Another shout out to
for picking up on my SXSW writing. Renee just sent me the nicest email.
Thursday, March 13, 2003
Corollary: Mention Me! XXXIV
Shouts out to
Ross Mayfield's Weblog
Pure Content
for mentioning my SXSW coverage. Thanks!
Shouts out to
for mentioning my SXSW coverage. Thanks!
Wednesday, March 12, 2003
Mention Me! XXXIV
My South by Southwest 2003 reports got good response this past weekend, and I'll follow up soon with some commentary on the event -- as well as some insight on what the immediate journalism experiment felt like. This is the first time I've confblogged, and it went over well enough to do it again in the future. Thanks to the folks who've linked to the Media Diet coverage to date:
Anil Dash
Ben Bailey
Boing Boing
JD's New Media Musings
Just Differently Intelligent
Lawrence Lessig
Stingy Kids
If I've missed anyone, let me know. I'm just going off references today.
My South by Southwest 2003 reports got good response this past weekend, and I'll follow up soon with some commentary on the event -- as well as some insight on what the immediate journalism experiment felt like. This is the first time I've confblogged, and it went over well enough to do it again in the future. Thanks to the folks who've linked to the Media Diet coverage to date:
If I've missed anyone, let me know. I'm just going off references today.
South by Southwest 2003 XIX
Bruce Sterling and Derek Woodgate: Tomorrow Now
Introductions
Sterling: I'm an author. My most recent book is actually a futurist book. After I did this book, I got this really sweet gig writing for Wired, writing this monthly futurist column. That explains what the heck I'm doing here.
Derek and I are going to start ripping on six major league change drivers. Were just going to ping pong some things back and forth.
Woodgate: I'm principal of the futures lab here in Austin. We work with major corporations looking for what we call future potential for them. We really look to provide them with what a strategic plan or R&D company can't. I'm a political economist by profession.
Open Spectrum
Sterling: Topic No. 1: Open spectrum. This baby's come completely out of left field. People are suggesting that you could divvy up the spectrum and rain it down on people's homes. I've got it right here in my machine. I'm running off Cory Doctorow's groovy little 802.11 thing. This is just the baby verson. I'm interested in the struggle because it a microcosm of a bigger one. It's a struggle between the pigopolis and the pirates. Or law and order and the multitudes. In the world of open spectrum, it's very open. No one knows what its good for. The people who are in charge of the spectrum allocation are very worried about it. After the '90s it's very clear that you can bring a lot of capital to stuff, make it widely available, and still lose your ass. You can go down in flames by bringing people access to information.
Here we've got my favorite version, Motorola Canopy. What your talking about is a really big antenna, kind of a moonlight tower. Everyone pitches in a couple of bucks. It's no big deal. The thing is, this is just a small range of spectrum that’s good for microwaving chickens. If we can get just one tiny chunk of Clearchannel's empire, one wasted classic rock station, we could cover the country in 18 months. There would be no last mile problem.
Woodgate: We've been following the spectrum thing, too. We're looking for a tipping point, and I'm not really sure we're there. The car seems to be the tipping point. People much more believe in the local area network than in mesh. The thought is that putting these standards in cars by 2007 means that Ford and Daimler are all in this together. If it really gets commercialized in that way it’s a very consumer-oriented way. We've seen the death of satellites. Other than moving heavy data, where open spectrum's better, we're probably going to see more of the local area networks in the short term.
From a business pojnt of view it’s a little different.
Bubble Money
Sterling: Let's talk about the business side. That’s Topic No. 2: Where's the bubble money? Where's the economic activity? Where's the business model? So much glass was put in the ground and so much human energy was expended for something that doesn’t have a business model. The death of portals is a problem. The death of ISP's is a problem. If something like Canopy takes off, there go the ISP's. Its interesting to me that the biggest thing going right now is Google. Google isn't a portal. It's all about getting right into the database. Get me right into the database.
Who is this poor guy from Red Herring? I saw him on CNN this morning. He says, "I was googling it. I was bloggering it." I was blog dancing him. He says, "Yeah, the enthusiasts usually start it and then someone like me comes in to finance it." I was, like, "Where's your magazine dude?" How many times do these guys need to be punished? How much money do they need to lose? When will they learn that the Internet is a product of the sciences and the military. Those aren't profit-motive ventures.
CNN doesn't have any money to send anyone to Baghdad this time around. Fox lost heaps of money, enough money to build entire cities from the ground up. There's no money. There's no money in Blogger. There's no money in the corporate media. Money has to come from somewhere. Unless information wants to be worthless. Unless we just want to be worse informed from machines that work worse and worse. That’s the trend I'm looking at, and it's bugging me.
Woodgate: I agree with you, but I think there are some places where there is some bubble money. Don't throw it all out. If you look at the drivers, you can see some trends. Things like escapism and maximum pleasure are really quite important. In things like entertainment or really serious stuff, there may not be any money. But in things like experience collecting, cultural diffusion, there may be money.
We are seeing some real creepage in a whole host of environmental issues. Where there is going to be real money is in security and in self-preservation. As a futurist, I usually never try to guess where I should put my money, but security is one of those areas. In addition, I think we need to look at biotech. Another thing ubiquitous computing.
Ubiquitous Computing
Sterling: Let's move right into that. Topic No. 3: Ubicomp. You're beginning to see some of this popping up. When you start having these little gizmos, you know you're moving in the right direction from where it goes from hand waving to where it really hurts people. Ubiciomp bites man.
I think that the first area is traffic monitoring and traffic rings. The mayor of London OK'd the installation of traffic monitoring cameras that take snapshots of your license plate. You get a ticket. That's OK. We don’t want to run people down. But what worries me is ubicomp mission creep. Now you’ve got a database of everybody and her sister's license plate and what they're doing downtown. I don’t know if any of you Austinites have noticed the bloom of video cameras. What is our city doing with this video? How do you leave town without them knowing? How do you really know when you're driving across town to have a little rendezvous with your boyfriend that your husband wont call up and ask where did my wife's license plate go? It's a ubicomp problem. Its an Orwellian ubicomp problem.
It's sexy. The upcoming war between palm tops and cell phone gadgets will be interesting. It's weird. I'ts one of the most exciting places of concurrent technological development: Handhelds trying to become phones and phones trying to become palm tops.
Woodgate: Every project that we've been working on for the last 2-3 years, ubicomp has been a really critical aspect. There are two sides: the everywhere and the nowhere. The likely thing is that the suit is most likely going to be an office. Given heads-up displays, you can really customize them. Having personal wireless area networks is going to be pretty exciting. MIT is working on that. So are a lot of companies, particularly companies making wear ware.
Sterling: You’ve got to love a term like "wear ware." Then GPS can be where wear ware.
Woodgate: What we're seeing is a tremendous number of new polymers with circuitry embedded in them.
Sterling: I love Materials Connection. Their job is to go to Italy and buy all the weirdest shit. They put it in a cubby hole and people pay just to come and handle the stuff. I could make a fork out of this! It takes a while for new materials to become adopted. They’ve been at it for a long time. I ran into this one guy. And he gave me a chunk of foamed aluminum. It's froth. That stuff just smells like the future.
Woodgate: It's good from the sense that you can really understand how you can build anything. That’s important from a sensory perspective. It's really important that it felt good. The technology really has to be invisible. We're looking for, even with ubiquitous computing, things that really do something formless. One interesting point you made is about the handheld vs. the cell phone. I don’t see the future of the screen being between the handheld vs. the cell phone but a piece of plastic.
Sterling: One aspect of this that’s being underplayed is ubijunk. The first wave of ubicomp isnt going to work very well. Then you end up with stuff that's just waiting to be turned off or picked up or thrown out. What happens if you walk into a room that’s experienced the blue screen of death? What if there are buggy rooms? Who do you call? The difficulty of cars has always been the planned obsolescence of cars. What happens when you try to drive an obsolete smart vehicle? It still thinks it's smarter than you, and it's been in a couple of wrecks. Its GPS map is 18 months out of date and you drive right over the edge at 80 miles an hour. Bad maps cause you to blow up the Chinese embassy. What if it's in your clothes? I have an ID tag in my underwear, and I wash it one too many times. There's a whole Philip K. Dick world of hilarity here.
Industry
Sterling: Let's move onto Topic No. 4: Influence on industry. The thing that impressed me with the foamed aluminum wasn’t the thing itself but the amount of sensing. You almost need aluminum moussing. Just the right temperature. What happens when that crashes? What happens when it's no longer under the control of experts? What if I can go down to Kinko's and foam me some aluminum?
It’s the Linux model for physical objects. It's a really intriguing organizational problem that our society has that no else seems to have. What happens to General Motors if people can build cars? What if you could just download the stats to build a Model T? That can't be that hard. Henry Ford wasn't that big a guy. What if you built one out of foamed aluminum and chopped bamboo? How much would it really cost? Maybe a couple of million dollars? A Model T cost $400 bucks new. And there was no one in particular making them.
It's a Red Hat automobile. There's no digital rights management. When it wore out you'd just make another. How would we fit that into the litigation structure? Who do you sue? What are we going to do when kids are making stuff -- stuff -- not drivers, but actual stuff? We have a major military problem over it. The terrorist spread of mass destruction is basically a Linux model for nuclear weapons. That’s why were going to take out Iraq. It used to be that only governments could afford weapons of mass destruction. Now small groups of networked activists can get their hands on the stuff.
They're only weapons. And weapons have a manufacturing aspect. You just have to make the stuff. Aluminum stuff is suddenly contraband. Walk around downtown Austin and see how many aluminum tubes you find. It concerns me. We don’t really have methods to deal with this stuff. People's attitudes are becoming polarized. At the top end its becoming more and more ferocious, and at the bottom it's becoming more and more corrupt. We need a middle here.
Woodgate: We're seeing some of the modeling techniques that are allowing people to make things like little toys. But it's beyond us to work out the distribution problems,. Fabbing's going to be an important part of some community aspects. But the whole issue of community structures is part of society. If you look at the changing nature of work, we are seeing a real breakdown of traditional structures, particularly in knowledge work. There's no real need for these big organizations. You can come in and do what you need to do at any time.
We're starting to see what we call community companies. They're not just profit-making companies but communities of profitable individuals. In Europe, we're seeing already that people are negotiating their own contracts on a very different basis. They're looking for a retirement lifestyle all the way through their entire career. I'm also looking at that from the fabbing point of view.
Sterling: I wonder how you make those structures accountable. And how you can plan that lifestyle when you have no idea how long you're going to live.
Biotech
Sterling: Maybe we should move onto topic No. 5: Biotech. I'm concerned about the structure of the American healthcare system. There's a not so slow crisis brewing there. One of the worst aspects of this I've seen is a revolt on the part of healthcare workers on insurance rates. They're refusing to heal sick people because they can't afford the healthcare premiums. This is a sign of a breakdown in the social order. You can't maintain that drain on the insurance companies.
We've tried. The US has struggled with this for many years, to find a balance between socialized medicine and the high-tech treatment we’ve been aiming for. It doesn’t matter if you can get four heart transplants if the guy next to you at the bus station coughs antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis on you. I belong to the generation where it's sort of a given that healthcare will continue to improve and lifespans will continue to expand. But you see life expectancies crashing in large parts of the world. The World Health Organization used to think that the population was on it's way to 11 billion. Where is it now? 8.3 billion. Where'd all those people go? AIDS, mostly, actually. AIDS and a crashing birth rate. When people don't have sex carefully, we get AIDS. And when people have sex carefully, we get crashing birth rates. We don’t treat our public health as though we all share the same species. The low end and a certain number of people are going to die from this. It's not going to be pretty
Some things are pretty. We have a much better sense of cellular development at this point. I'd be pretty concerned about the degree of antibiotic resistance. We're going to be domesticating microbes, figuring out what they do and how they work. Whereas we used to have home pregnancy tests, we're going to have home everything tests. You're going to have microbe sniffers on towers. Bad cloud today. You're going to have microbe sniffers on every water faucet. There's a potential there for non-commercial health monitoring activity where we can actually see what's eating us. It's a no brainer for domestic offense because it's a bio-war defense. You can see this in elk wasting and West Nile virus. Out of this crisis better things will come.
Woodgate: Other than the UK, compared to other healthcare systems, yours is probably the worse. With new bio materials, tissues, and genetics, we're going to see massive growth in that area which will counterbalance what we see happening. Particularly with an aging population, the costs are up. All those things cost money, and it's going to be even more difficult to keep the system running.
We're going to see more prevention techniques. The air that’s inside your house is 2-3 times worse than the air outside your house. We're going to see a lot of things pumped into the air at home for therapy. Equally, were going to see new soaps and other materials.
Sterling: Instead of home fire things, why don’t we have home cold germs things? People are used to paying a lot of money for medicine, but prevention is more of a hobby. Why can't I see the inside of my head every morning? Why can't I scan my body head to toe and have that as my start page so I can see how much calcium I've lost in my spine? Why do I have to go to an expert and pay them to tell me?
The mechanisms of decay in the human body, there are probably eight or nine of them. We might beat one or two of them in pretty short order. You could have fresh dewy young skin but still be going blind or deaf. Life extension isn't going to be like this fountain of youth crap. You'll have life extension in your nose. You'll spend all your time patching things up while you're Chernobyling somewhere else. I think the first people to do it are going to really suffer. Don’t ever be the alpha test for a biotech upgrade. Let the junkies do it. Let RU Sirius do it. Let the extropians do it.
Globalization
Sterling: We're done to our last topic here: Globalizatioon, Americanization, anti-Americanization. The war. Movement in the street. NATO, the UN, the scene, baby!
Woodgate: Is globalization Americanization? It's really China-ization. The factory of the world is in China. The way globalization spreads is more about timing than anything else. It's perceived as Americanization because there's a complete gap between the ideology of America and the ideology of the rest of the world. In most of Europe and in Japan, you don't have ultra-capitalism like you have in the US. Look at what's important to people's lives. That makes it really different and difficult.
You have the same problem internally between states and federalization. States are going their own way. There's a massive change that’s going to go on. If it doesn’t, the US is going to go through a really difficult period. That might not be the end of the world. Go back 100 years and you have two world wars and tens of wars elsewhere. And we're still here. 10 years from now the US will be very different in its attitudes. It has to be if it's going to sustain any kind of growth.
Sterling: I think a lot of people mistook globalization for Americanization because for a long time Americans held the megaphone. During the '90s there was kind of a period of quiescence. People in the rest of the world expect Americans to behave the way the Washington Consensus would have us act. But now we've got more of a Serbian or South African-style regime in power that’s trying to shift foreign policy away from here. It's a large continental, militarized superpower with a population under surveillance and punishment.
That’s not the way America was when it was globalizing. Other countries are globalizing better now. ??? Al jazira ??? has the vitality of CNN during the first Gulf War. I would expect this second Gulf War to make them. They're a global newsmaking organization. They're breaking a lot of stories, people. The non-resident Indians have had a huge impact on their home country. Al Qaeda are globalized Arabs. They're guys with western educations and engineering degrees. They're globalized Arabs and they're angry about it.
I think it's about time the globe woke up that 4% of the people in the world can't do all the damn heavy lifting. If you're Brazil, you need your own damn government. The idea that the UN becomes irrelevant because the Bush administration says so is ridicuolous. It's not like the Chinese prime minister is going to stop talking to the Indian prime minister because they shut down a building in New York. The future is people in Belgrade talking to people in Latvia.
This too shall pass. The clock will not stop ticking. Armageddon never lives up to its hype. Things change and they change for the better, the worse, and the indifferent. Let's all go to my house and have a beer this evening.
