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| Friday, April 20, 2001 |
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The correct answer to "What's your sign?" Along with some very helpful corrections on yesterday's blog (along with a nice lesson in the difference between 'compose' and 'comprise'), Tom von Alten pointed me to his blog, which features a neat picture he took of a donkey munching on a warning sign about (what else) itself.
Strugglage: The serious side of the last post is that I'm trying to write an editorial, right now, on the whole Hailstorm/Passport thing for Linux Journal. And I don't want to fall into what Don Norman calls the "conversational black hole" that appears whenever Microsoft comes up. "Drop the subject in the middle of the room, and it sucks in everything around it so that no light escapes," he says. In words to that effect, anyway.
I think the bottom line is infrastructure, or what I'll call interstructure. What Microsoft does with Passport and Hailstorm isn't a Bad Thing as long as it runs on common interstructure, which (by the way) we haven't finished building yet, and will probably end up building with Microsoft's help whether we like it or not. They're too big to exclude when interstructure we're building supports commercial activity.
Now is the time to get conscious about building market interstructure that supports relationships and not just distribution and transaction activities. I think Microsoft has done some good thinking here. Passport is highly respectful of what you need to operate in a marketplace. But it stops short of the conversational stuff — not just because that's something outside Hailstorm's functional scope or Microsoft's commmercial interests; but because Microsoft can't help thinking of you as a "consumer." Look at the language that opens the Hailstorm press release. Though consumers and businesses...
Consumers don't inhabit real marketplaces where supply and demand enjoy equal power and talk constantly about their shared passions. They're batteries for the industrial matrix. Or, as Jerry Michalski puts it, gullets that live under the end of the distribution system's conveyor belt, where they gulp down products and crap out cash. They are species of fish that move in schools we call "markets": demographics, psychographics, regions — anything but the messy, unpredictable, unique human beings they really are, living and working in the real world.
This isn't just a disconnect. It's a conceptual conflict. When we speak of customers as "consumers" and sort them into "markets," and feed them "content" that we "deliver" through a "medium" or a "channel," we are conceiving business as a shipping system and speaking, literally, in that system's terms. Our vocabulary discloses the unconscious conceptual system that produces it. We also locate our perspective at the production end of that system. We think and talk as producers, not consumers. On the other hand, when we speak of customers by name, and of markets as places (or, as Cluetrain puts it, conversations), we conceive business as culture. It's something social. And it's a lot closer to what it was in the first place — what we might call its natural state.
So Microsoft isn't the only company that can't help thinking and talking about business in shipping terms. We all do. We've been doing it since Industry won the industrial revolution. And what we're all doing together, right now, is rediscovering the fundamentally social nature of business, and how to do Industry in that context. We're in new territory that's also very old.
When I talked to my Nigerian friend Sayo Ajiboye about this, he added a new spin: we can understand markets in terms of accounting or relationships. Our mistake, here in the industrial First World, is thinking and operating almost entirely in terms of accounting, while so much of what really happens in markets is about relationships. Markets have always been a platform for culture as well as business. The culture Microsoft envisions, so far, through Hailstorm, is a producerist one. It's conceived a highly personalized industrial system. It's a way to help consumers evolve into more capable gullets. But it's not that far away from being something that supports relationships and not just purchasing.
So: what kind of market environment do you want? I'll bet that deep down, where it exists only as a web of relationships, Microsoft wants it too.
Whose hand is that in your pocket? Here's Cam on Microsoft's Hailstorm. Try this: type "passport" into the address line of your browser and hit Return (or just click on that link, which does the same thing). Read the URL that comes up. Translation: Hi, Consumer! Want some candy?
Clue crack: Cluetrain makes MetaFilter today, without which I wouldn't have been distracted by Project Denny's. A tip of the caboose to Jay for both — and for leading us to a remarkable piece, Defending the Right to Pleasure, on Kuro5hin. One sample:
| | Those who condemned physical pleasure were more likely to approve violence against children, the death penalty, or punishment of abortion. They were more likely to think that physical punishment is necessary "to build a strong moral character", they were more likely to prefer drugs over sex, and they tended to be more politically conservative.
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This interview with George Lakoff enlarges the same subject.
This land's not your land, this land's not my land, this land's not Buy Land, and not Long Guy land... David Weinberger's out with the latest JOHO, in which he continues to shout in the wilderness that is Business as Usual about why proprietary notions about the Web remain entirely misplaced. It's good stuff, and here's a nice hunk of it:
| | Between the two moods — embracing the plenitude, feeling alienated from cold, unknowable matter — we build our lives. Civilizations form where the rivers meet. Cultures develop in isolation because of the fact of distance. There is nothing we take for granted more than the fact that we are thrown into the gift of the world.
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| | The world that we've carved for ourselves out of the rock and ice of the earth has always been a social world, one in which we share interests and presuppositions, and, most of all, a language. The sociality of the world has always been hemmed in by the fact of distance, a type of enforced intimacy that we take for granted. But there's no matter on the Web and thus no distance. It is a purely social realm; all we have are one another and what we've written. And what we've written has been written for others. The Web is a public place that we've built by doing public things.
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| | It is, unlike the world that was given to us, thoroughly ours. I don't mean "ours" in the sense of a possession. The normal model of possession doesn't hold on the Web, for there is no *matter* to be divvied up and defended. Rather, the Web is ours in the sense that language is ours. It is of us. It is drenched in that which makes us human: consciousness, sociality, meaning, intention, interest. As with anything human, the nature of those intentions vary from the noble to the base to the perverse. But the Web is *our* world, a world that we're building for ourselves out of the truly human "stuff" of language and passion.
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| | This is why the Web matters to us. We once had a chance to live large in the abundance that was given to us and we chose instead to listen to the serpent who showed us the harsh fact that the world isn't all mangoes and rum. Ever since we have built our world huddled within the sharp-edged crannies that protect us from the wind. Now we have our first opportunity to build a world out of nothing but our passion to be together.
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So no trespassing, okay?
Biography of a ghost: Tom Carpenter gives 3 Lessons from BOO.com.
Is this why Boeing's splitting? The Seattle Times says February's magnitude 6.8 quake in the Northwest just wound the stem on a sping that could unload a quake 100 times worse. "It's getting spring-loaded," says one scientist. Details here.
Hold you in his armchair, you can feel his disease: Seems the English govenrment's special stash of smallpox, tuburculosis, anthrax and ebola viruses was stolen or something. Think you can teach an airport customs dog to smell some of that? Speaking of which, several years ago Joyce was waiting for her bags at Customs in San Francisco after a trip back from Hong Kong. Also hanging around the carousel was a gentleman who led a beagle from bag to bag to sniff for... what? When the dog passed by Joyce's bag, the guy next to her dryly remarked, "software dog."
Speaking of Clues: I was just asked if I knew anything about Linux training. Well, there was the some excellent instruction I got from SGI a year ago. But the real mind blower is that Google lists not only 1,220,000 pages with "Linux training," but four of those little low-bud classified-like ads.
Yes, I know yesterday's blog has more bad links than a nuked golf course. Thanks to Uncle Dave, I know how to do them right now (see? today it works). I'll get around to yesterday later.
Sacre Cleu! The friendly mailwoman just handed me a package from Perseus Books that contains two copies of Liberté pour le Net, which is The Cluetrain Manifesto, au Francais. Instead of "The End of Business as Usual," the subtitle is "Manifeste Cluetrain: la fin du train-train des affaires."
Day Three with Radio. On deadline all day, so it'll be thin. Also screwing around with Rules. Neat stuff.
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