Eckotek

The Emotional Roller Coaster of Peace Corps

2009-08-18T10:52:00.000-07:00

People ask what Peace Corps was like and a stock response I employ is "It was an emotional roller coaster, but worth it." No other job hurtles faster from triumphant ecstasy to heartbreaking defeat. No other lifestyle charms as effectively as it disappoints. Let's take a look at an exultant peak and a bitter valley from this volunteer's experience in the Dominican Republic.

Roasted coffee sales were booming at the cooperative we assisted. Claudette had designed a snazzy new logo and packaging for our organic, high altitude coffee. The operations manager saw that roasted coffee could be a savior for our over-indebted loss-making enterprise. The opportunity that roasting our coffee was vastly more profitable than selling the raw commodity had sunk in for her. For the Asociación de Caficultores de Jarabacoa (ASCAJA) and the small farmers it represents, that's the difference between $1.25/lb for green coffee and $4-$5/lb. Although our costs are higher for a finished product (fuel, labor, and packaging), it still beats our red ink splattering commodity business. Plus, it increases employment in a country where good work is hard to find.

So the orders were rolling in. We were selling to volunteers in the Peace Corps office, employees of the US Embassy in Santo Domingo, artisan fairs, and several Americans entrepreneurs marketing the coffee to tourists. At one point over the summer of 2008, we even ran out of coffee to roast and had to borrow some from another buyer in town. Our limited roasting capacity became a problem. Our "sample" size roaster, capable of roasting only eight pounds at a time, couldn't cope with our projections of hundreds or even thousands of pounds per month. For any struggling business, growth problems are good to have.

Luckily, there was a seed sown in rocky soil nearby. USAID (or another development agency) had donated an eighty-pound drum roaster to a rural farmers group associated with ASCAJA. The machine was rusting in their warehouse from disuse. The donor agency had no doubt hoped to initiate some of the economic benefits of commodity processing I described above. The problem was that no local human capacity existed to market the finished product. These are simple farmers who are mostly illiterate and innumerate. The area has no electricity or phones. These are not exactly fertile conditions for a thriving startup roasted coffee business. The machine also didn't work as delivered, requiring major welding and drilling modifications to function. Dumping broken machines into places they can't be used with no training or followup is standard Big Development practice.

As educated outsiders, Peace Corps volunteers see problem-opportunity sets like these as gleaming nuggets in the muddy pan of routine daily experience. The downside is that nugget might turn out to be fool's gold.

I thought we could bring the eighty-pound roaster down from its isolated mountain community to the ASCAJA factory in town, where it could be put to good use filling roasted coffee orders as its donors intended. The group wouldn't part with their machine easily, holding out hope that orders might suddenly materialize. ASCAJA couldn't afford to purchase it, given their dire financial situation. The solution: pay the group a usage fee per pound roasted minus repair costs to get it running. Brilliant!

It was a fair compromise that kept everyone's interests aligned -- when sales are high, usage fees are high, and when sales are low, fees are low. This incentive structure avoids yoking ASCAJA to a fixed monthly lease payment that could be a burden in lean times. At this point a seasoned volunteer might look down the nose of their miner's spectacles and wonder if this elegant win-win solution has the sheen of fool's gold. That veteran (for once) would be wrong.

I traveled to Jumunuco on the back of a motorcycle down the rutted dirt roads. Flying past rolling hills of pine forest, golden pasture, and shaded coffee I learned my driver is the son of one of our board members. Knowing I was integrated enough to know my motoconchista was a good omen.

I entered the simple concrete block warehouse to introduce myself. Most of the men looked familiar to me and I to them, even if we didn't know one another by name. They all come to the factory office with their coffee and saw me plugging away at the cooperative's accounting. The recognition felt good. My presence, if not well understood, was at least noticed.

I explained the production bottleneck preventing us from reaching our potential in the roasted coffee business. I pointed out the roaster lying unused in the corner. I urged them to have the entrepreneurial vision to see problems as opportunities. I explained what was in it for them: a usage fee for their machine and a higher and better use for their green coffee. I repeated myself and spoke as slowly and clearly as possible so they could understand my accent. I referenced popular culture in illustrative examples. I mustered all my training and all my cultural understanding to make a deal happen.

And they understand! They agree! We reach consensus on terms, and I promise to draw up the contract. A success like this is one of the highlights of a volunteer's career. It's also Peace Corps development philosophy at its finest -- not writing checks and building stuff but instead educating, communicating, and removing the blockage and waste that prevents people from reaching their potential. Oh, triumphant success! Oh, sweet, sweet victory.