Bruce Sterling and Derek Woodgate: Tomorrow Now
Do I really need to introduce Sterling? Woodgate is the principal partner of the Futures Lab. Here is a rough transcript of the discussion:
Introductions
Sterling: I'm an author. My most recent book is actually a futurist book. After I did this book, I got this really sweet gig writing for Wired, writing this monthly futurist column. That explains what the heck I'm doing here.
Derek and I are going to start ripping on six major league change drivers. Were just going to ping pong some things back and forth.
Woodgate: I'm principal of the futures lab here in Austin. We work with major corporations looking for what we call future potential for them. We really look to provide them with what a strategic plan or R&D company can't. I'm a political economist by profession.
Open Spectrum
Sterling: Topic No. 1: Open spectrum. This baby's come completely out of left field. People are suggesting that you could divvy up the spectrum and rain it down on people's homes. I've got it right here in my machine. I'm running off Cory Doctorow's groovy little 802.11 thing. This is just the baby verson. I'm interested in the struggle because it a microcosm of a bigger one. It's a struggle between the pigopolis and the pirates. Or law and order and the multitudes. In the world of open spectrum, it's very open. No one knows what its good for. The people who are in charge of the spectrum allocation are very worried about it. After the '90s it's very clear that you can bring a lot of capital to stuff, make it widely available, and still lose your ass. You can go down in flames by bringing people access to information.
Here we've got my favorite version, Motorola Canopy. What your talking about is a really big antenna, kind of a moonlight tower. Everyone pitches in a couple of bucks. It's no big deal. The thing is, this is just a small range of spectrum that’s good for microwaving chickens. If we can get just one tiny chunk of Clearchannel's empire, one wasted classic rock station, we could cover the country in 18 months. There would be no last mile problem.
Woodgate: We've been following the spectrum thing, too. We're looking for a tipping point, and I'm not really sure we're there. The car seems to be the tipping point. People much more believe in the local area network than in mesh. The thought is that putting these standards in cars by 2007 means that Ford and Daimler are all in this together. If it really gets commercialized in that way it’s a very consumer-oriented way. We've seen the death of satellites. Other than moving heavy data, where open spectrum's better, we're probably going to see more of the local area networks in the short term.
From a business pojnt of view it’s a little different.
Bubble Money
Sterling: Let's talk about the business side. That’s Topic No. 2: Where's the bubble money? Where's the economic activity? Where's the business model? So much glass was put in the ground and so much human energy was expended for something that doesn’t have a business model. The death of portals is a problem. The death of ISP's is a problem. If something like Canopy takes off, there go the ISP's. Its interesting to me that the biggest thing going right now is Google. Google isn't a portal. It's all about getting right into the database. Get me right into the database.
Who is this poor guy from Red Herring? I saw him on CNN this morning. He says, "I was googling it. I was bloggering it." I was blog dancing him. He says, "Yeah, the enthusiasts usually start it and then someone like me comes in to finance it." I was, like, "Where's your magazine dude?" How many times do these guys need to be punished? How much money do they need to lose? When will they learn that the Internet is a product of the sciences and the military. Those aren't profit-motive ventures.
CNN doesn't have any money to send anyone to Baghdad this time around. Fox lost heaps of money, enough money to build entire cities from the ground up. There's no money. There's no money in Blogger. There's no money in the corporate media. Money has to come from somewhere. Unless information wants to be worthless. Unless we just want to be worse informed from machines that work worse and worse. That’s the trend I'm looking at, and it's bugging me.
Woodgate: I agree with you, but I think there are some places where there is some bubble money. Don't throw it all out. If you look at the drivers, you can see some trends. Things like escapism and maximum pleasure are really quite important. In things like entertainment or really serious stuff, there may not be any money. But in things like experience collecting, cultural diffusion, there may be money.
We are seeing some real creepage in a whole host of environmental issues. Where there is going to be real money is in security and in self-preservation. As a futurist, I usually never try to guess where I should put my money, but security is one of those areas. In addition, I think we need to look at biotech. Another thing ubiquitous computing.
Ubiquitous Computing
Sterling: Let's move right into that. Topic No. 3: Ubicomp. You're beginning to see some of this popping up. When you start having these little gizmos, you know you're moving in the right direction from where it goes from hand waving to where it really hurts people. Ubiciomp bites man.
I think that the first area is traffic monitoring and traffic rings. The mayor of London OK'd the installation of traffic monitoring cameras that take snapshots of your license plate. You get a ticket. That's OK. We don’t want to run people down. But what worries me is ubicomp mission creep. Now you’ve got a database of everybody and her sister's license plate and what they're doing downtown. I don’t know if any of you Austinites have noticed the bloom of video cameras. What is our city doing with this video? How do you leave town without them knowing? How do you really know when you're driving across town to have a little rendezvous with your boyfriend that your husband wont call up and ask where did my wife's license plate go? It's a ubicomp problem. Its an Orwellian ubicomp problem.
It's sexy. The upcoming war between palm tops and cell phone gadgets will be interesting. It's weird. I'ts one of the most exciting places of concurrent technological development: Handhelds trying to become phones and phones trying to become palm tops.
Woodgate: Every project that we've been working on for the last 2-3 years, ubicomp has been a really critical aspect. There are two sides: the everywhere and the nowhere. The likely thing is that the suit is most likely going to be an office. Given heads-up displays, you can really customize them. Having personal wireless area networks is going to be pretty exciting. MIT is working on that. So are a lot of companies, particularly companies making wear ware.
Sterling: You’ve got to love a term like "wear ware." Then GPS can be where wear ware.
Woodgate: What we're seeing is a tremendous number of new polymers with circuitry embedded in them.
Sterling: I love Materials Connection. Their job is to go to Italy and buy all the weirdest shit. They put it in a cubby hole and people pay just to come and handle the stuff. I could make a fork out of this! It takes a while for new materials to become adopted. They’ve been at it for a long time. I ran into this one guy. And he gave me a chunk of foamed aluminum. It's froth. That stuff just smells like the future.
Woodgate: It's good from the sense that you can really understand how you can build anything. That’s important from a sensory perspective. It's really important that it felt good. The technology really has to be invisible. We're looking for, even with ubiquitous computing, things that really do something formless. One interesting point you made is about the handheld vs. the cell phone. I don’t see the future of the screen being between the handheld vs. the cell phone but a piece of plastic.
Sterling: One aspect of this that’s being underplayed is ubijunk. The first wave of ubicomp isnt going to work very well. Then you end up with stuff that's just waiting to be turned off or picked up or thrown out. What happens if you walk into a room that’s experienced the blue screen of death? What if there are buggy rooms? Who do you call? The difficulty of cars has always been the planned obsolescence of cars. What happens when you try to drive an obsolete smart vehicle? It still thinks it's smarter than you, and it's been in a couple of wrecks. Its GPS map is 18 months out of date and you drive right over the edge at 80 miles an hour. Bad maps cause you to blow up the Chinese embassy. What if it's in your clothes? I have an ID tag in my underwear, and I wash it one too many times. There's a whole Philip K. Dick world of hilarity here.
Industry
Sterling: Let's move onto Topic No. 4: Influence on industry. The thing that impressed me with the foamed aluminum wasn’t the thing itself but the amount of sensing. You almost need aluminum moussing. Just the right temperature. What happens when that crashes? What happens when it's no longer under the control of experts? What if I can go down to Kinko's and foam me some aluminum?
It’s the Linux model for physical objects. It's a really intriguing organizational problem that our society has that no else seems to have. What happens to General Motors if people can build cars? What if you could just download the stats to build a Model T? That can't be that hard. Henry Ford wasn't that big a guy. What if you built one out of foamed aluminum and chopped bamboo? How much would it really cost? Maybe a couple of million dollars? A Model T cost $400 bucks new. And there was no one in particular making them.
It's a Red Hat automobile. There's no digital rights management. When it wore out you'd just make another. How would we fit that into the litigation structure? Who do you sue? What are we going to do when kids are making stuff -- stuff -- not drivers, but actual stuff? We have a major military problem over it. The terrorist spread of mass destruction is basically a Linux model for nuclear weapons. That’s why were going to take out Iraq. It used to be that only governments could afford weapons of mass destruction. Now small groups of networked activists can get their hands on the stuff.
They're only weapons. And weapons have a manufacturing aspect. You just have to make the stuff. Aluminum stuff is suddenly contraband. Walk around downtown Austin and see how many aluminum tubes you find. It concerns me. We don’t really have methods to deal with this stuff. People's attitudes are becoming polarized. At the top end its becoming more and more ferocious, and at the bottom it's becoming more and more corrupt. We need a middle here.
Woodgate: We're seeing some of the modeling techniques that are allowing people to make things like little toys. But it's beyond us to work out the distribution problems,. Fabbing's going to be an important part of some community aspects. But the whole issue of community structures is part of society. If you look at the changing nature of work, we are seeing a real breakdown of traditional structures, particularly in knowledge work. There's no real need for these big organizations. You can come in and do what you need to do at any time.
We're starting to see what we call community companies. They're not just profit-making companies but communities of profitable individuals. In Europe, we're seeing already that people are negotiating their own contracts on a very different basis. They're looking for a retirement lifestyle all the way through their entire career. I'm also looking at that from the fabbing point of view.
Sterling: I wonder how you make those structures accountable. And how you can plan that lifestyle when you have no idea how long you're going to live.
Biotech
Sterling: Maybe we should move onto topic No. 5: Biotech. I'm concerned about the structure of the American healthcare system. There's a not so slow crisis brewing there. One of the worst aspects of this I've seen is a revolt on the part of healthcare workers on insurance rates. They're refusing to heal sick people because they can't afford the healthcare premiums. This is a sign of a breakdown in the social order. You can't maintain that drain on the insurance companies.
We've tried. The US has struggled with this for many years, to find a balance between socialized medicine and the high-tech treatment we’ve been aiming for. It doesn’t matter if you can get four heart transplants if the guy next to you at the bus station coughs antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis on you. I belong to the generation where it's sort of a given that healthcare will continue to improve and lifespans will continue to expand. But you see life expectancies crashing in large parts of the world. The World Health Organization used to think that the population was on it's way to 11 billion. Where is it now? 8.3 billion. Where'd all those people go? AIDS, mostly, actually. AIDS and a crashing birth rate. When people don't have sex carefully, we get AIDS. And when people have sex carefully, we get crashing birth rates. We don’t treat our public health as though we all share the same species. The low end and a certain number of people are going to die from this. It's not going to be pretty
Some things are pretty. We have a much better sense of cellular development at this point. I'd be pretty concerned about the degree of antibiotic resistance. We're going to be domesticating microbes, figuring out what they do and how they work. Whereas we used to have home pregnancy tests, we're going to have home everything tests. You're going to have microbe sniffers on towers. Bad cloud today. You're going to have microbe sniffers on every water faucet. There's a potential there for non-commercial health monitoring activity where we can actually see what's eating us. It's a no brainer for domestic offense because it's a bio-war defense. You can see this in elk wasting and West Nile virus. Out of this crisis better things will come.
Woodgate: Other than the UK, compared to other healthcare systems, yours is probably the worse. With new bio materials, tissues, and genetics, we're going to see massive growth in that area which will counterbalance what we see happening. Particularly with an aging population, the costs are up. All those things cost money, and it's going to be even more difficult to keep the system running.
We're going to see more prevention techniques. The air that’s inside your house is 2-3 times worse than the air outside your house. We're going to see a lot of things pumped into the air at home for therapy. Equally, were going to see new soaps and other materials.
Sterling: Instead of home fire things, why don’t we have home cold germs things? People are used to paying a lot of money for medicine, but prevention is more of a hobby. Why can't I see the inside of my head every morning? Why can't I scan my body head to toe and have that as my start page so I can see how much calcium I've lost in my spine? Why do I have to go to an expert and pay them to tell me?
The mechanisms of decay in the human body, there are probably eight or nine of them. We might beat one or two of them in pretty short order. You could have fresh dewy young skin but still be going blind or deaf. Life extension isn't going to be like this fountain of youth crap. You'll have life extension in your nose. You'll spend all your time patching things up while you're Chernobyling somewhere else. I think the first people to do it are going to really suffer. Don’t ever be the alpha test for a biotech upgrade. Let the junkies do it. Let RU Sirius do it. Let the extropians do it.
Globalization
Sterling: We're done to our last topic here: Globalizatioon, Americanization, anti-Americanization. The war. Movement in the street. NATO, the UN, the scene, baby!
Woodgate: Is globalization Americanization? It's really China-ization. The factory of the world is in China. The way globalization spreads is more about timing than anything else. It's perceived as Americanization because there's a complete gap between the ideology of America and the ideology of the rest of the world. In most of Europe and in Japan, you don't have ultra-capitalism like you have in the US. Look at what's important to people's lives. That makes it really different and difficult.
You have the same problem internally between states and federalization. States are going their own way. There's a massive change that’s going to go on. If it doesn’t, the US is going to go through a really difficult period. That might not be the end of the world. Go back 100 years and you have two world wars and tens of wars elsewhere. And we're still here. 10 years from now the US will be very different in its attitudes. It has to be if it's going to sustain any kind of growth.
Sterling: I think a lot of people mistook globalization for Americanization because for a long time Americans held the megaphone. During the '90s there was kind of a period of quiescence. People in the rest of the world expect Americans to behave the way the Washington Consensus would have us act. But now we've got more of a Serbian or South African-style regime in power that’s trying to shift foreign policy away from here. It's a large continental, militarized superpower with a population under surveillance and punishment.
That’s not the way America was when it was globalizing. Other countries are globalizing better now. ??? Al jazira ??? has the vitality of CNN during the first Gulf War. I would expect this second Gulf War to make them. They're a global newsmaking organization. They're breaking a lot of stories, people. The non-resident Indians have had a huge impact on their home country. Al Qaeda are globalized Arabs. They're guys with western educations and engineering degrees. They're globalized Arabs and they're angry about it.
I think it's about time the globe woke up that 4% of the people in the world can't do all the damn heavy lifting. If you're Brazil, you need your own damn government. The idea that the UN becomes irrelevant because the Bush administration says so is ridicuolous. It's not like the Chinese prime minister is going to stop talking to the Indian prime minister because they shut down a building in New York. The future is people in Belgrade talking to people in Latvia.
This too shall pass. The clock will not stop ticking. Armageddon never lives up to its hype. Things change and they change for the better, the worse, and the indifferent. Let's all go to my house and have a beer this evening.
Tuesday, March 11, 2003
South by Southwest 2003 XVIII
Richard Florida: The Rise of the Creative Class
Kirk Watson: Welcome, everyone. I'm pleased to see such a crowd. As the former mayor of Austin and someone who tried to pay attention to why regions flourish, I have been enamored with Dr. Florida's work for some time. It is difficult to be a rock star when you talk about economic development and regionalism. Richard Florida is a rock star. Many of you already know that he's the author of The Rise of the Creative Class. If you have not picked up that book, you should do so. In Austin, Texas, we debate creativity all the time. It's stirring debate all around the country.
Richard Florida: When you callled me up, it was a long time ago. When you said, "Will you do South by Southwest?", I jumped out of my chair. I said, "Sure, I'll do South by Southwest!" It's great to be here.
After writing this book I've gotten to be interviewed by lots of journalists. The book couldn’t have been written without two places, Newark, New Jersey, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I teach at a place called Carnegie-Mellon. If you know anything about Carnegie-Mellon you know it’s a pretty technologically oriented place.
When I was recruited there in 1987, Pittsburgh was going through a bit of a transformation. They recruited me and the whole idea was to turn Pittsburgh into a high-tech place. The steel mills were closing. We would develop small business incubators, high-tech councils, and spur economic development. I used to come to Austin and talk to people in entrepreneurship. The idea was that we could do some of that in Pittsburgh.
