Becalmed in the Summer Doldrums

In the early eighties, after lunch, around 1 PM on hot — and I mean Indian hot — summer days, I’d step out onto the verandah, push two straight-backed chairs together to create a sort of bench, and take a nap. There were ceiling fans inside, and even one room with an air-conditioner, but I preferred the verandah with its still, hot air. It was a natural sauna and sensory deprivation chamber. It induced a sort of death-sleep and occasionally, mild hallucinations.  Reflecting on these memories and the 100 degree days we’ve been experiencing here in the DC area this week, it struck me that I am a very seasonal kind of guy. Which is why I dread being forced to move to California. Something about sharply marked seasons fits very well with my personality. At least when I am able to harmonize my own manic-depressive mood swings with the local seasons. In my winter post from exactly 6 months ago, I noted that I like bouts of extreme, deathly cold because they represent rebirth and renewal. Deathly summer heat on the other hand, feels like suddenly hitting the pause button in the middle of the most exciting action in a movie.

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The Philosopher’s Abacus

July 4th will be the three-year anniversary of Ribbonfarm. I normally celebrate with a retrospective-plus-roundup, but this year, I thought I’d do something different. I am not entirely sure what you guys get out of my writing, but for me, the act of writing this blog has clarified, reinforced and (for better or worse) hardened a certain philosophy of life. This philosophy is a set of coupled choices on a set of either/or spectra. The best visualization I could come up with is something I call the philosopher’s abacus. Here’s a picture (feel free to share, pass along etc.)

I believe the abacus represents fundamental genetic constraints that define a life-philosophy design space. I believe it is nearly impossible for humans to transcend the abacus. Let me explain how it works.

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WOM, Broadcast and the Classical Marketing Contract

Word-of-Mouth (WOM) vs. Broadcast is the emerging Mac vs. PC debate in marketing. There are relevant facts, but they don’t matter, because battles inevitably turn ideological. If you did the Mac-vs-PC ads for WOM vs. Broadcast, an episode might go as follows:

WOM: Hey Broadcast, how are you doing?

Broadcast: Great, I just finished a multi-million dollar Master Marketing Plan for my Fortune 100 client, with a textbook positioning strategy, a great branding theme and 3 superbowl ad concepts. All in just 3 weeks.

WOM: Oh wow! That’s impressive. How did the customers respond?

Broadcast: Very funny WOM. We both know it takes months of stakeholder conversations and focus groups before you can roll out a marketing campaign. If all goes as planned, 50% of our marketing will work; we just won’t know which 50% of course, ha ha. Even someone as good as me can’t break the Golden Rule of Marketing after all.

WOM: Well actually Broadcast, I just finished a 3-week concept-to-execution campaign for a small business, for just $800, where we used a Facebook page to talk to customers. And I know exactly which pieces worked, and why.

Broadcast: Oh I have a social media component in my master plan too. We’ll have a Facebook page AND a Twitter feed AND a blog AND a YouTube Channel. And we’ve already sourced the first 50 professionally written blog posts. So looks like I am  a little ahead of you there, WOM. You really should try more planning instead of just jumping in. You’ve got to maximize reach and optimize your channel mix; it’s all about eyeballs baby.

WOM: You do know that Twitter is not always best for all types of conversational marke….

Broadcast: Tweet Tweet Tweet Tweet TWEET TWEET TWEET TWEET. I can’t hear you. TWEET TWEET TWEET TWEET TWEET TWEET

The WOM-vs.-Broadcast debate, which is currently at this level, is incredibly shallow and juvenile (though sometimes entertaining). The WOM camp is getting prematurely smug, and the Broadcast camp is defending the wrong parts of classical marketing. So let’s try to take the conversation up a notch.

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The Missing Folkways of Globalization

Between individual life scripts and civilization-scale Grand Narratives, there is an interesting unit of social analysis called the folkway. Historian David Hackett Fischer came up with the modern definition in 1989, in his classic, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America:

…the normative structure of values, customs and meanings that exist in any culture. This complex is not many things but one thing, with many interlocking parts…Folkways do not rise from the unconscious in even a symbolic sense — though most people do many social things without reflecting very much about them. In the modern world a folkway is apt to be a cultural artifact — the conscious instrument of human will and purpose. Often (and increasingly today) it is also the deliberate contrivance of a cultural elite.

Ever since I first encountered Fischer’s ideas, I’ve wondered whether folkways might help us understand the  social landscape of globalization. As I started thinking the idea through, it struck me that the notion of the folkway actually does the opposite. It helps explain why a force as powerful as globalization hasn’t had the social impact you would expect. The phrase “global citizen” rings hollow in a way that even the officially defunct “Yugoslavian” does not. Globalization has created a good deal of  industrial and financial infrastructure, but no real “social landscape,” Friedman-flat or otherwise. Why? I think the answer is that we are missing some folkways. Why should you care? Let me explain. [Read more…]

Digital Security, the Red Queen, and Sexual Computing

There is a technology trend which even the determinedly non-technical should care about. The bad guys are winning. And even though I am only talking about the bad guys in computing — writers of viruses, malware and the like — they are actually the bad guys of all technology, since computing is now central to every aspect of technology. They might even be the bad guys of civilization in general, since computing-driven technology is central to our attacks on all sorts of other global problems ranging from global poverty to AIDS, cancer, renewable energy and Al Qaeda. So turning around and winning this war might even be the single most important challenge facing humanity today. Even that bastion of the liberal arts and humanities, The Atlantic Monthly, has taken note, with this excellent feature on how the best security researchers in the world are losing the battle against the Conficker worm. Simple-minded solutions, ranging from “everybody should get a Mac” to “just stick to Web-based apps and netbooks” to “practice better digital hygeine” are all temporary tactical defenses against an adversary that is gradually gaining the upper hand on many fronts. I have concluded that there is only one major good-guy weapon that has not yet been tried: sexual computing. And it hasn’t been tried because major conceptual advances in computer science are needed. I’ll explain what I mean by the term (it is a fairly obvious idea for those who know the background, so there may be more accepted existing terms for the vision), but I’ll need to lay some groundwork first.

