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Thursday, May 6, 2004
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 Thursday, May 6, 2004
started 5/6/2004; 10:54:54 AM - last post 5/9/2004; 6:48:56 AM
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Doc Searls - Thursday, May 6, 2004 
5/6/2004; 2:54:54 PM (reads: 4593, responses: 1)
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The great uncovered 
Flogrolling
Human waste
| | The phrase "social capital" has done so much more harm than good. Just heard that from Clay Shirky on the phone. I totally agree. In fact, I feel the same way about anything we call "capital" that basically isn't: "intellectual capital" ... "human capital" ... yada yada. |
| | There's a human cost to conceiving human qualities in terms of business quantities. We not only demean innately human values, but we also misplace them in a context that subtracts their power to enlarge themselves, to grow and change, and to act in all kinds of ways — very few of which resemble the other goods we call "capital." |
| | My point here is similar to the one I made the other day on Jeff Jarvis' blog about speech, which is a highly human activity. The First Amendment protects our right to speak freely, yet when we conceive speech as "content" or "material" or a "product" that we "load" into a "channel" or a "network" for "distribution" or "transmission" through a "medium" to "receivers" and "consumers" ... it isn't speech any more. It's just another product transported from producers to consumers and subject to all kinds of laws that have nothing to do with speech. In effect, we waste our own humanity. After all, nothing is more human than our power of speech, no? |
| | When we productize (and regulate) the crap out of our humanity, crap is all we have left to sell. |
| | Bonus link: The Clue Rush, a section of this blog from February 26, 2001. |
But it won't happen
A triumph of French genius over French engineering
| | That's what my old friend Julius Ruff (a professor of history at Marquette) called Citroën automobiles. This was back in the sixties, when we were both in college. In those days your iconic Citroëns were the 2-cylinder 2cv and the aerodynamic DS. The 2cv had windows with hinges, bug-eye headlights, less curb weight than a large motorcycle and accelleration that Car & Driver called "eventual." The DS had headlights that turned with the steering wheel, a brake that was a button on the floor and a failure-prone hydraulic system that controlled most of the car's fluid systems. Both were distinctive to extremes matched by no other cars, ever. |
| | For some reason I woke up at 3-something this morning, thinking about that quote. I found it nowhere on the Web, so I had to write it down. |
| | [Later...] Merci beaucoup for the blogback from mediaTIC blog. I should add that the 2cv and the DS were two of the most long-lived automobiles of all time. The 2cv lasted 50 years and the DS lasted for 20. |
| | Of course, individual Citroëns, especially the highly complex and hard-to-fix DS, were another case. I know one guy who owned several just so he could keep one of them on the road. |
discuss
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Phil Wolff - Speaking scales up. Listening doesn't.
5/9/2004; 10:48:56 AM (reads: 715, responses: 0)
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Speaking scales up. Listening doesn't.
In one-to-one conversation there's no problem. But add people and things change quickly.
There's a point where we become a collective, working for mutual benefit. Clubs, businesses, activist groups. But voice and attention are limited and don't scale in a union hall; cacophony, not song. So we take turns and choose and filter and edit and before long we're using megaphones.
About the nomenclature: "Human resources" reeks of "people as cogs in a machine", remnants of an industrial revolution.
Capital is "something I can use." One definition of management is "using resources to support an organizational goal." It's evidence of the dissatisfaction with the framing and the reaching about for an alternative. Applying some of what civilization has learned (however wrong) from the ages of numbers and machines and systems to the softer stuff is appealing.
The languages of accounting and management took millenia to expand beyond literally counting beans. We've been only been talking about social capital (Ben Franklin, Dale Carnegie) and intellectual capital (von Clausewitz, Porter) for the last few generations. Generations from now we'll have language and ideas for modeling the humane and spiritual sides along with the quant.
Nevertheless, our challenge will remain hearing more, listening better, absorbing faster.
discuss
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