You might not be aware that one of the Carnegie-Mellon spin-offs is Sun Microsystems. Carnegie-Mellon was spinning off companies, but for some reason they weren't rooting in Pittsburgh. In 1991 and 1992 we thought we'd hit a major home run. We'd landed a big Internet search company, Lycos. Everyone thought that that was the company that would change Pittsburgh. 1994 came along. It was my seventh year, so I got to go on sabbatical. I went to teach at Harvard.
I opened up the paper one morning, and it said Lycos to move to Boston. That was a surprise. This was the company that was supposed to transform Pittsburgh. And it was moving to Boston.
People move to the place that has the best jobs. You will do anything in your community regardless of what it takes to lure those jobs. Here was the bizarre thing. The people weren't moving to the jobs. Jobs were moving to the people. When I called the people at Carnegie-Mellon to see why Lycos was moving to Boston, it wasn't that Boston was offering economically incentives. Lycos was moving because it wanted to be closer to the people that were in Boston.
That's when the lightbulb turned on in my head. Companies don't lead economic growth, people do. People move inexorably to the highest paying jobs. Maybe, just maybe, the biggest driver to economic growth was where people choose to go. When I looked back over the entire field I found not one paper about this question. No one had even bothered too ask.
We did all sorts of research. We talked to waiters and waitresses. We talked to people in bars. We talked to students. Students are interesting because they're making location decisions. And we did some statistical research.
The first thing we figured out was that most people have belief that what generates economic growth and wealth is technological progress. Some people criticize my notion off the creative class as elitist. Generally speaking, the field of economics says if you want to grow your field you need to invest in technology. My simple-minded notion was that that was far too narrow of a conceptualization. Technology is a very narrow sliver of something called human creativity.
Where you get real cycles of economic growth is where the different kinds of creativity come together. When hippie culture and universities come together, centers of economic growth have always been centers of creativity. Where in the hell is Silicon Valley? It may be nerdy, but it's equidistant between the Haight-Ashbury and the Monterey peninsula. Before the Grateful Dead, there was John Steinbeck. It has always been a place of creativity.
In the Bay Area, when Apple when to Valentine to ask for money, he didn't care what they looked like. Creativity is the source of innovation, not technology. The argument in the book is that creativity is involved in and integral to everything we do, every good we make, and every service we provide. I learned that from my father.
My dad's glasses cost $8 or $9. I'm not going to tell you how much these bad boys cost, but they cost a lot more than that, and I got them for 50% off. I didn't just buy the glasses, I bought the creative content. Whether its eyeglasses or textiles or CD's or music or architecture, everything is valued increasingly it’s the creative content of goods rather than the physical content.
Creativity is the economic force. Where does creativity come from? This is the point that many of the critics of the book criticize. Isn't the idea of the creative class elitist? Every single human being is creative. That's what the book says. Creativity is the great leveler. It defies race, gender, ethnicity, appearance, and sexual orientation. You can't hand creativity down to your children no matter how rich you are. If you suck at playing guitar, you suck. It comes from real live people who defy type.
People are the critical economic resource, not the raw materials, gold, or oil. Those places that can attract creative people because they provide the environment, they're going to be the economic winners. Because people are fickle. What do people want? People want to be themselves. All the other stuff give signals that a place will let people be themselves.
If creativity is the economic force and creativity comes from people and people are the real thing that matters, we come to the third thin. That's the role of place, of community, or region. Geographic place and community have become the essential organizing building block. Geographic place and community have supplanted the corporation. That makes our job a heck of a lot harder. We, all of us, have become stewards of the essential economic building block of the creativity age.
It's not just the Internet. This has been going on for 100 years. The great story of the 20th century was that the Internet was going to make place irrelevant. What is a corporation? What is a company? Well, the company pays dividends, salaries, and wages. It provides a base of people to participate in the company. How does a company do that? The company takes a person, a human being, and matches them up with a task. In the age of the Company Man, companies matched lots of people to lots of jobs, and it worked relatively well. Anyone remember what IBM used to stand for? I've been moved. Your company was your life.
What's the average length of a job today? Three years. What is the mechanism of matching people to work? The geographic place. For a company, the geographic place provides a thick pool of potential people who can come to work or leave work to do more interesting things. People told us we won't move to a place for a job. We want to move to places with lots of jobs. We want to move to a place where there's a vibrant labor market. Place provides this critical economic organizing function.
We began to ask people why do you move. Jobs weren't high on the list. Economists believe that people move according to economic incentives. If you're a 22 year old and you're graduating from college, and there's a great job there but no boys or girls, where are you going to go? People go to other people. Creativity people have always wanted to live in creative environments. There weren't a lot of people who are paid to be creative, so you had these little pockets of people. According to our research, there are 38 million people paid to be creative as part of their job. That's a third of the workforce.
People wanted to be in exciting places with lots of stimli. They wanted outdoors stuff. They wanted to be able to do what they wanted to do. It's not just about the high arts. The things that came through was what we call the informal arts, the independent arts, or street-level culture. Artistic and cultural and music scenes. We associate a place with its audio identity. We had do develop an indicator, right? Can we make up a bohemian index? We counted the people who were paid to be bohemian. It's an admittedly crude, flawed measure. But when you test across 300 metro cities, places that score high on this bohemian measure have high rates of innovation and economic growth.
Places also need to be open, accepting, inclusive, and tolerant. Places that are exlusionary and segregationist, creative people move away. Then other people move away. What would be an indicator that a place is open? We build a measure of foreign-born people and called it the Melting Pot Index. Canada's gone one better. They call it a mosaic. We accept people to melt and become assimilated. The Canadians say it's a mosaic. Come, whoever you are, bring your cultural heritage, and you can be a Canadian.
It's bogus bullshit that creativity is American. 30% of the companies in Silicon Valley were founded by a non-American. The places that are open are the economic winners. Then I met Gary Gates. I was studying the high-tech stuff, and Gary was studying gay people. We met, and we put our lists together, and the high-tech cities were also the gayest cities. I named my five favorite cities, and they were the top five gay cities.
Places that are open to diversity, places where anyone can come and plug in, those are the places that are going to get economic advantage. It wasn't so much that gays or the bohemians drove or attracted economic growth, but that the place attracted people and creativity bubbled up from the people who were there.
Lastly, what people gravitate to in a world with high levels of transience is history and authenticity. Pittsburgh might have a lot more history and authenticity than Austin, but we want to eradicate it. We knock down the Homestead Works and put up a mall because we were afraid o our past. Austin has leveraged its history.
I grew up in a Leave it to Beaver family. My dad went to work, my mom stayed at home, and there were two boys. You know how many Americans live in a family like that today? 7%. Between 93% and 75% live in some other kind of different setup. It's not one or the other. It's not about recruiting families, gays, or singles. It's about having cities that have something for everyone.
Richard Florida: The Rise of the Creative Class
Florida is a professor of economic development at Carnegie-Mellon Universiy and author of The Rise of the Creative Class. Here is a rough transcript of his remarks:
Kirk Watson: Welcome, everyone. I'm pleased to see such a crowd. As the former mayor of Austin and someone who tried to pay attention to why regions flourish, I have been enamored with Dr. Florida's work for some time. It is difficult to be a rock star when you talk about economic development and regionalism. Richard Florida is a rock star. Many of you already know that he's the author of The Rise of the Creative Class. If you have not picked up that book, you should do so. In Austin, Texas, we debate creativity all the time. It's stirring debate all around the country.
Richard Florida: When you callled me up, it was a long time ago. When you said, "Will you do South by Southwest?", I jumped out of my chair. I said, "Sure, I'll do South by Southwest!" It's great to be here.
After writing this book I've gotten to be interviewed by lots of journalists. The book couldn’t have been written without two places, Newark, New Jersey, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I teach at a place called Carnegie-Mellon. If you know anything about Carnegie-Mellon you know it’s a pretty technologically oriented place.
When I was recruited there in 1987, Pittsburgh was going through a bit of a transformation. They recruited me and the whole idea was to turn Pittsburgh into a high-tech place. The steel mills were closing. We would develop small business incubators, high-tech councils, and spur economic development. I used to come to Austin and talk to people in entrepreneurship. The idea was that we could do some of that in Pittsburgh.
You might not be aware that one of the Carnegie-Mellon spin-offs is Sun Microsystems. Carnegie-Mellon was spinning off companies, but for some reason they weren't rooting in Pittsburgh. In 1991 and 1992 we thought we'd hit a major home run. We'd landed a big Internet search company, Lycos. Everyone thought that that was the company that would change Pittsburgh. 1994 came along. It was my seventh year, so I got to go on sabbatical. I went to teach at Harvard.
I opened up the paper one morning, and it said Lycos to move to Boston. That was a surprise. This was the company that was supposed to transform Pittsburgh. And it was moving to Boston.
People move to the place that has the best jobs. You will do anything in your community regardless of what it takes to lure those jobs. Here was the bizarre thing. The people weren't moving to the jobs. Jobs were moving to the people. When I called the people at Carnegie-Mellon to see why Lycos was moving to Boston, it wasn't that Boston was offering economically incentives. Lycos was moving because it wanted to be closer to the people that were in Boston.
That's when the lightbulb turned on in my head. Companies don't lead economic growth, people do. People move inexorably to the highest paying jobs. Maybe, just maybe, the biggest driver to economic growth was where people choose to go. When I looked back over the entire field I found not one paper about this question. No one had even bothered too ask.
We did all sorts of research. We talked to waiters and waitresses. We talked to people in bars. We talked to students. Students are interesting because they're making location decisions. And we did some statistical research.
The first thing we figured out was that most people have belief that what generates economic growth and wealth is technological progress. Some people criticize my notion off the creative class as elitist. Generally speaking, the field of economics says if you want to grow your field you need to invest in technology. My simple-minded notion was that that was far too narrow of a conceptualization. Technology is a very narrow sliver of something called human creativity.
Where you get real cycles of economic growth is where the different kinds of creativity come together. When hippie culture and universities come together, centers of economic growth have always been centers of creativity. Where in the hell is Silicon Valley? It may be nerdy, but it's equidistant between the Haight-Ashbury and the Monterey peninsula. Before the Grateful Dead, there was John Steinbeck. It has always been a place of creativity.
In the Bay Area, when Apple when to Valentine to ask for money, he didn't care what they looked like. Creativity is the source of innovation, not technology. The argument in the book is that creativity is involved in and integral to everything we do, every good we make, and every service we provide. I learned that from my father.
My dad's glasses cost $8 or $9. I'm not going to tell you how much these bad boys cost, but they cost a lot more than that, and I got them for 50% off. I didn't just buy the glasses, I bought the creative content. Whether its eyeglasses or textiles or CD's or music or architecture, everything is valued increasingly it’s the creative content of goods rather than the physical content.
Creativity is the economic force. Where does creativity come from? This is the point that many of the critics of the book criticize. Isn't the idea of the creative class elitist? Every single human being is creative. That's what the book says. Creativity is the great leveler. It defies race, gender, ethnicity, appearance, and sexual orientation. You can't hand creativity down to your children no matter how rich you are. If you suck at playing guitar, you suck. It comes from real live people who defy type.
People are the critical economic resource, not the raw materials, gold, or oil. Those places that can attract creative people because they provide the environment, they're going to be the economic winners. Because people are fickle. What do people want? People want to be themselves. All the other stuff give signals that a place will let people be themselves.
If creativity is the economic force and creativity comes from people and people are the real thing that matters, we come to the third thin. That's the role of place, of community, or region. Geographic place and community have become the essential organizing building block. Geographic place and community have supplanted the corporation. That makes our job a heck of a lot harder. We, all of us, have become stewards of the essential economic building block of the creativity age.
It's not just the Internet. This has been going on for 100 years. The great story of the 20th century was that the Internet was going to make place irrelevant. What is a corporation? What is a company? Well, the company pays dividends, salaries, and wages. It provides a base of people to participate in the company. How does a company do that? The company takes a person, a human being, and matches them up with a task. In the age of the Company Man, companies matched lots of people to lots of jobs, and it worked relatively well. Anyone remember what IBM used to stand for? I've been moved. Your company was your life.
What's the average length of a job today? Three years. What is the mechanism of matching people to work? The geographic place. For a company, the geographic place provides a thick pool of potential people who can come to work or leave work to do more interesting things. People told us we won't move to a place for a job. We want to move to places with lots of jobs. We want to move to a place where there's a vibrant labor market. Place provides this critical economic organizing function.
We began to ask people why do you move. Jobs weren't high on the list. Economists believe that people move according to economic incentives. If you're a 22 year old and you're graduating from college, and there's a great job there but no boys or girls, where are you going to go? People go to other people. Creativity people have always wanted to live in creative environments. There weren't a lot of people who are paid to be creative, so you had these little pockets of people. According to our research, there are 38 million people paid to be creative as part of their job. That's a third of the workforce.
People wanted to be in exciting places with lots of stimli. They wanted outdoors stuff. They wanted to be able to do what they wanted to do. It's not just about the high arts. The things that came through was what we call the informal arts, the independent arts, or street-level culture. Artistic and cultural and music scenes. We associate a place with its audio identity. We had do develop an indicator, right? Can we make up a bohemian index? We counted the people who were paid to be bohemian. It's an admittedly crude, flawed measure. But when you test across 300 metro cities, places that score high on this bohemian measure have high rates of innovation and economic growth.
Places also need to be open, accepting, inclusive, and tolerant. Places that are exlusionary and segregationist, creative people move away. Then other people move away. What would be an indicator that a place is open? We build a measure of foreign-born people and called it the Melting Pot Index. Canada's gone one better. They call it a mosaic. We accept people to melt and become assimilated. The Canadians say it's a mosaic. Come, whoever you are, bring your cultural heritage, and you can be a Canadian.
It's bogus bullshit that creativity is American. 30% of the companies in Silicon Valley were founded by a non-American. The places that are open are the economic winners. Then I met Gary Gates. I was studying the high-tech stuff, and Gary was studying gay people. We met, and we put our lists together, and the high-tech cities were also the gayest cities. I named my five favorite cities, and they were the top five gay cities.
Places that are open to diversity, places where anyone can come and plug in, those are the places that are going to get economic advantage. It wasn't so much that gays or the bohemians drove or attracted economic growth, but that the place attracted people and creativity bubbled up from the people who were there.
Lastly, what people gravitate to in a world with high levels of transience is history and authenticity. Pittsburgh might have a lot more history and authenticity than Austin, but we want to eradicate it. We knock down the Homestead Works and put up a mall because we were afraid o our past. Austin has leveraged its history.
I grew up in a Leave it to Beaver family. My dad went to work, my mom stayed at home, and there were two boys. You know how many Americans live in a family like that today? 7%. Between 93% and 75% live in some other kind of different setup. It's not one or the other. It's not about recruiting families, gays, or singles. It's about having cities that have something for everyone.
South by Southwest 2003 XVII
Paul Bausch, Anil Dash, Justin Hall, Ben Trott, and Mena Trott: Beyond the Blog
Mena: Welcome to the Beyond the Blog panel. I'm one of the co-creators of Moveable Type and co-founder of TK which is the company that releases Moveable Type. I also have a personal blog called a A Day Late and a Dollar Short.
Das: My name's Anil Dash, and I live in New York City. Until recently I worked for Village Voice Media. Before that I worked in the music promotion industry. And now I'm freelancing about Web logs to see if there's a possibility of making a living in this area.
Bausch: I was one of the co-creators and developers of Blogger. Recently I helped write a book about Web logs.