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Three Off-Ribbonfarm Posts

You may have noticed that in the last few weeks, I haven’t exactly been posting spectacular original content on this blog. A vacation and the simultaneous bootstrapping of two new writing outlets (the Trailmeme blog and the Be Slightly Evil email list), are part of the reason. The other part of the reason is that all my current ribbonfarmesque ideas are currently in the form of several rather demanding drafts (reading Gibbon’s 6-volume “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” doesn’t exactly catalyze tweet-sized ideas). So rather than post hasty dreck, I figured I’d just point you to some of my posts on the Trailmeme blog that might interest you.

  • In Rent vs. Buy and Digital Lifestyle Design I looked at what’s happening to an age-old decision due to the impact of future-of-work forces
  • In The Marcus Aurelius School of Curation, I argue that information curation (an emerging new profession) is less like being a librarian, and more like being a stoic emperor. And yeah, this post is partly inspired by my current obsession with the history of Rome. Expect a lot of Rome references from me in upcoming writing. The fact that I was actually vacationing in Italy, and wandering around Pompeii, while reading the thing, probably helped burn the book into my head a lot more vividly.
  • In The Eight Belts of Information Ninja-Hood I have one of my usual overworked metaphors.

These are just a sampling. There’s more stuff there. Between me and a colleague, that blog sees about 4 new posts a week. Subscribe to that blog if this vein of writing interests you. The Be Slightly Evil email list is turning into an interesting project as well, and after 4 experimental mailings, I am finally beginning to get a sense of how and what to write there. All you sociopath wannabes — subscribe if you haven’t already.

And oh yeah, the book is coming along nicely. I had some writer’s block going for a while, but things are back on track.

Lots of balls to juggle, but I am making my writing processes more aerodynamic all along, so you should see things back to normal here in a week or two. I have a couple of really interesting (to me at least) posts shaping up.

In the Real World…

The phrase “In the real world…” comes up in many different contexts and conversations, and is deployed by all sorts of people, for all sorts of reasons. Over several years of watching and filing away instances, a script for a funny SNL style sketch, stringing together several of these conversations, occurred to me. Well, at least I think it is funny. I wanted to do it as a comic-strip, but never got around to it.

Here’s the script for the sketch. I call it The Circle of Life. Okay, my dialogue is not exactly Shakespeare quality, but bear with me here. Bad fiction in the service of a non-fiction point.

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Intellectual Gluttony

An Einstein quote that I disagree with is the following:

Much reading after a certain age diverts the mind from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking, just as the man who spends too much time in the theaters is apt to be content with living vicariously instead of living his own life.

It is the best known of various cautions against “intellectual greed.” I once interviewed at a university where there seemed to be a particularly strong fear of intellectual over-reach. Every faculty member I talked to had a word of caution about young researchers and “intellectual greed” — taking on too many, too big, or too wide-ranging a set of intellectual interests. If this is a sin — and it sort of sounds like one, which is why the biblical word “gluttony” seems more appropriate to me — I am certainly guilty. But if I am going to hell anyway, I might as well know why in a little more detail.

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A Bumper May Harvest of Good Reading

I am headed out on a trip after a hectic week, so I didn’t have time to pipeline a new post for the week. Fortunately for me, I’ve reaped a bumper harvest of unusually good reading on the Web in the last week, so I thought I’d share a selection. If you follow @ribbonfarm, you may have already seen these. I put the selections on a convenient trail if you want to jump right in, otherwise read on for my quick commentary. Warning: I read the kind of stuff I write, so all these are long-to-epic size reads.

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Two Interesting Gervais Principle Follow-Ups

I thought I’d share two recent ‘Gervais Principle’ related posts that crossed my radar. There have been quite a few blog reactions to the GP series over the last 6 months, but most don’t venture beyond an editorial comment or two. These two go further, in a couple of rather dangerous (and fun) directions.

First, a few weeks back, Pete Carapetyan emailed me about his post on dealing with passive aggressive. He doesn’t cite or relate the ideas to GP directly, but he tells me that the post is “inspired” by GP (dangerously ambiguous linkage term there).

Working with Passive Aggressives

Working with a PA is the most counter-intuitive thing you will ever do. That is their primary tactic, coming across exactly opposite from what is really going on, which also includes covering their tracks. Well honed PA skills never show on the radar, that is how the whole system works.

In a different vein, Jacob, writing in the extreme early retirement (nice name for a blog, that), has a post riffing on the idea that if you can’t join the sociopaths, perhaps you can beat them by owning them, by turning to capitalism? Jacob suggests that this requires giving up addictive consumerism.

A Cure to Careerism

Of course there is a third way, extreme early retirement, which sadly is considered too extreme by many. The reason is that it means giving up consumerism which to consumers is like giving up cigarettes for smokers. Not only are many people suffering from careerism, but they are also suffering from consumerism believing that it is impossible, at least for them, to live a satisfying life without shopping.

Note that this is a different exit strategy than the ‘exile/exodus’ strategy described in Managing Language (With Extreme Prejudice), on Tobias C. Van Veen’s Fugitive Philosophy blog, which I highlighted earlier.

I’ll withhold my own opinion for now, other than to note that I agree that the questions being raised are important, even if I don’t entirely agree with the answers. Click on, check out the articles, and comment. I’ll be following the discussion with interest of course.