These achievements make one forget all the loneliness, humiliation, and confusion that form the warp of the volunteer's fabric of experience. The pain is forgotten, and, through forgetting, one melts a bit more into the collective moral community that characterizes traditional rural society. One thinks, "I finally get these people and they get me! I've acculturated. I've integrated." This feeling of becoming whole and integrated, to not fractionate oneself into American parts and host country parts, but to feel wholly American and wholly native to the place is Peace Corps Nirvana.

Buddhists say the surest sign you've not reached enlightenment is to believe you have. In other words, if you see the Buddha on the road, kill him. My smug feeling from securing the larger roaster was a fleeting illusion cemented by my desire to fit in, and to be a good volunteer. A good Buddhist would notice my attachment to success and remind of the second Noble Truth: suffering is caused by desire. As per usual when breaking a universal truth, a cosmic smackdown was in order.

Like all proper cosmic smackdowns, this one took me by surprise. We were waiting for a hitched ride down the mountain when a large Isuzu work truck stopped for us. The two men in the cab motioned my beautiful wife up front while I climbed into the bed. I set my backpack in the puddled wet bed while I stood hanging onto the bar that runs behind the cab. Standing was my custom for bolas (what we call hitched rides in the DR) to provide optimal scenery viewing, wind-through-the-hair, and leaning into the sharp mountain curves as if carving down the hill on a six-ton snowboard.

The reverie of my slalom through tropical scenery stuttered. I caught a whiff of diesel fuel. I thought, "Must be some engine fumes." I noticed the odor several times, and continued to ignore it. Unburnt diesel didn't fit the joyous high of my recent roaster achievement.

Little did I know, the wet puddles were spilled diesel and that sticky dead dinosaur juice was soaking through my entire backpack, making a blotchy chromatography experiment out of my important papers. I shouldered my pack and promptly soaked my lower back with fuel. Now the fumes were undeniable. I was a walking oil spill.

I began to cycle between rage and dejection. My backpack, laptop case, papers and shirt were covered with sticky hydrocarbons. Feverish efforts to wash the pack with detergent and water proved futile. (Geeky aside: Since then I've learned a polar solvent like water doesn't work on nonpolar chained hydrocarbons like diesel fuel. Dry cleaning fluid would have been better.) I asked my Dominican friends at the factory how I could get the fuel out. Feeble replies to wash it and put it in the sun didn't satisfy. They were really thinking, "Best remedy for diesel fuel is don't get soaked with it in the first place, pendejo."

These minor snafus can precipitate extreme existential anguish in the volunteer. We construct mental dams to hold back the days, weeks, and months of stress and awkwardness we feel. Then a neighbor's goat devours the garden, a bat crawls up your calf, or your backpack is soaked in diesel. Right then the camel's spinal column shatters and life doesn't seem worth living. Your American upbringing just doesn't prepare for this stuff. You think, "This would never happen to a Dominican," and you're right.

The good news is such suicidal moments are as short as they are frequent. Moments later you might be treated to a delicious lunch of barbecued pork ribs, eggplant salad, and fluffy moro by a family that treats you like one of their own children, a five year old might greet you with a bear hug in the street, or a coworker might tell you she's really learning a ton and she's so glad you're here. The magic of Peace Corps draws you in again. Another ride on the roller coaster?

First Shadowing Day in the ER

2009-07-20T12:26:00.001-07:00

There may be nothing like a busy ER for the rush of constant, purposeful action. Every patient is a new puzzle, a medical and social jigsaw to be solved by the emergency physician. I saw it firsthand on my first shadowing shift with a third year resident at Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan. Flowing from patient bedside to the flashing queue of tasks on the screen, from teasing out a cogent medical history to presenting that story to one's colleagues, the practice of healing in a crowded urban ED appears a chaotic synchronized dance.

This is not a purposeless or formless chaos. There is a distinct algorithmic cooperation operative in the Emergency Department. Like a school of fish swarming to bait, workers converge around a cardiac patient fibrillating on a bed. Charge paddles are charged and discharged. Patient recovers. The school flutters to the man choking on the fish bone or the other who's fallen from scaffolding.

Other moments are more sedate. They can be solved with a medication. This patient has a relapsing vertigo that left him immobilized on the sidewalk. His heart disease risk factors like high blood pressure and high cholesterol concerned us but his normal EKG and lack of chest pain or shortness of breath rule out a heart attack. That coupled with the way his feeling of the room spinning worsens when tilting his head forward or backward is classic vertigo, a problem of the equilibrium system in the inner ear. The resident orders an anti-dizziness medicine called meclizine and he perks right back up.

Certain patients drive home the need for health care reform in our country. One gentleman came in with some severe congestion due to allergies. The resident I was shadowing asks if he's ever seen his primary doctor about the issue. He has no primary care physician and no insurance. The resident explains he's probably one of the unfortunate working poor who make too much to qualify for Medicaid and too little to purchase private insurance. Another patient comes in with persistent rib pain due to a fall the previous week. They had done a thorough imaging workup (x-rays and a CAT scan) to rule out broken ribs or spleen laceration. The real problem was that he had run out of pain medication and couldn't afford the $20 it would take to refill it. We asked the ED's social worker for help but she said they don't help out with narcotics purchases, a reasonable policy for addictive drugs but little solace to our indigent patient. The country's Emergency Departments are the safety net for those who fall through the cracks of our dysfunctional health care system.