Ben: I'm co-creator of Moveable Type as well. I have the exact same bio as Mena except my site isnt A Dollar Short, it's Stupid Fool.
Hall: In 1994 I got really jazzed about making pages on the Web using Simpletext and Emacs. I did that for 9 years. I kinda fell into freelance journalism because it’s the thing closest to writing on the Web and getting paid for it.
Mena: We want to talk about how the different elements of a Web log are going to evolve. Basically, we see a Web log as a reverse chronological, permalink-filled sort of mess. It's open to question whether the chronology is important.
Hall: Personal Web sites were a big topic of conversation at SXSW four years ago. Today we talk about Web logs. If everyone organizes their thoughts in reverse chronology, there are other ways to organize our thoughts. There's something being broken about the Web sites being so strictly controlled. What possibly could be better?
Bausch: I have to defend reverse chronology because I helped put that in there. It adds a hint of structure to something that might not have structure.
Mena: I agree with Justin that we shouldn't be limited to reading Web logs in day order. Part of it is that we expect it, but if you find somebody's Web logs six months after they started, you don't care about the date, you care about the content.
Bausch: We need a way to get a sense of how ideas evolve and how memes move throughout communities. Before Web logs put that structure into the Web, there was no shared time. Web logs provide that.
Dash: One of the things I think is valuable about having time in your Web log is that there's a contract. There's a social contract. You want to know when there's going to be something new. If it's ordered by date, I can scroll down to what I've already read and get a sense of completion. The contract has been fulfilled.
Mena: It isn't so much the date but the expectation that they're going to be publishing.
Hall: It's like commitment.
Mena: It's commitment. It's weird. When I see a regular Web site it's weird. What is this? They haven't updated this in six months?
Hall: Even with personal Web sites, there's no sense of immediacy. The convenience of Web logs is neat because people can make their own personal newspaper. That’s great. But now that we've got personal newspapers down, what else can we do?
Dash: I want to be able to view by category or by author or by topic or by arbitrary category, not the ones that they've assigned.
Mena: PB [Paul Bausch] has a lot to say about where the content is. We have personal newsletters. We want to publish our thoughts, own our thoughts, and be responsible for them.
Bausch: As people get the taste of controlling their own information, it's going to be harder and harder for centralized sites to get people to contribute there. We contribute to the Web in lots of different ways. It's not just about posting to our Web logs. We post to other sites. We post via email. We IM. It's just one big text box. All of these applications can talk to each other. You can post a review to Amazon.com but why can't you also post it to your Web log?
Ben: This comes back to identity and ownership. How do you feel like you have control over your information on these other sites? Your URL is your identity in a sense. You have the control over where it flows.
Mena: I think that’s why Web logs have take off. We have our identities. And we like that control.
Hall: That predates Web logs in a way.
Dash: Part of what interests me is this entry form, though. There is one entry that works. You have our URL, your identiy, your entry form. I want blogs to look the same. I want to know how they work. I want it to be a desktop application. I want anything I do in Word on the desktop to be available to all of these media.
Hall: I was talking to a guy whose working on a universal gaming system. The game scales to fit the client. The direction you're moving with blogs is happening in other areas of electronics.
Mena: This is Matt Haughey's Web log.
Bausch: He realized that he's contributing to many different places across the Web. He didn't have a place to aggregate all of this information together. If you don't know Matt personally, you might not know that he contributes to all these different sites. It's sort of a next step of taking information that’s distributed.
Mena: if you post a comment on Amazon, you don’t want it to be limited to Amazon.
Dash: I almost resent that someone else control swhat I've written. The tools need to evolve so I post to this one place, and it's posted somewhere else.
Bausch: The interfaces are so similar, why can't they just talk to each other?
Dash: Can't we all just get along?
Hall: I was in Japan taking pictures with a cell phone, and I decided I would only post in Japanese. It's hard to write in these shrunk-down devices. People are also hacking audio blogs.
Dash: Audio blogs suck.
Hall: No, it doesn't fit into your rational Web log structure, Anil.
Dash: How many people here have had a crush on someone just from reading their Web log? You fill in the blanks just like you do in a book.
Hall: Do you like pictures?
Mena: He doesn't even like pictures. He likes straight text.
Dash: I want binary. I want to be able to fill in the blanks myself. Because you know what it is.
Hall: What you really want is video blogs. Is that what I'm hearing?
Mena: Let's play devil's advocate. I have a similar feeling about audio blogging, but I think it'll work as supplementary content. Not every post needs to be audio. Maybe it would work in a disaster.
Hall: Matt Haughey at the bottom of his blog said that he wished he had a recording of the sound of the forks hitting the plates in the restaurant he was in because it was so dinny.
Dash: If we look at what Ben and Mena and Paul have done with moblogs, or little photos that they've taken somewhere, that is interesting to me. It is a snapshot of their life. Audio could be supplementary content. But photos and text are less intrusive and work better for me.
Hall: They're less captivating. You can multitask more easily just with text and pictures.
Mena: In Japan, they're not really allowed to use their cell phones on the train -- as though to speak. So they're IM'ing.
Hall: They're also checking their stock quotes and getting their fortunes told.
Mena: We should talk about identity.
Ben: I guess identity as your identity is your URL.
Mena: In the sense of your reputation, how do we see the blogroll changing?
Ben: I don’t think we'll see it change much in terms of how it looks, but the back end will change. Like the Friend of a Friend thing in XML. You have data in interchangeable formats that you can make sense of. You can graph relationships.
Bausch: Blogrolls are used for several different things. These are the people I fit in with.
Dash: Or want to fit in with.
Bausch: Yeah. This is my community. These are the people I trust. We need tools. No one is going to write Friend of a Friend files by hand. It's just like RSS. The tool should handle the creation of it and the consumption of it. It's moving beyond what tools can currently do. You're going to need semantic search engines. You're going to need to be able to traverse the tools. And these tools aren't here now.
Dash: The number of Web logs I track has gone up exponentially. I know a lot of people who keep active track of 20 and then through an aggregator keep up with 100 Web logs.
Hall: Those aggregators increase Web log consumption.
Dash: The next threshold is 10,000. If you use an aggregator and all this stuff, I honestly think that a lot of people will actively track 150 and passively track 10,000.
Mena: The day we have no jobs.
Dash: You may not know everybody by name. If you take everything your immediate friends have posted in a given day and then go out two degrees, you've got Metafilter. It looks like Metafilter.
Mena: We're evolving to each of us having our own Metafilter.
Hall: What's the Lafayette Project?
Dash: As far as I know it's what Nick Denton and Meg Hourihan in New York are working on, some sort of content aggregator.
Bausch: I don’t know that RSS readers are the best way to read personal publishing.
Dash: Is this because of the amateur thing?
Bausch: We're all designers.
Mena: That’s just part of the personal publishing thing. There's a bigger part. Are we just aggregating text? If I was writing about design, I want people to see my site to maybe think I know what I'm talking about.
Hall: If you look at what the newspapers now, they've got hundreds of reporters. They take Ap and Reuters stories, and AP and Reuters have 10,000 reporters. So the New York Times is basically 10,000 reporters. Anil's tool is people's amateur, non-professional, non-corporate news sources.
Mena: We assume that when we get to 10,000, we will read them differently.
Hall: If we read them like we do now, we'll need to buy a new mouse every two days.
Dash: For me, it's because I don't watch TV. I would rather have 10,000 people's real realities than one B-list celebrity on a desert island.
Hall: Or 10.
Paul Bausch, Anil Dash, Justin Hall, Ben Trott, and Mena Trott: Beyond the Blog
Bausch co-created Blogger. Dash used to write for the Village Voice. Hall has a long and storied history that you can check at Justin's Links. The Trotts co-created Moveable Type. Here is a rough transcript of the panel discussion:
Mena: Welcome to the Beyond the Blog panel. I'm one of the co-creators of Moveable Type and co-founder of TK which is the company that releases Moveable Type. I also have a personal blog called a A Day Late and a Dollar Short.
Das: My name's Anil Dash, and I live in New York City. Until recently I worked for Village Voice Media. Before that I worked in the music promotion industry. And now I'm freelancing about Web logs to see if there's a possibility of making a living in this area.
Bausch: I was one of the co-creators and developers of Blogger. Recently I helped write a book about Web logs.
Ben: I'm co-creator of Moveable Type as well. I have the exact same bio as Mena except my site isnt A Dollar Short, it's Stupid Fool.
Hall: In 1994 I got really jazzed about making pages on the Web using Simpletext and Emacs. I did that for 9 years. I kinda fell into freelance journalism because it’s the thing closest to writing on the Web and getting paid for it.
Mena: We want to talk about how the different elements of a Web log are going to evolve. Basically, we see a Web log as a reverse chronological, permalink-filled sort of mess. It's open to question whether the chronology is important.
Hall: Personal Web sites were a big topic of conversation at SXSW four years ago. Today we talk about Web logs. If everyone organizes their thoughts in reverse chronology, there are other ways to organize our thoughts. There's something being broken about the Web sites being so strictly controlled. What possibly could be better?
Bausch: I have to defend reverse chronology because I helped put that in there. It adds a hint of structure to something that might not have structure.
Mena: I agree with Justin that we shouldn't be limited to reading Web logs in day order. Part of it is that we expect it, but if you find somebody's Web logs six months after they started, you don't care about the date, you care about the content.
Bausch: We need a way to get a sense of how ideas evolve and how memes move throughout communities. Before Web logs put that structure into the Web, there was no shared time. Web logs provide that.
Dash: One of the things I think is valuable about having time in your Web log is that there's a contract. There's a social contract. You want to know when there's going to be something new. If it's ordered by date, I can scroll down to what I've already read and get a sense of completion. The contract has been fulfilled.
Mena: It isn't so much the date but the expectation that they're going to be publishing.
Hall: It's like commitment.
Mena: It's commitment. It's weird. When I see a regular Web site it's weird. What is this? They haven't updated this in six months?
Hall: Even with personal Web sites, there's no sense of immediacy. The convenience of Web logs is neat because people can make their own personal newspaper. That’s great. But now that we've got personal newspapers down, what else can we do?
Dash: I want to be able to view by category or by author or by topic or by arbitrary category, not the ones that they've assigned.
Mena: PB [Paul Bausch] has a lot to say about where the content is. We have personal newsletters. We want to publish our thoughts, own our thoughts, and be responsible for them.
Bausch: As people get the taste of controlling their own information, it's going to be harder and harder for centralized sites to get people to contribute there. We contribute to the Web in lots of different ways. It's not just about posting to our Web logs. We post to other sites. We post via email. We IM. It's just one big text box. All of these applications can talk to each other. You can post a review to Amazon.com but why can't you also post it to your Web log?
Ben: This comes back to identity and ownership. How do you feel like you have control over your information on these other sites? Your URL is your identity in a sense. You have the control over where it flows.
Mena: I think that’s why Web logs have take off. We have our identities. And we like that control.
Hall: That predates Web logs in a way.
Dash: Part of what interests me is this entry form, though. There is one entry that works. You have our URL, your identiy, your entry form. I want blogs to look the same. I want to know how they work. I want it to be a desktop application. I want anything I do in Word on the desktop to be available to all of these media.
Hall: I was talking to a guy whose working on a universal gaming system. The game scales to fit the client. The direction you're moving with blogs is happening in other areas of electronics.
Mena: This is Matt Haughey's Web log.
Bausch: He realized that he's contributing to many different places across the Web. He didn't have a place to aggregate all of this information together. If you don't know Matt personally, you might not know that he contributes to all these different sites. It's sort of a next step of taking information that’s distributed.
Mena: if you post a comment on Amazon, you don’t want it to be limited to Amazon.
Dash: I almost resent that someone else control swhat I've written. The tools need to evolve so I post to this one place, and it's posted somewhere else.
Bausch: The interfaces are so similar, why can't they just talk to each other?
Dash: Can't we all just get along?
Hall: I was in Japan taking pictures with a cell phone, and I decided I would only post in Japanese. It's hard to write in these shrunk-down devices. People are also hacking audio blogs.
Dash: Audio blogs suck.
Hall: No, it doesn't fit into your rational Web log structure, Anil.
Dash: How many people here have had a crush on someone just from reading their Web log? You fill in the blanks just like you do in a book.
Hall: Do you like pictures?
Mena: He doesn't even like pictures. He likes straight text.
Dash: I want binary. I want to be able to fill in the blanks myself. Because you know what it is.
Hall: What you really want is video blogs. Is that what I'm hearing?
Mena: Let's play devil's advocate. I have a similar feeling about audio blogging, but I think it'll work as supplementary content. Not every post needs to be audio. Maybe it would work in a disaster.
Hall: Matt Haughey at the bottom of his blog said that he wished he had a recording of the sound of the forks hitting the plates in the restaurant he was in because it was so dinny.
Dash: If we look at what Ben and Mena and Paul have done with moblogs, or little photos that they've taken somewhere, that is interesting to me. It is a snapshot of their life. Audio could be supplementary content. But photos and text are less intrusive and work better for me.
Hall: They're less captivating. You can multitask more easily just with text and pictures.
Mena: In Japan, they're not really allowed to use their cell phones on the train -- as though to speak. So they're IM'ing.
Hall: They're also checking their stock quotes and getting their fortunes told.
Mena: We should talk about identity.
Ben: I guess identity as your identity is your URL.
Mena: In the sense of your reputation, how do we see the blogroll changing?
Ben: I don’t think we'll see it change much in terms of how it looks, but the back end will change. Like the Friend of a Friend thing in XML. You have data in interchangeable formats that you can make sense of. You can graph relationships.
Bausch: Blogrolls are used for several different things. These are the people I fit in with.
Dash: Or want to fit in with.
Bausch: Yeah. This is my community. These are the people I trust. We need tools. No one is going to write Friend of a Friend files by hand. It's just like RSS. The tool should handle the creation of it and the consumption of it. It's moving beyond what tools can currently do. You're going to need semantic search engines. You're going to need to be able to traverse the tools. And these tools aren't here now.
Dash: The number of Web logs I track has gone up exponentially. I know a lot of people who keep active track of 20 and then through an aggregator keep up with 100 Web logs.
Hall: Those aggregators increase Web log consumption.
Dash: The next threshold is 10,000. If you use an aggregator and all this stuff, I honestly think that a lot of people will actively track 150 and passively track 10,000.
Mena: The day we have no jobs.
Dash: You may not know everybody by name. If you take everything your immediate friends have posted in a given day and then go out two degrees, you've got Metafilter. It looks like Metafilter.
Mena: We're evolving to each of us having our own Metafilter.
Hall: What's the Lafayette Project?
Dash: As far as I know it's what Nick Denton and Meg Hourihan in New York are working on, some sort of content aggregator.
Bausch: I don’t know that RSS readers are the best way to read personal publishing.
Dash: Is this because of the amateur thing?
Bausch: We're all designers.
Mena: That’s just part of the personal publishing thing. There's a bigger part. Are we just aggregating text? If I was writing about design, I want people to see my site to maybe think I know what I'm talking about.
Question: Why do you even want to keep track of 10,000 web logs? How much information can you assimilate even with 20 or 30?
Hall: If you look at what the newspapers now, they've got hundreds of reporters. They take Ap and Reuters stories, and AP and Reuters have 10,000 reporters. So the New York Times is basically 10,000 reporters. Anil's tool is people's amateur, non-professional, non-corporate news sources.
Mena: We assume that when we get to 10,000, we will read them differently.
Hall: If we read them like we do now, we'll need to buy a new mouse every two days.
Dash: For me, it's because I don't watch TV. I would rather have 10,000 people's real realities than one B-list celebrity on a desert island.
Hall: Or 10.
South by Southwest 2003 XVI
Po Bronson: What Should You Do with Your Life?
