See What Made My Twit List

Upon realizing that my posting here has decreased while it has increased on Twitter, I'm experimenting with displaying said Twitter feed here, in the right margin. I may find a better solution, but think this will help keep some fresh content churning here - even if it isn't longer-form content (like, more than 140 characters).

Full disclosure: I have some apprehension about linking my Twitter feed here, as I feel like I post more randomly there. Of course, I also still giggle when people say "twit" or twit-related puns when trying to sound smart...

(Our) Life Inc.

Life Inc. The Movie from Douglas Rushkoff on Vimeo.

It is with some regret that I admit, I've had a galley copy of Douglas Rushkoff's new book Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back which I have been unable to devote enough attention. Between medical issues and my wedding, I just haven't had the time to sit and read much. Hopefully I can squeeze out a review before the book hits store shelves in just under two weeks (Sorry, Douglas, I really appreciate the advance copy and hope this doesn't negate my chances for advances of future publications). Everyone can read Chapter One here courtesy of BoingBoing, where Rushkoff has been guest blogger this week.

For the time being, I highly recommend Life Inc The Movie (above), which sets up the book's premise. In light of the current economic woes worldwide, I think it is crucial to examine the path that got us here: corporatism. You may be surprised to learn how it all began, and even more surprised to discover how much corporatism has become ingrained in the way we behave. Pre-order Life Inc. on Amazon.

UPDATE:
Great continuation of the conversation, with more excerpts from the book, here at BoingBoing: Everything's Open Source but Money.

Polling Place Ponderings

While waiting in line to vote, I turned my attention to the things I can't wait to be end with the election season. Three things in particular have been grinding my nerves over the past few weeks...

Claiming "this is the most historic election" ever...
You're only proving that you don't understand what "historic" means when you make claims like this. Stop being such a magpie; everyone knows you're just chirping what heard that on the news (which is more interested keeping you in the audience than keeping you properly informed). Something is either "having importance in or influence on history" or not; there is no graduated scale in the making of history, only in the way it is interpreted afterward. Every Presidential Election is equally historic. Every Election Day makes history. Even if we thought it was uneventful, it would still be historic because it's influencing history, one way or another. If you want to consider the voter turn-out a historic thing, that's fine -- but every voter turn-out before this was historic, too. Historic lows, historic highs... they're all recorded as public record and therefore part of the fabric of history. But, what's so ground-breaking about a US Presidential Election that boils down to one candidate from each of the two controlling parties, both of a Judeo-Christian faith? The choice isn't much different than it's ever been. It's good that you're voting, but keep things in perspective.

Implying that your vote counts more than mine because you're going to Grant Park tonight.
My vote counts just as much as yours; it always has and always will. But I don't create more waste with stickers, pamphlets or buttons; I don't lie that my middle name is Hussein or "donate my status" on Facebook (Why do some of you think assuming a fake name convinces me to vote for Obama, anyway? It doesn't make you the voice of reason you think you are. In fact, giving a false name may violate Facebook's terms of use); I don't consider my choice of candidate a status symbol -- it is our civic duty to vote, plain and simple. It's good that you voted, but you're not any more unique for it. If you secured tickets to gain entry to a public park for a speech tonight, good for you. I will have a better view from the comfort of my living room, and I won't be making the downtown area impassable for the people who traverse it every day. You are free to stand outside and clap for a jumbo-tron if you want. Just don't count your chickens before they hatch -- a lot of us thought Gore won eight years ago, but that's not how it played out.

Thinking it's a good idea to create election-themed advertising campaigns.
I work in advertising, and have been sick to my stomach with the inane "election" themes that have been pitched since before this time last year. Thankfully, not many made it to the public - but a lot of them did. Realize this is part of the reason people hate advertising: when you take something serious and belittle it to sell automobiles or donuts, you make us all look like idiots. You make people feel fatigued by the time election day comes, and dillute the power of real voting as though it were as inconsequential as picking the right soft drink in the supermarket, or as trivial as selecting the winner of a game show. I am happy it will be another four years before bad advertisers belittle our civic duties again, even though I know I have peers who will revisit those inane themes again and again and again.

No News Is The Best News

If only CNN and the other 24-7 news networks would do this instead of repeating the same sixty minutes of programming, twenty-four times a day. I'd watch the news more often, which would get their advertisers more exposure to my much-coveted "young adult" demographic. Just a thought.

