The problem I see with it is what happened to video art in the conversion from movies to TV. Movies were an event, but television is more like running water, something you expect to be constant. There are very few stories really worth telling, which means that TV is inevitably tuned toward that worst of all curses, the re-run or the derivative idea.

Free media in other words is a one-way trip to forgettable media. We’ll have so much the quality per item will diminish, and this is what I’m seeing in music, movies and books. They’re all about the same but they try so hard to be different they make themselves bizarre and unreal, but then come back to the same 4 or 5 “uplifting” stories that people will buy.

It will distill society down to its most basic level, which is a competition for social status through drawing attention to oneself. The social rules haven’t changed since we were toddlers, or since our ancestors were apes.

I don’t know what I would rather see, because I can see the dual face of ownership. Free means that no one item gets much investment, because it’s an advertisement for something else. Ownership, while people like to pretend it’s a barrier to utopia, encourages artists to put more effort into their work and take more risks with it.

Realistically, we have one great novelist a generation, and maybe fifty pretty good ones. We shouldn’t have the thousands we do now, because most of them are so bad that they should have blogs instead (haha). The more people we have publishing, the less any content stands out, which means that soon every writer will be a TV channel with not enough viewers, and it’ll be hard to find any greats in the mix.

It’s the same way with where print media is going now, where blogs and web sites give away the news for free. It’s nice to have it free to read, but then, it becomes entirely driven by advertising and rewards weird extremes without deviating much from the norm.

Insight has been and always will be rare. People now are more informed on pop culture, and less informed on critical thinking and knowledge application, than ever before in history. It’s easy to mistake junk for knowledge. As much as we all like free things, the path of free is toward one where junk and knowledge are valued the same.

In the fall, John Muir Laws published “The Laws Field Guide to the Sierra Nevada.”

There is also something sweet and obsessive, and marvelously 19th century about the whole enterprise, the idea of a lone amateur, now 41 years old (living in a rented $600 apartment in San Francisco), spending season after season tramping around the mountains, painting mushrooms and moles.

“I’m a beauty junkie,” Laws adds. “And this book was done by somebody who is stunned by the beauty of the world.”^{^}

The world, too much with us, afflicts us with this desire to be functional all the time. We justify vacations and TV because they relax us. It’s refreshing to see someone who just leapt ahead into something he found amazing in nature, and succeeded at it, to boot.

A new spin on social networking from a Slashdot user:

I’ve now been meta-social networking on Slashdot for six months, and my meta-friends list runneth over with people who have distinguished themselves with their brains and personalities and knowledge. I’m proud of this list, because when I go through it, I see people who are using their brains to make technology and humanity better. These aren’t the couchbound slackers that make our lives miserable by failing to fix obvious deficiencies. These people represent the kind of people whose company I’d want to seek, the kind of people who bring a sense of hope for humanity.

Here’s that meta-social networking list again. Check ‘em out. I’m proud of them, even if I only know a few of them. ^{^}

An interesting take on an old dilemma of online “avatars” and how well they translate into the real world. I’ve got my shingle out at LinkedIn, FaceBook, Slashdot, MySpace, Amazon and Technorati. Drop me a line sometime!

Telecommuting is a win-win for employees and employers, resulting in higher morale and job satisfaction and lower employee stress and turnover. These were among the conclusions of psychologists who examined 20 years of research on flexible work arrangements.^{^}

I was glad to see this article. It’s easier to get a lot of things done outside the office, in a pleasant home surrounding, which is often more natural and less encumbered. Even just taking off a tie seems to raise IQ by seven points.

My only question here is how telecommuting is arranged. Most businesses allocate days of the week for telecommuting, but it makes more sense to do it by project. You figure out the project, meet the people, get the information, and then go home to get some real work done.

Whenever I get nostalgic for consulting, it’s this. I tend to live in places where I’m surrounded by living plants and animals, and sitting at a desk typing away with some good music going can make even the most mundane task a little better.