What should I do with my life? Often, we don't like having to answer that question. It's itchy and confusing. We feel about destiny the same way we feel about inheritance. We want it to come easy. We feel that if it doesn't come easy, it's wrong.
We know the text and the subtext. The text is never enough money, never enough time. The subtext is psychological hurdles. Some people feel the question is self-indulgent. What is freedom if not the chance to live for yourself? In farming, success doesn't come at the expense of another man.
We equate money with freedom. True economic freedom is the confidence that you can live within the means of something you're passionate about. It's a dangerous thought that you're environment won't get to you. Academia compared to Hollywood is like bathing in altruism.
It's wrong to assume that it's in good times that we can change our lives. It's the bad times that force us to change. Sometimes the answers aren't out there. They're in here. How many events in our lives do we just ignore? Learn to love what you get, not just get what you love.
If you're open to strangers, willing to be empathetic and willing to learn from their stories, you can have a new life every day.
Po Bronson: What Should You Do with Your Life?
Author Bronson wrote the books Bombardiers and What Should I Do with My Life?. Here is an extremely abbreviated transcript of his remarks:
What should I do with my life? Often, we don't like having to answer that question. It's itchy and confusing. We feel about destiny the same way we feel about inheritance. We want it to come easy. We feel that if it doesn't come easy, it's wrong.
We know the text and the subtext. The text is never enough money, never enough time. The subtext is psychological hurdles. Some people feel the question is self-indulgent. What is freedom if not the chance to live for yourself? In farming, success doesn't come at the expense of another man.
We equate money with freedom. True economic freedom is the confidence that you can live within the means of something you're passionate about. It's a dangerous thought that you're environment won't get to you. Academia compared to Hollywood is like bathing in altruism.
It's wrong to assume that it's in good times that we can change our lives. It's the bad times that force us to change. Sometimes the answers aren't out there. They're in here. How many events in our lives do we just ignore? Learn to love what you get, not just get what you love.
If you're open to strangers, willing to be empathetic and willing to learn from their stories, you can have a new life every day.
Interlude: South by Southwest 2003 XV
After the sessions ended yesterday, I headed over to the Film Threat party at B.D. Riley's. There, I met up with Jim Munroe and David from MP4. We talked about punk rock, filmmaking, and road trips before Jim and I left to meet my friend Amy so we could sit down and get some food. After dinner on the deck at Iron Cactus, we made our way to Texture for the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Cyberorganic Jam. Remember Cyborganic? Ahhh.
The party was fun. Cory gave a rousing talk about the ongoing erosion of our offline and online rights. Sandy Stone, founder of UT-Austin's ActLab gave a short welcome and then lapsed into an extremely interesting spoken-word performance piece about cats, RF, and the fragility of life. We stayed almost until the very end, and my night last night was not as late or as crazy as Sunday. Still, I've taken this morning a little easy. Migas and a smoothie for breakfast with Rick, the 15 bus downtown, and more impressionistic note taking during Po Bronson's morning session. We'll turn our attention there now.
After the sessions ended yesterday, I headed over to the Film Threat party at B.D. Riley's. There, I met up with Jim Munroe and David from MP4. We talked about punk rock, filmmaking, and road trips before Jim and I left to meet my friend Amy so we could sit down and get some food. After dinner on the deck at Iron Cactus, we made our way to Texture for the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Cyberorganic Jam. Remember Cyborganic? Ahhh.
The party was fun. Cory gave a rousing talk about the ongoing erosion of our offline and online rights. Sandy Stone, founder of UT-Austin's ActLab gave a short welcome and then lapsed into an extremely interesting spoken-word performance piece about cats, RF, and the fragility of life. We stayed almost until the very end, and my night last night was not as late or as crazy as Sunday. Still, I've taken this morning a little easy. Migas and a smoothie for breakfast with Rick, the 15 bus downtown, and more impressionistic note taking during Po Bronson's morning session. We'll turn our attention there now.
Monday, March 10, 2003
South by Southwest 2003 XV
Mikela Tarlow and Philip Tarlow: Digital Aboriginals
Philip: Digital Abroiginals is the name of a book we wrote.
Mikela: I was working on a proposal for our second book, Charting Your Career in a World Without Rules. The proposal was kind of bogging down. I was talking to our agent, and I said I was getting a little bored. He said, "What do you want to do?" I said I'd write a book called Digital Aboriginals.
10 years ago I was in a museum. I've always had a passion for aboriginal paintings. We were in the Museum of Modern Art, and there was a new show getting hung. They were paintings of circuit boards. It began this journey of what was encoded in those images that could lead to a deeper understanding of what was happening in the digital landscape.
What we do when were not writing books is consulting to corporations. We walk into places like Coca-Cola and Philip Morris and play stuff like this. We do consulting on future trends and the big picture.
Philip: Mikela's background is in anthropology. My background is in the fine art. I'm a painter. We're both interested in trends but in different ways.
Mikela: What you see there is a picture we took last year at SXSW.
Philip: And up in the upper left-hand corner is a segment of a tribe of aboriginals from north Australia. They were just having a meeting, sitting around. There is some connection and relationship betwene these two photographs.
Mikela: The aboriginal photograph just shows men. Women participated in those circles, but the women are very shy. As we put those two images together, even the number of people was identical. The ideal number for small group work is no more than 12. When you put together more than 12, it becomes difficult to do complex tasks. And if you look at the distance, its about the right distance for sitting around a fire.
There's another number that begins to appear. Malcolm Gladwell writes about the number 200. That number 200 is interesting because it's about as large as a tribe ever got. Once they got bigger than 200, a power struggle would occur and the tribe would break apart. 12 is the family unit. And 200 is the economic unit. It's just the last couple hundred years that were tryign to work in these mega-corporations. We're going against our biology almost.
Philip: Another level of talking about these photographs is that these aboriginals assumed that they were connected, connected in a way that’s hard for us to understand because of their connection to the earth, to plants, and to animals. Digital aboriginals means that we're coming full circle. We're relearning what it means to be connected.
Mikela: A lot of what's happening in the digital landscape, like blogging, is triggering this biological memory.
This is where our research is. Is there something happening in our culture that's very similar to what's happening in the business landscape and in our journey of consciousness? How we describe that centerpiece is with four platforms. The first one is Who Owns the Wind, which has to do with the dissolution of ownership as we know it. Ownership is not working. The second piece has to do with the return of the storytellers and the collapse of traditional advertising. Advertising people say that as soon as Tivo households hit 10 million they're going to stop doing TV advertisements. Even people who listen to the ads don't remember where they heard what. What does that mean if advertisers can't reach you with traditional advertising? The only way to connect with us is authentic stories.
Philip: Authentic and compelling. Our feeling is that this is just the beginning. You can't fool the public.
Mikela: The third platform is Tribal Mind, which has to do with collaborative work structures. And the fourth platform is Riding the Songlines, or the capacity of new models of leadership and consciousness.
When the dialogue space is transformed the power relationship is transformed. Whenever the power relationship is transformed we must change our perception of what is important. When Matt Damon was in Japan, teenage girls held up their cell phones to stream video to their friends. The traditional media was also there. Who is more important in that equation, the teenagers or the media? Those teenagers are the ones who are going to create the buzz about the movie, not the article in Teen People. Now you have to consider how to connect with the teenagers. A traditional press release is not going to connect with them.
Philip: Gere are some of the things that go along with storytelling. They're all ages. Nobody's bored. And nobody, I can assure you, is asking whether this is his original story. This is a story that has been told since time immemorial.
Mikela: This is how the big stories happen. When stories were conveyed by oral tradition, storytellers revised stories when people looked away. The oral tradition gives you tremendous feedback. These stories become fully tweaked.
Philip: It was also considered a work in progress. It was never a finished product.
Mikela: You were not allowed to create an original work until you had copied all of the masters.
Philip: Original work was not a concept. Copyright? There was no question about that
Mikela: What Lessig is describing is the way things have been since the beginning of time. We're returning to an oral culture. I think we're the last generation that's going to write the way we write. The average person use to know 50,000 words. Kids today know about 25,000 words. When was the last time you said "I sauntered across the room?" You don't. That's a written word, not a spoken word. If we're approaching the characteristics and number of words of an oral tradition, what does that mean? In an oral tradition, reputation is extremely important. Relationships are extremely important. Intimacy is extremely important.
I grew up in a strange household where we had a lot of books about Zen tradition. There was a story about a teacup that I used to hear all the time. When we began telling these stories in corporations, we decided we needed a story that communicated the importance to open your mind.
Philip: This is the story of a student who had been wanting his entire adult life to visit with the master and watch the master perform the traditional tea ceremony. Finally, the opportunity arose. As he watched the master pouring the tea, he felt privileged to be in the presence of the master. He noticed that the tea was getting dangerously close to the top of the cup. Before he knew it, the tea had overflowed and was staining the table. He continued to pour. At a certain point, he couldn't hold back any more. "Master, the tea is overflowing! The cup is full! It can't take any more!" And the master said, "Yes, just like your mind."
Mikela: I heard this story many times. It wasn't until we started telling this story until we discovered the meaning of it. The reason why he gained enlightenment? There are two reasons. One is that the tea ceremony is a profound part of their cultural context. It's a metaphor for all life. In anthropology, it’s the difference between a high-content culture and a high-context culture. The second thing is his relationship with the teacher. He had such profound intimacy and trust with the teacher that everything the teacher said was like a pebble in a pond.
Philip: He was listening differently.
Mikela: The story used to just be a stupid story, but when I began to think about it in a different way, it came to life. We don't spend a lot of time doing things over and over and over and over and over and looking for deeper meaning in things. I think blogging is going to shift our society, and it's because of the storytelling.
Something happens when you go deeper and deeper and deeper. These core archetypes have formed in every culture of the world. As storytelling is being introduced not just into the cultural space but also the corporate space, the ancient creative is being tapped into in ourselves.
These are some of the things you would learn if you studied with a mystic. You're not your personality. Everything is connected. You are the storyteller. Does that seem familiar? Is it something that you kind of know at some level? We came up with this phrase: digital sutras. Those are statements designed to shift your consciousness in a certain way.
Philip: They're sounds. They're like a scientific experiments.
Mikela: What are our big predictions for the future? Virtually enhanced real-life events are going to be more and more where the artistry is going to exist. We're also in an age where complexity is going to reclaim control. The third is established redundancies. The capacity to utilize social networks will be the work of the next generation.
In an information dense world the unrepeatable present moment will become a highly valued event.
Mikela Tarlow and Philip Tarlow: Digital Aboriginals
Mikela and Philip are corporate consultants and the co-authors of Digital Aboriginals. Here is a rough transcript of their talk.
Philip: Digital Abroiginals is the name of a book we wrote.
Mikela: I was working on a proposal for our second book, Charting Your Career in a World Without Rules. The proposal was kind of bogging down. I was talking to our agent, and I said I was getting a little bored. He said, "What do you want to do?" I said I'd write a book called Digital Aboriginals.
10 years ago I was in a museum. I've always had a passion for aboriginal paintings. We were in the Museum of Modern Art, and there was a new show getting hung. They were paintings of circuit boards. It began this journey of what was encoded in those images that could lead to a deeper understanding of what was happening in the digital landscape.
What we do when were not writing books is consulting to corporations. We walk into places like Coca-Cola and Philip Morris and play stuff like this. We do consulting on future trends and the big picture.
Philip: Mikela's background is in anthropology. My background is in the fine art. I'm a painter. We're both interested in trends but in different ways.
Mikela: What you see there is a picture we took last year at SXSW.
Philip: And up in the upper left-hand corner is a segment of a tribe of aboriginals from north Australia. They were just having a meeting, sitting around. There is some connection and relationship betwene these two photographs.
Mikela: The aboriginal photograph just shows men. Women participated in those circles, but the women are very shy. As we put those two images together, even the number of people was identical. The ideal number for small group work is no more than 12. When you put together more than 12, it becomes difficult to do complex tasks. And if you look at the distance, its about the right distance for sitting around a fire.
There's another number that begins to appear. Malcolm Gladwell writes about the number 200. That number 200 is interesting because it's about as large as a tribe ever got. Once they got bigger than 200, a power struggle would occur and the tribe would break apart. 12 is the family unit. And 200 is the economic unit. It's just the last couple hundred years that were tryign to work in these mega-corporations. We're going against our biology almost.
Philip: Another level of talking about these photographs is that these aboriginals assumed that they were connected, connected in a way that’s hard for us to understand because of their connection to the earth, to plants, and to animals. Digital aboriginals means that we're coming full circle. We're relearning what it means to be connected.
Mikela: A lot of what's happening in the digital landscape, like blogging, is triggering this biological memory.
This is where our research is. Is there something happening in our culture that's very similar to what's happening in the business landscape and in our journey of consciousness? How we describe that centerpiece is with four platforms. The first one is Who Owns the Wind, which has to do with the dissolution of ownership as we know it. Ownership is not working. The second piece has to do with the return of the storytellers and the collapse of traditional advertising. Advertising people say that as soon as Tivo households hit 10 million they're going to stop doing TV advertisements. Even people who listen to the ads don't remember where they heard what. What does that mean if advertisers can't reach you with traditional advertising? The only way to connect with us is authentic stories.
Philip: Authentic and compelling. Our feeling is that this is just the beginning. You can't fool the public.
Mikela: The third platform is Tribal Mind, which has to do with collaborative work structures. And the fourth platform is Riding the Songlines, or the capacity of new models of leadership and consciousness.
When the dialogue space is transformed the power relationship is transformed. Whenever the power relationship is transformed we must change our perception of what is important. When Matt Damon was in Japan, teenage girls held up their cell phones to stream video to their friends. The traditional media was also there. Who is more important in that equation, the teenagers or the media? Those teenagers are the ones who are going to create the buzz about the movie, not the article in Teen People. Now you have to consider how to connect with the teenagers. A traditional press release is not going to connect with them.
Philip: Gere are some of the things that go along with storytelling. They're all ages. Nobody's bored. And nobody, I can assure you, is asking whether this is his original story. This is a story that has been told since time immemorial.
Mikela: This is how the big stories happen. When stories were conveyed by oral tradition, storytellers revised stories when people looked away. The oral tradition gives you tremendous feedback. These stories become fully tweaked.
Philip: It was also considered a work in progress. It was never a finished product.
Mikela: You were not allowed to create an original work until you had copied all of the masters.
Philip: Original work was not a concept. Copyright? There was no question about that
Mikela: What Lessig is describing is the way things have been since the beginning of time. We're returning to an oral culture. I think we're the last generation that's going to write the way we write. The average person use to know 50,000 words. Kids today know about 25,000 words. When was the last time you said "I sauntered across the room?" You don't. That's a written word, not a spoken word. If we're approaching the characteristics and number of words of an oral tradition, what does that mean? In an oral tradition, reputation is extremely important. Relationships are extremely important. Intimacy is extremely important.
I grew up in a strange household where we had a lot of books about Zen tradition. There was a story about a teacup that I used to hear all the time. When we began telling these stories in corporations, we decided we needed a story that communicated the importance to open your mind.
Philip: This is the story of a student who had been wanting his entire adult life to visit with the master and watch the master perform the traditional tea ceremony. Finally, the opportunity arose. As he watched the master pouring the tea, he felt privileged to be in the presence of the master. He noticed that the tea was getting dangerously close to the top of the cup. Before he knew it, the tea had overflowed and was staining the table. He continued to pour. At a certain point, he couldn't hold back any more. "Master, the tea is overflowing! The cup is full! It can't take any more!" And the master said, "Yes, just like your mind."