Know When You're Living

Welcome to another installment in my periodic posts about wordplay.

Today, I'll briefly discuss a phrase I've heard used four times in the past three weeks, and each time used incorrectly. The phrase?

Turn-of-the-century

Folks, that was just over seven years ago. The century turned when our calendars moved from 2000 to 2001. If you want to refer to the turn of the century, you must be more specific.

Please, know what year you're living in. Don't say "turn of the century" unless you mean to harken that period when we worried about the Y2K bug. Try "turn of the Twentieth Century" to refer to the late 1800's and early 1900's.

You're welcome.

We call that "sampling", Hillary.

Well, sampling may not be the preferred term in political circles, but that's basically what it is.

If Deval Patrick doesn't have a problem with it, why should anyone else? It's not plagiarism if it's used with permission, whatever it is. Beside that, Hillary hasn't exactly written all her own material. Is she implying that she utters nary a phrase that's been uttered by anyone else in the history of mankind?

Folks might not boo her if she were a little more "with the times". And maybe not such a divisive bellyacher, when her political career seems predicated on her husband more than her own merit. (Total pot-shot added to justify use of this image.)

[Image sampled from The Carpet Bagger Report]

Anti-Social Bookmarking (what del.icio.us is now)

If you've read PYLB for a while, you've probably noticed that I've been experimenting with del.icio.us (which, like Flickr, is owned by Yahoo!) to display my links on the sidebar of this page. It seemed like the one social bookmarking tool that served my purposes. But in the past week, it's been on the fritz. As I type, the linkroll script supplied by del.icio.us is displaying my tagroll. That's a significant error, and it's making me think del.icio.us was a bad choice. (Then again, we have no reason to expect stability from anything Yahoo! does these days.)

So, are any of you using social bookmarking services? Which ones? How do you like them? I'd love to know, because it's a pain to keep converting all of one's bookmarks from one service to another. I just want one that works, simply, and easily plugs into my site and my blog. If I need to ditch del.icio.us and head elsewhere, where should I turn?

In The Event of [ ____ ] Disaster

Having worked in advertising the past eight years, I've encountered a few worst-case-scenario assignments. The most memorable were in anticipation of Mad Cow disease and bird flu. Thankfully, none of those scenarios came to pass. But having gone through the exercise of "what if, and then what?" gives me an appreciation of this William Safire-penned speech. Written for Nixon, In The Event Of Moon Disaster prepared for some unforeseen catastrophe that would have prevented Apollo 11 astronauts from returning to Earth from the moon.

Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.

This first sentence is a blatant reminder that politicians rarely speak with such eloquence any more. Where there was an implied sense of reverence and respect for the American public in Nixon's day (yes, I am aware of the irony in that statement), now is self-congratulatory smugness and complacency, if not mild retardation. Something to keep in mind with the election year approaching. Then again, if the wrong candidate wins again, there's always the burgeoning space tourism industry - and a potential to escape not only to Canada, but perhaps our nearest celestial neighbor.

[via Kottke.org]

Bike Helmets Bad For Cyclists?

Just in time for prime bike season: news that wearing a bike helmet may actually increase your chances of an accident involving a motor vehicle. I'm not just pulling your leg, this makes a lot of sense to me. But I've done a little reading on it, so let me throw the links at you...

Neatorama reports on
a Scientific American article about
the findings of University of Bath's Dr. Ian Walker.

As a perennial pedestrian, people-watcher and rider of public transportation, I have no problem whatsoever getting behind Walker's reason for conducting this road safety study.

His road safety work is currently considering questions relating to how drivers' attentional and decision-making mechanisms affect the safety of vulnerable road user groups such as pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorcyclists. Of particular interest at the moment is the issue of how our natural tendency to "read" other people (i.e., to interpret their gaze signals and other non-verbal communications) affects the safety of vulnerable groups.
[via Ian Walker's site]

I've worn a bike helmet ever since I started biking through the city. I've never been hit, but Chicago traffic is always more dense and less predictable than, say, DeKalb traffic. I do remember first wearing kneepads and a helmet while skateboarding on a half-pipe, and feeling invincible. But I also get the feeling that certain accidents are likely to happen regardless of the cyclist's choice of headgear.

Does wearing a helmet just say to everyone "the wearing of this helmet is totally protected"? It would seem that some effect like this is indeed at play. Do you think drivers are more likely to take precaution when a cyclist is not wearing a helmet?

Pseudonymity Reconsidered

I've been reconsidering some of my pseudonyms lately. And wondering how far pseudonymity will take you when you would prefer that your efforts were all related, connected and coherent.

The primary moniker I use for producing music, Instigator, has proven too ubiquitous. I adopted it eight years ago and am the oldest listing for artists named "Instigator", for the record. The bigger point is that I think I've outgrown it. I argue with myself about whether Instigator was supposed to do anything but get my solo production efforts underway. Things have been instigated well enough (the ambitious "Used Materials" album, and the fruitful Noise Throng label). It's time for the name, like the creative product itself, to move beyond the beginning-stage mentality.

This is what I did with INSTILLE, a name derived from the portmanteau of Instigator and Distille.

But getting my musical monikers in order inevitably leaves me reconsidering my PYLBUG moniker, too. A misspelling of pillbug, inspired by a dream about an abundance of insects and pills as interchangeable objects, it's been my handle for extra-curricular productions since 1995. Sometimes, however, I find myself wary of the connotations "pylbug" brings.

I am not, for the record, a pill-head any more than I am an insect aficionado. [Though I'm definitely much closer to the latter.] The reasoning by which I arrived at "pylbug" doesn't always hold up now, nearly 13 years later. Many of my extra-curricular efforts now seem inspired by different things, and this makes me feel like they should go by a different name. I'm considering a revised strategy to naming my projects; a refined point-of-view. Something like that.

All of that is for me to figure out. But, here's the question for my readers: where does your pseudonym come from, and did you plan any longevity into it? Maybe this question is more for bands, bloggers, content producers in general... people with a product that needs a brand name, if you will. What thought, if any, did you put into the act of picking your favorite pseudonym?

That is, if you can reveal the secrets behind your screen names.

Two Tips On (Not) Sounding Stupid

Two things that, for some reason, I've heard or read a LOT in the past couple weeks. Two things that are widely over-used and very incorrect. Two things I hope you'll learn to avoid saying, because they make you sound stupid. Two things that make me ignore everything else a speaker has to say, because these popular errors do a lot to remove a speaker's credibility.

1. Trying or giving anything more than 100%. Say this and you not only are a liar, but you've proven that you are terrible at math and not thinking about what you're really saying. Do the math. You can't have more than 100% of anything, because 100% is all of it. It's impossible to give 110%, so don't say that to someone if you want them to have more confidence in your abilities. You might as well come out and say "2+2=17".

2. Saying "it's in our company's / corporation's / brand's DNA". Absolutely not. Companies, corporations and brands do not, nor will they ever, have DNA. Claiming that anything is part of your organization's DNA shows that you don't understand what DNA is, and that you are spewing meaningless gibberish. Do your homework before you ape something that sounds scientific, or you'll look like a fool. What you're talking about are ideas, not genetic information. It's likely that, if you're referring to anything at all, it's a "meme" or "meme-complex". Have some respect for science; try not to butcher it just to feel like you sound important.

Piracy is a business model

Interesting post on Boing Boing, quoting a Disney co-chair Anne Sweeney. While the executive's comments at Mipcom seem clearly spurned by the belief that "content is king", Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow rounds out his post with a moment of clarity to which more studio execs and marketers should subscribe:

Content isn't king. If I sent you to a desert island and gave you the choice of taking your friends or your movies, you'd choose your friends -- if you chose the movies, we'd call you a sociopath. Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.

Well put. I'm inspired to put it this way:
Conversation is king because no one can own it.

(Not even Disney, not even with all the pirate references ... coincidentally made as a Disney pirate movie special edition DVD is made available for pre-order.)