Mikela: I heard this story many times. It wasn't until we started telling this story until we discovered the meaning of it. The reason why he gained enlightenment? There are two reasons. One is that the tea ceremony is a profound part of their cultural context. It's a metaphor for all life. In anthropology, it’s the difference between a high-content culture and a high-context culture. The second thing is his relationship with the teacher. He had such profound intimacy and trust with the teacher that everything the teacher said was like a pebble in a pond.
Philip: He was listening differently.
Mikela: The story used to just be a stupid story, but when I began to think about it in a different way, it came to life. We don't spend a lot of time doing things over and over and over and over and over and looking for deeper meaning in things. I think blogging is going to shift our society, and it's because of the storytelling.
Something happens when you go deeper and deeper and deeper. These core archetypes have formed in every culture of the world. As storytelling is being introduced not just into the cultural space but also the corporate space, the ancient creative is being tapped into in ourselves.
These are some of the things you would learn if you studied with a mystic. You're not your personality. Everything is connected. You are the storyteller. Does that seem familiar? Is it something that you kind of know at some level? We came up with this phrase: digital sutras. Those are statements designed to shift your consciousness in a certain way.
Philip: They're sounds. They're like a scientific experiments.
Mikela: What are our big predictions for the future? Virtually enhanced real-life events are going to be more and more where the artistry is going to exist. We're also in an age where complexity is going to reclaim control. The third is established redundancies. The capacity to utilize social networks will be the work of the next generation.
In an information dense world the unrepeatable present moment will become a highly valued event.
South by Southwest 2003 XIV
Karl Deckard, Cory Doctorow, Maitresse Elise, and Jim Munroe: Why I Dig Working in the Cultural Gutter
Munroe: My name's Jim Munroe. I've written three novels. One of them is about another guy who goes to another planet to teach English. But when I'm at parties, I find myself saying I write novels. And I say it's science fiction-influenced stuff. I'm interested in my own tendency to sidestep that sort of stuff. I'm very interested in people who are involved in things that are not terribly highly regarded by society in terms of the arts.
Doctorow: I'm Cory Doctorow. I'm a blogger, a science-fiction writer, and I work for a nonprofit organziation called the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I write science fiction, and not just science fiction, but science fiction for Slashdot readers that will get published on the Internet. That can be seen as one step below self-publishing. It's considered scraping the bottom of the barrel. But if there's hope, it's in the trolls. Will someone care about the poor Slashdot reader? I write for them. You need to be involved in Internet culture to understand it. I'm fairly unapologetic about using terms and jargon that comes out of that milieu. I get surrounded by people at science-fiction conventions by people who wonder what I'm smoking.
Science-fiction writing doesn’t pay for shit. Roald Dahl sold his short stories one at a time for enough money to feed his family of four for a month. Asimov's pays about enough to feed a family of four for a meal. But occasionally, the New York Times discovers you and what you do. Fuck you gutter, the New York Times thinks I'm cool
Elise: Ive done a lot of things in the adult entertainment. I'm on this panel as a porn actress. I've done four adult videos. Two were bi and two were lesbian. I've done stripping. I write erotica. I've done the modeling. I've done the Internet.
I also have a Ph.D. in romance linguistics. The adult entertainment industry got me through school. When people ask me what I do, I say translation. That is one of my jobs. But that pays nothing. If someone's truly interested, I'll go into detail about what I do, but if it's just anyone, I'll say I'm a writer. If they ask what I'm writing, I'll say true-life adventure stories. I'm not ashamed, but sometimes you do have to protect yourself.
Deckard: I design video games. I worked on the PC game Half-Life and a game for Nintendo's console Metroid Prime. What is this gutter? Who are these people who look down on all of the careers were talking about today? And why do we care?
Munroe: The cultural gutter is just something I made up. I made up this idea of there being gutter genres. I've always been attracted to science fiction, but people generally remember the crappy science-fiction movie that they saw and stigmatize the genre as a whole. I'm drawn to the genre with the interest in defusing that as much as I can.
When I got involved in video games and started talking about video games, talking about them as art, I realized that I'm drawn to these genres because they have a basis that keeps drawing people back to them. Because I like violating these cultural norms, it’s a perfect place for me. For unconventional thinkers like Elise, instead of following a traditional writing career with a smattering of erotica, she did what she did.
When I write a science-fiction novel, I feel free. You get to write about robots, for Christ's sake. There's a fundamental fun element that draws me to it. I have a lot more freedom in terms of what I can do.
Elise: I've really been enjoying the BDS&M I've been seeing in the mass media lately. I don't mind the lesser stigma. My sister understands what I'm doing a little more. My parents appreciate some of the writing I've done, but they don’t know everything I'm doing.
It's a huge fantasy being a porn star. It's fantasy being a stripper or a dominatrix. You get to be a schoolgirl, a teacher, a nurse. My life is not boring.
Doctorow: Who are the people looking down their nose? And why does it matter? It only matters when it matters. I used to work at a science-fiction bookstore, and I used to hang out at the science-fiction library. "Speculative fiction" is one of those shame words. "It's not a comic, it's a graphic novel!"
When I was 12, it was a great place to hang out. But when I was 20 and applying to a writing program at York University, saying I wanted to write science fiction was fairly embarrassing. In Canada, much of the writing is supported by arts grants. And they don't award grants to genre writers. That can mean the difference between a writer having time to finish writing a novel or not having the time.
I like having the freedom to write about the things that excite me. You guys are my tribe, and it's not necessarily the case that this is weird. But in the larger world, there's a bit of disdain for such unbridled technology-related enthusiasm. Not having to be apologetic about being enthusiastic about technology is good and refreshing. The rewards of fiction writing are so slim that if you didn't love it there'd be no reason to do it. I'm glad to be in the gutter to write like I feel like writing.
Deckard: The kind of work I do I don’t necessarily want it to be talked about at dinner parties. I want people in cool smoky lounges and subway stations to talk about my work. That's my tribe. That's who you should be doing your art for: the people like you. There've been a lot of times in my life where I've noticed that there is definitely a "them" spoiling things for me. I don't know who they are.
I've worked in Seattle and in record stores for a lot of my time. When the Nirvana record "Bleach" came out, we all loved it. Then some jerk at Rolling Stone dubbed it the Seattle grunge scene. We were wearing flannel because it's cold and wet in Seattle. It's hard to keep creativity when you have to filter it through so many people.
Doctorow: Working in the gutter is working out of scrutiny. William Gibson got an honorary Ph.D. from the Rhode Island School of Design. William Gibson's start in the genre is actually pretty interesting. He used to draw single-panel comic strips for fanzines. We are all geeks under the sin. It's nice to avoid the scrutiny.
Elise: What we have in common is that we enjoy extreme fantasy. In the leather world, there's a huge crossover between the leather community, science fiction, games, and Ren fair. I consider myself to be a big geek in a big way. Put me in a costume and I'm happy. Is there a bigger stigma being a sci-fi geek or being a porn enthusiast?
Doctorow: Do we really need to measure? My pain is like… [He gestures with his hands.]
Elise: This isn’t about pain.
Munroe: If you're at a rock concert, it's cooler to know a lot about porn than it is about science fiction. Fantasy is an interesting thing. It's assumed that they're immature. A lot of people's enthusiasm for it and dismissed. Everyone has that inside them. We go on a binge/purge thing. We watch a couple of Hollywood movies and then we read a very important novel. You know how there are writers who are light, but filling? I like to think of myself as the falafel of science fiction readers. I enjoy it when someone says, "I don’t like science fiction, but I like your books."
Doctorow: I thought you were science fiction influenced!
Munroe: I'm over that. I've come to terms with that. The fantasy of it is its strength. The media is heaping attention on, say, Grand Theft Auto. But I feel like it's like it was with comics 10 years ago when Watchmen came out. 10 years later, people don't really think about comics the same way. The stigma remains. Because these genres are fantasy based, they slip towards the gutter. They may have a moment in the spotlight, but then they fade away. I think that's a good thing.
Deckard: It's not interesting to me that these people are pushing these things back into the gutter. That’s being driven by people who might not understand any of these genres. If you've never seen this film that you say is so bad, how do you know it's so bad?
Elise: you know how they say if you're going to smoke pot, then you start heroin? If you become a stripper, the next step is porn. I didn't have any stripper friends, but being in the leather community, I was very comfortable. And I didn't start stripping under I was 31. My leather friends thought it was great. When I started doing movies, I had huge support. I don’t know if I'd want to move to Southern California and just do them with anyone.
Doctorow: Science-fiction writers in Toronto are really lucky. When I was 12, I was hanging out at the Spaced Out Library. By the time I was 16 and got to alternative school, I was in a writing workshop.
Munroe: I just met Cory a few years ago. I didn’t really have any contacts with the science-fiction community. I grew up making zines in the punk-rock community. I started self-publishing and ended up with a full-length novel. I published my first novel with Harper Collins, and it didn't work out that great, so I decided to self-publish my second novel. I wouldn’t have been able to do that if it weren't for zines. Self-publishing is OK.
Deckard: I basically grew up my whole life playing video games. I knew it was something I wanted to get into. In college I studied graphic design. It was a natural step to get into game design. I moved out to Seattle to work for Nintendo and did graphic design for their magazine and players guides. And then I got a job in game design.
Munroe: The economics are just an indicator for the appetites that exists for these things. The guilt that I'm performing is just a mirror of how socially as a society we aren't comfortable acting out these fantasies. We cordon it off.
Doctorow: If the gutter is just right, you have no scrutiny, and there's vibrant economic activity.
Elise: The money is a driving factor in the adult entertainment industry. But a lot of people go into it just out of curiosity.
Deckard: When my wife and I were talking about this, she said, "Haven't you already stepped up onto the curb?" Because video games do sell well.
Doctorow: The urge to transgress is the urge to step back into the gutter. They've mainstreamed Grand Theft Auto, but can they mainstream Journey Through the Cancerous Colon?
Deckard: Games are a much more family thing in Japan. It's not just little Timmy buying games. It's mom. And it's a bunch of games. It's the same for comics and porn. One section of the gutter that's not included here today is board games. Board games are huge in Germany. I end up having to import games and translate them so I can play them.
Elise: I would still do it, but less often.
Doctorow: I started submitting science-fiction stories when I was 16, and I didn’t get accepted until I was 26. When I got my advance for the novel, I got a check for a three-paragraph piece in Wired. The check from Wired was $100 less than my advance.
Munroe: People aren't in this for the money.
Elise: There are people in it for the money in my field, and they're not happy.
Doctorow: William Gibson writes about denuding the counter culture landscape. The last scene he saw get co-opted was punk. That took 18 months. Then came grunge. That took three weeks. Staying on the transgressive edge makes it harder to participate in the denuding of the counter culture landscape.
Doctorow: I think people wear Star Trek tunics because they're proud. The signifier of a Star Trek tunic is "I am incredibly proud of being distant from your pop culture. Screw y'all."
Munroe: It's also a matter of not having a clue and not caring. There's nothing secret or attractive about the secret society of Star Trek.
Deckard: A lot of times, people don't care what those other people's opinions are. I've been a big skate punk since I was a little kid. People kind of look at us weird when we come up on our skateboards. I don't care what they think. It's kind of sad to see that lost. Just as grunge got big, you start seeing cheap skateboards in K-Mart and Target. All of a sudden it becomes less us. You do everything you can to make that not happen.
Doctorow: Then some bastard came along and made Tony Hawk Skating. Those bastard video game makers sucked out all the life out of skating.
Karl Deckard, Cory Doctorow, Maitresse Elise, and Jim Munroe: Why I Dig Working in the Cultural Gutter
Deckard is a senior game designer who has worked on Metroid Prime for Nintendo and Half-Life. Doctorow is outreach coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a contributor to Boing Boing, and author of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Elise is an adult actress and writer of erotica. And Munroe was managing editor of Adbusters before writing novels and making video games. Here is a rough transcript of the panel discussion:
Munroe: My name's Jim Munroe. I've written three novels. One of them is about another guy who goes to another planet to teach English. But when I'm at parties, I find myself saying I write novels. And I say it's science fiction-influenced stuff. I'm interested in my own tendency to sidestep that sort of stuff. I'm very interested in people who are involved in things that are not terribly highly regarded by society in terms of the arts.
Doctorow: I'm Cory Doctorow. I'm a blogger, a science-fiction writer, and I work for a nonprofit organziation called the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I write science fiction, and not just science fiction, but science fiction for Slashdot readers that will get published on the Internet. That can be seen as one step below self-publishing. It's considered scraping the bottom of the barrel. But if there's hope, it's in the trolls. Will someone care about the poor Slashdot reader? I write for them. You need to be involved in Internet culture to understand it. I'm fairly unapologetic about using terms and jargon that comes out of that milieu. I get surrounded by people at science-fiction conventions by people who wonder what I'm smoking.
Science-fiction writing doesn’t pay for shit. Roald Dahl sold his short stories one at a time for enough money to feed his family of four for a month. Asimov's pays about enough to feed a family of four for a meal. But occasionally, the New York Times discovers you and what you do. Fuck you gutter, the New York Times thinks I'm cool
Elise: Ive done a lot of things in the adult entertainment. I'm on this panel as a porn actress. I've done four adult videos. Two were bi and two were lesbian. I've done stripping. I write erotica. I've done the modeling. I've done the Internet.
I also have a Ph.D. in romance linguistics. The adult entertainment industry got me through school. When people ask me what I do, I say translation. That is one of my jobs. But that pays nothing. If someone's truly interested, I'll go into detail about what I do, but if it's just anyone, I'll say I'm a writer. If they ask what I'm writing, I'll say true-life adventure stories. I'm not ashamed, but sometimes you do have to protect yourself.
Deckard: I design video games. I worked on the PC game Half-Life and a game for Nintendo's console Metroid Prime. What is this gutter? Who are these people who look down on all of the careers were talking about today? And why do we care?
Munroe: The cultural gutter is just something I made up. I made up this idea of there being gutter genres. I've always been attracted to science fiction, but people generally remember the crappy science-fiction movie that they saw and stigmatize the genre as a whole. I'm drawn to the genre with the interest in defusing that as much as I can.
When I got involved in video games and started talking about video games, talking about them as art, I realized that I'm drawn to these genres because they have a basis that keeps drawing people back to them. Because I like violating these cultural norms, it’s a perfect place for me. For unconventional thinkers like Elise, instead of following a traditional writing career with a smattering of erotica, she did what she did.
When I write a science-fiction novel, I feel free. You get to write about robots, for Christ's sake. There's a fundamental fun element that draws me to it. I have a lot more freedom in terms of what I can do.
Elise: I've really been enjoying the BDS&M I've been seeing in the mass media lately. I don't mind the lesser stigma. My sister understands what I'm doing a little more. My parents appreciate some of the writing I've done, but they don’t know everything I'm doing.
It's a huge fantasy being a porn star. It's fantasy being a stripper or a dominatrix. You get to be a schoolgirl, a teacher, a nurse. My life is not boring.
Doctorow: Who are the people looking down their nose? And why does it matter? It only matters when it matters. I used to work at a science-fiction bookstore, and I used to hang out at the science-fiction library. "Speculative fiction" is one of those shame words. "It's not a comic, it's a graphic novel!"
When I was 12, it was a great place to hang out. But when I was 20 and applying to a writing program at York University, saying I wanted to write science fiction was fairly embarrassing. In Canada, much of the writing is supported by arts grants. And they don't award grants to genre writers. That can mean the difference between a writer having time to finish writing a novel or not having the time.