In fact, Sweeney goes on to mention that some consumers want to consume content in a timely fashion so as to not miss out on the proverbial "watercooler moment" - conversation, in not so many words. This doesn't jive with her "content is king" stance. You don't bring content to the watercooler, you bring conversation. Let me give you an example:

This week, had I a watercooler conversation, it would have been about how the streaming online player for selected ABC programs doesn't work very well, and how the Disney-owned network was unable to stream more than twenty seconds of LOST without grinding to a halt for minutes at a time (an unpleasant, frustrating user experience). I'd then turn the conversation to the feeling I got, saying "just go buy it at iTunes and be done with this", and how I thought I'd just been teased into buying content I was supposed to have gotten for free. I'd managed to see a choppy two minutes of the episode, and now I wanted to see the rest. This is where I'd let the conversation go parenthetical...

(What do you do when the brand new, free streaming player isn't working? You can pay two dollars for the same content - plus DRM - at iTunes, or you could just watch for the content on a free P2P network, where you can get the content that will keep you in tomorrow's conversations.)

I would have concluded the conversation with mention of the BitTorrent options for freely acquiring the content on which our conversations thrive.

Non-Errors

Pilfering from Kottke again today, because I love these grammatic non-errors.

Stigmergy vs. Synergy

I learned a new word today, thanks to Jason Kottke and Wikipedia: stigmergy.

After reading the definition, it occurred to me that stigmergy is potentially the Web 2.0 equivalent of "synergy" - a term notoriously mis-used and abused by account directors and strategists everywhere. Synergy is not always good - it is a compounding of effects from two or more discrete influences. Think of the side-effects of cold medicine... take two or more kinds and the resultant synergy could prove fatal.

Since "synergy" has practically lost its meaning through mis-use (much in the same way "impact" is mis-used as a positive term - usually as the non-word "impactful"), I think "stigmergy" has promise. It affords a more realistic, organic approach to defining the nature a given relationship. That is, until chumps with poor language and communication skills butcher the term into meaninglessness.

GSTV: you can't spend five minutes without TV

Wouldn't the money spent installing televisions in gas pumps be better spent defraying the high price of gas? If my gas station is installing flat screens on the pumps, I get a strong sense that they're making more money than they need. Why compromise my concentration while I'm pouring highly flammable fluids into an automobile, anyway? Why not let me sit in my car with the inane DVD player I installed in the dashboard and use the GSTV money to provide full-service instead?

If it really is so "maddeningly tedious" for you as AdRants claims, you need to start walking, biking, or taking public transportation more often.

Seriously. If you can't go five minutes without television, you probably aren't fit to be driving at all.

The Backlash Bandwagon

It always happens... The industry leader is the brand that takes criticism for the entire category. The brand's competition may very well be worse for you, but it doesn't matter because you armchair activists and podcast pundits aim for the biggest target. I'm not defending McDonald's or Microsoft, but pointing out that "anti-hype" is little more than a backlash bandwagon - based on misplaced emotion more than fact.

You can see the anti-hype around MySpace more frequently now. From the half-assed "Fox bought MySpace" panic that, in the end, only attracted millions more people to the social networking site... to this article. Let me get this straight: a site that has 70 million members is "out" because one 18-year-old out of just 400 high school students surveyed said she's done with MySpace? Can't we just admit that we're tired of stories about MySpace's dominance, instead of publishing superfluous fluff and clutter about it? I'm not defending MySpace, but wondering where our collective common sense went.

We bitch about MySpace being too big, yet we've more than doubled the site's population in the past year. We claim that we don't eat McDonald's any more, yet we actually go to the fast-food giant more often and spend more when we're there since SuperSize Me came out. We bitch about Bill Gates and Microsoft, yet somewhere around 90% of us still claim Windows as our operating system. As consumers have proven that we are lying through our teeth; that we love to complain, but we have no resolve to effect change.

Why not get off the backlash bandwagon and put your money where your mouth is, folks?

The God Delusion

I thought it appropriate to follow that last post with a quick shout-out for Richard Dawkins' new book, The God Delusion. Pre-order it now, so you don't forget about it before the October 2006 release date.

For more info, here's a Salon interview with Dawkins from last year, about how all of America's god-mongering is pushing the country back into the Middle Ages. If you want more, here's another article in which Dawkins claims religion amounts to child abuse. Given the vast amounts of misinformation, false hope and resignation to not understand the world that religion gives us, I have to agree that it's extremely unhealthy when taught as divine truth instead of moral fiction.

The refix is in (for now).