I like having the freedom to write about the things that excite me. You guys are my tribe, and it's not necessarily the case that this is weird. But in the larger world, there's a bit of disdain for such unbridled technology-related enthusiasm. Not having to be apologetic about being enthusiastic about technology is good and refreshing. The rewards of fiction writing are so slim that if you didn't love it there'd be no reason to do it. I'm glad to be in the gutter to write like I feel like writing.
Deckard: The kind of work I do I don’t necessarily want it to be talked about at dinner parties. I want people in cool smoky lounges and subway stations to talk about my work. That's my tribe. That's who you should be doing your art for: the people like you. There've been a lot of times in my life where I've noticed that there is definitely a "them" spoiling things for me. I don't know who they are.
I've worked in Seattle and in record stores for a lot of my time. When the Nirvana record "Bleach" came out, we all loved it. Then some jerk at Rolling Stone dubbed it the Seattle grunge scene. We were wearing flannel because it's cold and wet in Seattle. It's hard to keep creativity when you have to filter it through so many people.
Doctorow: Working in the gutter is working out of scrutiny. William Gibson got an honorary Ph.D. from the Rhode Island School of Design. William Gibson's start in the genre is actually pretty interesting. He used to draw single-panel comic strips for fanzines. We are all geeks under the sin. It's nice to avoid the scrutiny.
Elise: What we have in common is that we enjoy extreme fantasy. In the leather world, there's a huge crossover between the leather community, science fiction, games, and Ren fair. I consider myself to be a big geek in a big way. Put me in a costume and I'm happy. Is there a bigger stigma being a sci-fi geek or being a porn enthusiast?
Doctorow: Do we really need to measure? My pain is like… [He gestures with his hands.]
Elise: This isn’t about pain.
Munroe: If you're at a rock concert, it's cooler to know a lot about porn than it is about science fiction. Fantasy is an interesting thing. It's assumed that they're immature. A lot of people's enthusiasm for it and dismissed. Everyone has that inside them. We go on a binge/purge thing. We watch a couple of Hollywood movies and then we read a very important novel. You know how there are writers who are light, but filling? I like to think of myself as the falafel of science fiction readers. I enjoy it when someone says, "I don’t like science fiction, but I like your books."
Doctorow: I thought you were science fiction influenced!
Munroe: I'm over that. I've come to terms with that. The fantasy of it is its strength. The media is heaping attention on, say, Grand Theft Auto. But I feel like it's like it was with comics 10 years ago when Watchmen came out. 10 years later, people don't really think about comics the same way. The stigma remains. Because these genres are fantasy based, they slip towards the gutter. They may have a moment in the spotlight, but then they fade away. I think that's a good thing.
Deckard: It's not interesting to me that these people are pushing these things back into the gutter. That’s being driven by people who might not understand any of these genres. If you've never seen this film that you say is so bad, how do you know it's so bad?
Question: When you got into what it is you do now, did you have a community there to begin with that you felt supported by?
Elise: you know how they say if you're going to smoke pot, then you start heroin? If you become a stripper, the next step is porn. I didn't have any stripper friends, but being in the leather community, I was very comfortable. And I didn't start stripping under I was 31. My leather friends thought it was great. When I started doing movies, I had huge support. I don’t know if I'd want to move to Southern California and just do them with anyone.
Doctorow: Science-fiction writers in Toronto are really lucky. When I was 12, I was hanging out at the Spaced Out Library. By the time I was 16 and got to alternative school, I was in a writing workshop.
Munroe: I just met Cory a few years ago. I didn’t really have any contacts with the science-fiction community. I grew up making zines in the punk-rock community. I started self-publishing and ended up with a full-length novel. I published my first novel with Harper Collins, and it didn't work out that great, so I decided to self-publish my second novel. I wouldn’t have been able to do that if it weren't for zines. Self-publishing is OK.
Deckard: I basically grew up my whole life playing video games. I knew it was something I wanted to get into. In college I studied graphic design. It was a natural step to get into game design. I moved out to Seattle to work for Nintendo and did graphic design for their magazine and players guides. And then I got a job in game design.
Question: There's a good deal of economic force behind what you do. Yet you perceive it as being in the gutter?
Munroe: The economics are just an indicator for the appetites that exists for these things. The guilt that I'm performing is just a mirror of how socially as a society we aren't comfortable acting out these fantasies. We cordon it off.
Doctorow: If the gutter is just right, you have no scrutiny, and there's vibrant economic activity.
Elise: The money is a driving factor in the adult entertainment industry. But a lot of people go into it just out of curiosity.
Deckard: When my wife and I were talking about this, she said, "Haven't you already stepped up onto the curb?" Because video games do sell well.
Doctorow: The urge to transgress is the urge to step back into the gutter. They've mainstreamed Grand Theft Auto, but can they mainstream Journey Through the Cancerous Colon?
Deckard: Games are a much more family thing in Japan. It's not just little Timmy buying games. It's mom. And it's a bunch of games. It's the same for comics and porn. One section of the gutter that's not included here today is board games. Board games are huge in Germany. I end up having to import games and translate them so I can play them.
Question: I would argue that you're doing this to indulge yourselves. If you make money, great. But if you didn't make money, would you still be doing it?
Elise: I would still do it, but less often.
Doctorow: I started submitting science-fiction stories when I was 16, and I didn’t get accepted until I was 26. When I got my advance for the novel, I got a check for a three-paragraph piece in Wired. The check from Wired was $100 less than my advance.
Munroe: People aren't in this for the money.
Elise: There are people in it for the money in my field, and they're not happy.
Question: What do you guys think is the difference between the cultural gutter and the cultural leading edge? Historically, it's always been such. Bright interesting people find bright interesting things and then the broader culture caught on.
Doctorow: William Gibson writes about denuding the counter culture landscape. The last scene he saw get co-opted was punk. That took 18 months. Then came grunge. That took three weeks. Staying on the transgressive edge makes it harder to participate in the denuding of the counter culture landscape.
Question: Why are some things, like being a fantasy football player, accepted, while other things are scary?
Doctorow: I think people wear Star Trek tunics because they're proud. The signifier of a Star Trek tunic is "I am incredibly proud of being distant from your pop culture. Screw y'all."
Munroe: It's also a matter of not having a clue and not caring. There's nothing secret or attractive about the secret society of Star Trek.
Deckard: A lot of times, people don't care what those other people's opinions are. I've been a big skate punk since I was a little kid. People kind of look at us weird when we come up on our skateboards. I don't care what they think. It's kind of sad to see that lost. Just as grunge got big, you start seeing cheap skateboards in K-Mart and Target. All of a sudden it becomes less us. You do everything you can to make that not happen.
Doctorow: Then some bastard came along and made Tony Hawk Skating. Those bastard video game makers sucked out all the life out of skating.
Interlude: South by Southwest 2003 XIV
After last night's Fray Cafe and the last two days of active transcribing, I'm feeling a little burnt out. While I went to the "Computers vs. Blackboards: Net Learning or Not Learning?" panel discussion this morning after meeting Scott Heiferman for breakfast, I did email for work instead of taking notes. Then, after lunch with Don Jarrell, the coordinator of the Austin Company of Friends group, I skipped Joshua Davis' keynote entirely in order to meet deadline for the May CoF events calendar. If anyone comes across any notes or transcripts for these two events, let me know. I'll at least link to them. Sorry I couldn't keep this up the whole conference.
After last night's Fray Cafe and the last two days of active transcribing, I'm feeling a little burnt out. While I went to the "Computers vs. Blackboards: Net Learning or Not Learning?" panel discussion this morning after meeting Scott Heiferman for breakfast, I did email for work instead of taking notes. Then, after lunch with Don Jarrell, the coordinator of the Austin Company of Friends group, I skipped Joshua Davis' keynote entirely in order to meet deadline for the May CoF events calendar. If anyone comes across any notes or transcripts for these two events, let me know. I'll at least link to them. Sorry I couldn't keep this up the whole conference.
South by Southwest 2003 XIII
Carrie Bickner, Ben Brown, and Kevin Smokler: Book Culture
Smokler: Please address all publishing questions to the publishing panel at 5 o'clock this afternoon. Thank you.
Brown: Bling bling.
Bickner: Happy happy.
Smokler: Joy joy. Good morning, everybody. My name's Kevin Smokler, and I'll be your moderator this morning. We'll be talking about books and the Web. Are they friends or enemies? Friends or lovers? Friends with benefits?
When I came to South by Southwest in 2000, I was a failed writer and looking for something literary. I was looking for something book related, and they had an e-books panel. That was three years ago. The e-book issue has largely been put to rest. It's more or less considered a failure in publishing circles.
We never think now about publishing and the Web in terms of the Web supplanting books. We're looking at how the two relate rather than will one dominate the other.
Bickner: I am with the New Your Public Library digital library program as the assistant director for digital information and system design.
Smokler: Ben Brown is a Web rock star, personality, and all-around good guy. But for our purposes today, he's the co-publisher of So New Media, an exciting, interesting new model of publishing. The very definition of being published has changed thanks to the Web.
Bickner: I am by training a librarian, but I'm also a writer. How I got into librarianship, initially I thought I'd be a special collections librarian, an archivist. It turned out that I actually knew a lot about technology. Now that I'm in the digital library program, my job is almost what I started out to do. It's preservation. How do we preserve our digital cultural heritage? 50 years from now, how are we going to be able to find these objects?
Brown: I'm a Perl programmer by trade, but I have a creative writing degree. When I started doing a lot of writing and looking for places to publish, it's not a great market for the kind of stuff I write. I was living in New Zealand at the time and I pitched a lot of articles about book culture. Magazines there just weren't interested. So I started a magazine. I did it myself. I did it punk-rock style, and we sold several hundreds of copies. When I got back, my partner and I started So New Media to primarily focus on writers who mostly publish online.
Smokler: I'm a book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and until last week was working on Central Booking. We also used that forum format and software interface to have authors come visit. Our readers would post questions and the authors would answer them.
Where should we start? The four main areas we've brought up in terms of where books and the Web intersect in interesting ways are promotion, dissemination, preservation, and selection vs. publishing. Three years ago, there was a lot of talk about print on demand. Before we could do that, seeing your book was some mark of quality, some mark that you had in fact made it as a writer. Your book had passed through some sort of selection process no matter how good or bad it was.
The Web has turned that entirely on its head. What does that mean? Now that everybody can be published, what does it mean to be published? Now the question isn't who can get published and is that worth reading, but, as a reader, how do we select what's worth reading?
Brown: We have a pretty rigorous selection process. We get hundreds and hundreds -- OK, many many -- submissions every week. We've done 12 books or something. We can't read all of the submissions that we get already. One of the major things we evaluate is: Does this author already have somewhat of an online following? Beyond that, it is very much my personal tastes in books. My hope is that the people in our audience will have tastes similar to what I have and just buy everything we put out. We've done everything from personal narrative to science fiction. But they all fall in moderny categories.
Another thing is dealing with the authors and how enthusiastic about the book. Some people are like, "Yeah, yeah, I'll put out a book." And other people are like, "Yeah! I'll go on a world tour, I'll visit 200 cities and put on a circus act in every city." Those are the people we publish.
The first people we published were members of the high-click personal Web site community. They had a decent audience. Our goal was not to sell books to viewers of the Web sites. The goal was to get writing on the Web already into the hands of people who buy books at the bookstore.
It's not new, but there are thousands and thousands of books being released every week into the bookstores. There's no distinguishing between your book and another. You've got to get out there and do a little song and dance for people.
One of the first people we did was Greg Knauss. He did a 40 Web log tour. Every day he'd do a virtual reading and write a piece for all these different sites. He got a lot of press because nobody had ever done that before. It was a tremendous promotional vehicle, and Greg could stay at home with his kids.
Smokler: that’s a more creative promotional effort than 90% of New York publishers have thought of. Until the last year and a half, very few publishers' Web sites had anything other than the season's catalog. If you've ever been to a reading, you know that readers just salivate over any information about the writing process. The Web is able to hone in on that in ways that other media cannot.
Neil Gaiman did a blog while he was writing American Gods. Robert Olen Butler wrote a short story live on a Web cam. The science fiction community has embraced that first for obvious reasons, but it's only the beginning.
We know how the Web has changed how books are made. Let's talk about the reverse.
Bickner: One of the most exciting things that happened in my career took place at the New York Public Library. We took in a box of papers from Malcolm X after his trip to Mecca when he rethought a lot of his ideas. These ideas have been unexplored because of a lack of material. This box was found in a storage locker in Florida. The storage owner sold the stuff, and it eventually ended up on Ebay. Through a lot of negotiation and other work, the New York Public Library acquired the collection.
That the box survived was an accident of the stuff the material was written on. Once we got the collection, we started getting calls from people who also had boxes of Malcolm X materials. I began looking for the analogous accidents and the analogous materials in the Web world and it's not there.
Let's say Josh Davis has a flood in his basement. Does someone save his CPU? We're not taking steps now to preserve digital materials. 20 years from now, how are we going to understand Cory Doctorow's editorial process?
Smokler: The way authors compose their books is changing. The number of authors who compose their books with pencil and paper is shrinking. There's a group of people called the Pencil and Paper Society, but those writers are rare.
Bickner: This is something that we just photographed at the New York Public Library to digitize. It's Walt Whitman's copy of Leaves of Grass. The pencil marks you see are his editing comments for the second edition. This physical object shows you what his process was like.
My own manuscript shows tracked changes in Microsoft Word. The Walt Whitman book is physical. With this, it's not just about saving the Microsoft Word file, it's about having the technology to read these tracked changes. 20 years from now, is someone going to want to see the email that I sent Tanya, a friend who helped me with the book? What do you save? What part do you save? Do you really want to save it for later? What is the digital object?
Smokler: In the future, will a rare books library be a collection of G4's? What if its format isn't compatible? What if Microsoft Word doesn't exist? Pens and pencils doesn't get evolved out of existence.
Brown: You're going to kill me. We do one print proof of our books. We delete all the changes and then we use that file to publish the book. That's all there is.
Smokler: Do people like Ben, Carrie, have the resources to do this sort of thing?
Bickner: Some of the resources are less expensive than you might think. Publishers do have a responsibility to preserve a part of their cultural heritage. Publishers print books on acid-free paper. Open standards are a pretty good bet. It's difficult. If you have to exchange with people working in proprietary software like Microsoft Word, it can be difficult to collaborate.
Brown: We just have to start saving everything instead of emptying our trash every morning
Bickner: Or find someone to save it for you. The collectors are the people who are going to have this stuff. Josh Davis puts out a CD-ROM every year. You know someone is collecting those.
Smokler: History is an incomplete story. We save what is most illuminating and most helpful. Ben, 20 years from now you may not want the first few books published by So New MMedia.
Brown: This is one of our first books. It was done by my partner James, who co-founded the company. It's a collection of short stories, and it's bound by a used envelope that he found at the office he worked at. He made photocopies at work and stapled them at his desk. That one's wrapped in plastic.
This one is one of the later ones we did. We upgraded to having our own expensive laser printer in our house. We bought a fancy-pants German saddle stapler. The most recent books, we've finally upgraded and are doing perfect bound real books. We just send them off to printers.
Smokler: That’s Neal Pollackl
Brown: his first book was put out by McSweeney's, and he's got a novel coming out at Harper Collins.
Bickner: It's interesting to me that someone who's on both sides of the publishing world thinks that putting something in print is a way of exalting the work.
Brown: I have been publishing my work online for many, many years. It doesn't compare to holding the book in your hands or selling your book to someone. The micropayment future never showed up. We sell a book for $6, and we send the author $2 or $3. I don't make any money at all. I just sent Adam Rakunas several hundred dollars so he could pay his rent.
Smokler: We still have a bias that things printed on paper are more worthy than publishing online. We don't have the New York Times Book Review for people who publish online. It's seen as a haven for people who can't cut it in the real world.
Brown: Most of the people we publish will probably get book deals in the future. The fact that I'm willing to put the money up indicates that I at least think the writing is quality.
Smokler: I hope we're nearing a day where writers see the Web as a viable way to promote their work. Publishers just now are starting to clue into that. Publicists at most publishing houses are young, terribly ambitious, horribly overworked people. They've got 30-40 books under their tutelage, and a lot of books get swept away by the tide.
Brown: And promotional budgets are about 10% of the overall budget. Let's say your advance is $12,000. That means your promotional budget is $1,000.
Smokler: The attention to promotion needs to come from you. The Web allows writers to promote themselves.
Brown: Neal Pollack's first book was promoted exclusively online. He did online promotion and went on tour. The tour was promoted only online. He did a tour diary on his Web site, and he sold a zillion copies of the book. This book is very much the same. The power of the Web as a promotional tool for books is underestimated by people even like myself.
Bickner: I have a non-literary example of how this might play out. There was a health information publisher who specialized in AIDS and HIV information to be distributed in African countries. The publisher's question was: How do we create the content, print it, and then get it where it needs to be? They decided to create the content in PDF's, send them where they needed to be, and then print them.
Smokler: We want to do Q&A, but does anyone have anything else to say?
Brown: I have a project I'd like to talk about. You don't write and you don't do Web logs because you're a socially adept person. You also don't spend years and years of your life writing a novel because you're partying every night. We're doing these events now where they force authors into the punk-rock or indie-rock musician role. We have a monthly series now in which writers perform with bands. It changes the way people think of our company. We don't just publish books. We entertain people. You're not just interacting with the author, you might even dance.
Smokler: We used to say that the production of literature happens in private and the celebration of literature happens in public.
Bickner: I haven't heard that term in such a long time now. It's not as costly. These alternate delivery mechanisms are getting more and more respect. We don't have those easy distinctions to make anymore. My worry about which of this stuff do we save is a confusing one.
Smokler: Most bookstores have a policy with publishers that whatever they can't sell they can return.
Brown: Or destroy.
Smokler: You have no such agreement with self-published authors.
Brown: We have run into a little about that. People say, "You publish your own books?" I say, "No, I publish other people's books." It's changing because there are a lot more independent presses. There is still a stigma. If someone comes up to me and says, "I published my own book. Will you look at it?" I'm sorry, I don't have enough time.
Also, I can't call up the newspaper and say, "Hey, I published this book by another guy." They won't talk to me. That's why I have a publicist. There's a stigma against promoting yourself in the literature world. The Onion gave us an insanely good review of Neal's new book, and it was available on Amazon yet. It is now on Amazon and in bookstores, but it was a panic.
Smokler: I get asked a lot by aspiring authors how do I get my book reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle. Book reviews are at best a questionable method for promoting your book. What if it's lousy?
There's still a place for experts on books. The space for those experts is underutilized. We have maybe a dozen book reviewers that a publisher would run out and slap for a jacket blurb. That is too few. Who is book blogging? The Amazon thing is a diffuse way of doing that.
Bickner: You might have one or two of your friends review your book on Amazon.
Brown: That's not an unusual thing. Log out as Michael Crichton, log back in as Joe.
Smokler: Where do you find out what to read next?
Bickner: I have to have a couple of people suggest something before I read it. It's gotta be, "Here, you really must read this." If I had more time I would probably read book reviews.
Brown: I have a pretty healthy network of people to recommend stuff. I also go to the Amazon recommendations. I do that "I have this book, and I like it," thing, so my recommendation list is a finely tuned machine. I also buy anything anyone recommends on their blog. I read Boing Boing. I read Heath Row's Media Diet. Shout out to Heath.
Kevin's already blogged about his panel experience. Carrie's posted her notes online.
Carrie Bickner, Ben Brown, and Kevin Smokler: Book Culture
Bickner works as assistant director for digital information and system design at the New York Public Library and runs Rogue Librarian. Brown co-founded So New Media. Smokler works as a book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and runs Where There's Smoke. Here is a rough transcript of the panel discussion:
Smokler: Please address all publishing questions to the publishing panel at 5 o'clock this afternoon. Thank you.
Brown: Bling bling.
Bickner: Happy happy.
Smokler: Joy joy. Good morning, everybody. My name's Kevin Smokler, and I'll be your moderator this morning. We'll be talking about books and the Web. Are they friends or enemies? Friends or lovers? Friends with benefits?
When I came to South by Southwest in 2000, I was a failed writer and looking for something literary. I was looking for something book related, and they had an e-books panel. That was three years ago. The e-book issue has largely been put to rest. It's more or less considered a failure in publishing circles.
We never think now about publishing and the Web in terms of the Web supplanting books. We're looking at how the two relate rather than will one dominate the other.
Bickner: I am with the New Your Public Library digital library program as the assistant director for digital information and system design.
Smokler: Ben Brown is a Web rock star, personality, and all-around good guy. But for our purposes today, he's the co-publisher of So New Media, an exciting, interesting new model of publishing. The very definition of being published has changed thanks to the Web.
Bickner: I am by training a librarian, but I'm also a writer. How I got into librarianship, initially I thought I'd be a special collections librarian, an archivist. It turned out that I actually knew a lot about technology. Now that I'm in the digital library program, my job is almost what I started out to do. It's preservation. How do we preserve our digital cultural heritage? 50 years from now, how are we going to be able to find these objects?
Brown: I'm a Perl programmer by trade, but I have a creative writing degree. When I started doing a lot of writing and looking for places to publish, it's not a great market for the kind of stuff I write. I was living in New Zealand at the time and I pitched a lot of articles about book culture. Magazines there just weren't interested. So I started a magazine. I did it myself. I did it punk-rock style, and we sold several hundreds of copies. When I got back, my partner and I started So New Media to primarily focus on writers who mostly publish online.
Smokler: I'm a book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and until last week was working on Central Booking. We also used that forum format and software interface to have authors come visit. Our readers would post questions and the authors would answer them.
Where should we start? The four main areas we've brought up in terms of where books and the Web intersect in interesting ways are promotion, dissemination, preservation, and selection vs. publishing. Three years ago, there was a lot of talk about print on demand. Before we could do that, seeing your book was some mark of quality, some mark that you had in fact made it as a writer. Your book had passed through some sort of selection process no matter how good or bad it was.
The Web has turned that entirely on its head. What does that mean? Now that everybody can be published, what does it mean to be published? Now the question isn't who can get published and is that worth reading, but, as a reader, how do we select what's worth reading?
Brown: We have a pretty rigorous selection process. We get hundreds and hundreds -- OK, many many -- submissions every week. We've done 12 books or something. We can't read all of the submissions that we get already. One of the major things we evaluate is: Does this author already have somewhat of an online following? Beyond that, it is very much my personal tastes in books. My hope is that the people in our audience will have tastes similar to what I have and just buy everything we put out. We've done everything from personal narrative to science fiction. But they all fall in moderny categories.
Another thing is dealing with the authors and how enthusiastic about the book. Some people are like, "Yeah, yeah, I'll put out a book." And other people are like, "Yeah! I'll go on a world tour, I'll visit 200 cities and put on a circus act in every city." Those are the people we publish.
The first people we published were members of the high-click personal Web site community. They had a decent audience. Our goal was not to sell books to viewers of the Web sites. The goal was to get writing on the Web already into the hands of people who buy books at the bookstore.
It's not new, but there are thousands and thousands of books being released every week into the bookstores. There's no distinguishing between your book and another. You've got to get out there and do a little song and dance for people.
One of the first people we did was Greg Knauss. He did a 40 Web log tour. Every day he'd do a virtual reading and write a piece for all these different sites. He got a lot of press because nobody had ever done that before. It was a tremendous promotional vehicle, and Greg could stay at home with his kids.
Smokler: that’s a more creative promotional effort than 90% of New York publishers have thought of. Until the last year and a half, very few publishers' Web sites had anything other than the season's catalog. If you've ever been to a reading, you know that readers just salivate over any information about the writing process. The Web is able to hone in on that in ways that other media cannot.
Neil Gaiman did a blog while he was writing American Gods. Robert Olen Butler wrote a short story live on a Web cam. The science fiction community has embraced that first for obvious reasons, but it's only the beginning.
We know how the Web has changed how books are made. Let's talk about the reverse.
Bickner: One of the most exciting things that happened in my career took place at the New York Public Library. We took in a box of papers from Malcolm X after his trip to Mecca when he rethought a lot of his ideas. These ideas have been unexplored because of a lack of material. This box was found in a storage locker in Florida. The storage owner sold the stuff, and it eventually ended up on Ebay. Through a lot of negotiation and other work, the New York Public Library acquired the collection.
That the box survived was an accident of the stuff the material was written on. Once we got the collection, we started getting calls from people who also had boxes of Malcolm X materials. I began looking for the analogous accidents and the analogous materials in the Web world and it's not there.
Let's say Josh Davis has a flood in his basement. Does someone save his CPU? We're not taking steps now to preserve digital materials. 20 years from now, how are we going to understand Cory Doctorow's editorial process?
Smokler: The way authors compose their books is changing. The number of authors who compose their books with pencil and paper is shrinking. There's a group of people called the Pencil and Paper Society, but those writers are rare.
Bickner: This is something that we just photographed at the New York Public Library to digitize. It's Walt Whitman's copy of Leaves of Grass. The pencil marks you see are his editing comments for the second edition. This physical object shows you what his process was like.
My own manuscript shows tracked changes in Microsoft Word. The Walt Whitman book is physical. With this, it's not just about saving the Microsoft Word file, it's about having the technology to read these tracked changes. 20 years from now, is someone going to want to see the email that I sent Tanya, a friend who helped me with the book? What do you save? What part do you save? Do you really want to save it for later? What is the digital object?
Smokler: In the future, will a rare books library be a collection of G4's? What if its format isn't compatible? What if Microsoft Word doesn't exist? Pens and pencils doesn't get evolved out of existence.
Brown: You're going to kill me. We do one print proof of our books. We delete all the changes and then we use that file to publish the book. That's all there is.
Smokler: Do people like Ben, Carrie, have the resources to do this sort of thing?
Bickner: Some of the resources are less expensive than you might think. Publishers do have a responsibility to preserve a part of their cultural heritage. Publishers print books on acid-free paper. Open standards are a pretty good bet. It's difficult. If you have to exchange with people working in proprietary software like Microsoft Word, it can be difficult to collaborate.
Brown: We just have to start saving everything instead of emptying our trash every morning
Bickner: Or find someone to save it for you. The collectors are the people who are going to have this stuff. Josh Davis puts out a CD-ROM every year. You know someone is collecting those.
Smokler: History is an incomplete story. We save what is most illuminating and most helpful. Ben, 20 years from now you may not want the first few books published by So New MMedia.
Brown: This is one of our first books. It was done by my partner James, who co-founded the company. It's a collection of short stories, and it's bound by a used envelope that he found at the office he worked at. He made photocopies at work and stapled them at his desk. That one's wrapped in plastic.
This one is one of the later ones we did. We upgraded to having our own expensive laser printer in our house. We bought a fancy-pants German saddle stapler. The most recent books, we've finally upgraded and are doing perfect bound real books. We just send them off to printers.
Smokler: That’s Neal Pollackl
Brown: his first book was put out by McSweeney's, and he's got a novel coming out at Harper Collins.
Bickner: It's interesting to me that someone who's on both sides of the publishing world thinks that putting something in print is a way of exalting the work.
Brown: I have been publishing my work online for many, many years. It doesn't compare to holding the book in your hands or selling your book to someone. The micropayment future never showed up. We sell a book for $6, and we send the author $2 or $3. I don't make any money at all. I just sent Adam Rakunas several hundred dollars so he could pay his rent.
Smokler: We still have a bias that things printed on paper are more worthy than publishing online. We don't have the New York Times Book Review for people who publish online. It's seen as a haven for people who can't cut it in the real world.
Brown: Most of the people we publish will probably get book deals in the future. The fact that I'm willing to put the money up indicates that I at least think the writing is quality.
Smokler: I hope we're nearing a day where writers see the Web as a viable way to promote their work. Publishers just now are starting to clue into that. Publicists at most publishing houses are young, terribly ambitious, horribly overworked people. They've got 30-40 books under their tutelage, and a lot of books get swept away by the tide.
Brown: And promotional budgets are about 10% of the overall budget. Let's say your advance is $12,000. That means your promotional budget is $1,000.
Smokler: The attention to promotion needs to come from you. The Web allows writers to promote themselves.
Brown: Neal Pollack's first book was promoted exclusively online. He did online promotion and went on tour. The tour was promoted only online. He did a tour diary on his Web site, and he sold a zillion copies of the book. This book is very much the same. The power of the Web as a promotional tool for books is underestimated by people even like myself.
Bickner: I have a non-literary example of how this might play out. There was a health information publisher who specialized in AIDS and HIV information to be distributed in African countries. The publisher's question was: How do we create the content, print it, and then get it where it needs to be? They decided to create the content in PDF's, send them where they needed to be, and then print them.
Smokler: We want to do Q&A, but does anyone have anything else to say?
Brown: I have a project I'd like to talk about. You don't write and you don't do Web logs because you're a socially adept person. You also don't spend years and years of your life writing a novel because you're partying every night. We're doing these events now where they force authors into the punk-rock or indie-rock musician role. We have a monthly series now in which writers perform with bands. It changes the way people think of our company. We don't just publish books. We entertain people. You're not just interacting with the author, you might even dance.
Smokler: We used to say that the production of literature happens in private and the celebration of literature happens in public.
Question: How would you distinguish vanity publishing from what we're talking about?
Bickner: I haven't heard that term in such a long time now. It's not as costly. These alternate delivery mechanisms are getting more and more respect. We don't have those easy distinctions to make anymore. My worry about which of this stuff do we save is a confusing one.
Smokler: Most bookstores have a policy with publishers that whatever they can't sell they can return.
Brown: Or destroy.
Smokler: You have no such agreement with self-published authors.
Brown: We have run into a little about that. People say, "You publish your own books?" I say, "No, I publish other people's books." It's changing because there are a lot more independent presses. There is still a stigma. If someone comes up to me and says, "I published my own book. Will you look at it?" I'm sorry, I don't have enough time.
Also, I can't call up the newspaper and say, "Hey, I published this book by another guy." They won't talk to me. That's why I have a publicist. There's a stigma against promoting yourself in the literature world. The Onion gave us an insanely good review of Neal's new book, and it was available on Amazon yet. It is now on Amazon and in bookstores, but it was a panic.
Question: What is the place of the book critic?
Smokler: I get asked a lot by aspiring authors how do I get my book reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle. Book reviews are at best a questionable method for promoting your book. What if it's lousy?
There's still a place for experts on books. The space for those experts is underutilized. We have maybe a dozen book reviewers that a publisher would run out and slap for a jacket blurb. That is too few. Who is book blogging? The Amazon thing is a diffuse way of doing that.
Bickner: You might have one or two of your friends review your book on Amazon.
Brown: That's not an unusual thing. Log out as Michael Crichton, log back in as Joe.
Smokler: Where do you find out what to read next?
Bickner: I have to have a couple of people suggest something before I read it. It's gotta be, "Here, you really must read this." If I had more time I would probably read book reviews.
Brown: I have a pretty healthy network of people to recommend stuff. I also go to the Amazon recommendations. I do that "I have this book, and I like it," thing, so my recommendation list is a finely tuned machine. I also buy anything anyone recommends on their blog. I read Boing Boing. I read Heath Row's Media Diet. Shout out to Heath.
Kevin's already blogged about his panel experience. Carrie's posted her notes online.
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