Refix? Yeah. Here's a fun example of a refix that follows-through on ETUC and movie remixing:

DJ Food's Raiding the 20th Century - an audio-history of the cut-up. It's a bit of a listen, but I highly recommend checking both versions - the original mix is brilliant, and the refix is true genius.

Methods of refixing in sound recording date back to Musique concrète and through early forms of sampling and dub:

Tzara, Burroughs and Gysin called it the cut-up;
Zappa called his version xenocrany;
John Oswald dubbed it Plunderphonics;
Double Dee and Steinski considered their examples "lessons";
Pop Will Eat Itself said it all in their name.

Though not the first to use it, DJ Food is onto something with the term refix. For the time being, it is a remix of the term remix - and therefore may be a better word for this discussion. Technically, I'm refixing my blog by linking to previous posts to create a richer context for this particular post and to reinforce the themes behind this entire blog.

The refix not a new tactic. It's just a new word for an old trick. We have always reappropriated cultural capital, legally or otherwise, to re-tell stories (personal experiences) within individual and institutional worldviews.

Think of all the "classic" art that is little more than a commissioned depiction of a royal family imposed on biblical or mythological scenes - notably, without the permission or consent of those who wrote the Bible. Those Bible stories are largely based on previous mythology and folklore, but "fixed" enough to support Christianity's insidious patriarchy and supplant Pagan belief systems. These refixes are traditionally maintained as classic art because they've been hanging on museum walls for centuries - but apply the same tactic to modern media and you are asking for a cease and desist order, lawsuit or worse. (That's because our permission culture is all f'd up, and our courts can't clearly define fair use.)

The refix tactic reaches into all niches of culture, not just the traditional, classic arts: ricers, bikers and gearheads refer to it as Kustom Kulture; writers know it by several names, portmanteau perhaps the most exotic of them; gamers know it in the form of cheats, mods and even machinema; programmers and hackers may consider it open source; one day soon we will refix our own genetic codes under the ideals of democratic transhumanism.

It will no doubt be outdated in a matter of months, but for now the refix is in.

Cooking with social currency

Douglas Rushkoff recently posted an excerpt about social currency from his forthcoming book. He first wrote about the idea a few years ago, and ran with it as the theme for this latest book.

A term like "social currency" can help explain a bigger idea like the meme, and Rushkoff's analogy about how we listen to the telling of jokes starts getting at the meat (which, I'm fairly certain, is lurking somewhere in that new book):

Observe yourself the next time you’re listening to a joke. You may start by listening to the joke for the humor - because you really want the belly laugh at the end. But chances are, a few sentences in, you will find yourself not only listening, but attempting to remember its whole sequence. You’ll do this tentatively at first, until you’ve decided whether or not it's really a good joke. And if it is, you'll commit the entire thing to memory - maybe even with a personalized variation, or a mental note to yourself to fix that racist part. This is because the joke is a gift - it's a form of social currency that you’ll be able to take with you to the next party.

This is a lot like an example of the two ways memes spread, which I seem to recall from Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine. I don't have the book with me, so I'll go on as if this was in fact where I got this (it may have been Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene): memes are ideas - regardless of "good" or "bad" - that spread via imitation. Memes are the building-blocks of culture; culture is based on imitation. There are two basic ways we imitate, and you can think of them around this example of an apple pie: when you have a great piece of apple pie, you can either experiement with various ingredients in an attempt to arrive at the same pie by trial and error, or you can just get the recipe.

Imitate the result or imitate the recipe - these are the transactions made with social currency (I prefer to refer to it as cultural currency, but this is mere semantics).

In Rushkoff's terms, you listen to the joke for humor (the pie) at first, then attempt to remember its whole sequence (the recipe) -- so you can retell it (spread the meme, as it were). Consider for a moment the cheap imitations of the world, which attempt to copy the product without respect for the recipe. The recipe is worth more, culturally-speaking, because it does more to preserve the fidelity, fecundity and longevity of future results.

What to do with Chicago's water tanks...

According to the Trib, the Chicago Architectural Club recently announced winners of a contest seeking ideas for what to do with the city's rooftop water tanks. There are some very cool ideas, my favorite is the winning idea from Rahman Polk (PDF), which uses the tanks to harness wind power and support a city-wide Wi-fi network (an idea that's got some people talking already). Let's hope the best ideas prevail.