Though the velocity of patient turnover in the ER prevents the doctors from getting to know their patients on a personal basis, the pace and justice aspects of the job can be exhilirating. Like a a NASCAR driver taking the high banked curves at 150 mph, emergency medicine is all concentrated action and reaction with little time to reflect or interrelate. Emergency medicine is a field for those who crave the rush of immediacy. I wonder if it's for me.

The professionalization of help is not help

2008-11-04T11:37:00.000-08:00

I often find myself in meetings with some well educated people. My friend, Victor Amauris, is one such person. He's good natured, clear headed, and a peacemaker. We’ve both had business careers before our development jobs, he in the cacao trade and me in commercial real estate. We’re the same age. Victor Amauris is a good guy, me cae bien.

So I’m at this meeting with a group of small coffee producers seeking low-interest loans from a new microcredit fund, financed as a “gift from the American people” through USAID. Before the start of the meeting, my friend Victor greets me with a pristine ¿Cómo estás?, and asks if I know what a mecanismo (mechanism) is. I stifle a laugh knowing this was not a joke, but rather a sort of password to enter the dark, smoky speakeasy of the development business in-crowd. I’m not one to quibble with a little intellectual challenge, so I launch into something about a mechanism being a set of procedures to bring about a desired end, that the component parts must be well defined and properly delegated, and more such nonsense. I finish and Victor smiles, “That’s exactly what it is.”

Cultural Sidebar: To explain the pronunciation of S issue, an example is in order. ¿Cómo estás? in Dominicano becomes just ¿Cómo ‘ta? The plural form of banana changes from los guineos to lo guineo. The educated, having seen their language written with all of its resplendent S’s, know how to pronounce them in formal settings. Some people, knowing their countrymen drop the S, will overcompensate, adding S’s indiscriminately, donde quiera. This is extremely annoying. The Case of the Missing S’s is not mysterious or difficult to understand once you’re used to it. It’s just the standard pronunciation of Caribbean Spanish (Lo cubano and lo puertorriqueño do it too).

Okay, now I’m “in.” I can traipse around and drink cocktails with professionals from USAID and UNDP and Plan International without seeming out of place. I should feel accomplished. Instead I feel no better than I did drinking chilled top-shelf tequila shots with our fat cat clients back in my brokerage days.

While Victor and I prove our stunning intelligence to each other, the coffee producers mill about, nervous and guarded. Each one worried for their families, who exist in a permanent state of indebtedness because one coffee harvest rarely leaves enough profit to harvest the next. Their precarious balance sheets and dismal literacy and numeracy often leave them prey to usurious lenders. Every year is a total crapshoot with the weather. Too much rain or wind at the wrong time and the precious berry-producing flowers, or the coffee berries themselves, tumble to the ground. Too little rain and few flowers even appear. Nasty beetles called broca burrow into the beans, reducing weight and quality. Few have the money to apply chemical or organic fertilizers, or practice the pruning and soil preservation techniques that help increase yields. These worries, smelling of mud, rot, and desperation, cloud the air while Victor and I prattle away up in the sunny stratosphere.

The farmers, dressed in plaid shirts and battered baseball caps, show up to these meetings to show their commitment to the new proyecto, the way peasants came humbly to the courts of their lords to request favors. The powers that be, namely USAID, require a semblance of community participation and training for projects they fund. Don’t get me wrong, a participatory process is admirable as an analog to our open comment legislative processes in the US, but the education gap between those managing projects and those supposedly benefiting from them makes it difficult to execute in the Dominican Republic.

So what does a meeting about microcredit mechanisms look like? Having attended these sorts of things before, I had braced myself for another Sahara PowerPoint, with words as numerous as grains of sand, and not a single image to whet my parched visual cortex. Sadly, I would not even enjoy the melancholy desolation of the desert. Instead, I was subjected to the same discombobulated Word document the local project bureaucrats had submitted to USAID, projected onto the big screen. There were complicated tables and procedures and bullet points galore. There were pointless cyclic diagrams and organizational flow charts. Believe me, this presentation was just dripping with synergy.

Maybe the fine print Word Doc writ large on the big screen demonstrated breathtaking intellectual power, maybe not. What I’m sure it didn’t do is communicate. Let me summarize in five slides what Victor wanted to say:

We (the Cluster de Café) just got one million pesos to lend.
You must fill out a form listing your land in coffee production with the amount of money you want.
Your neighbors will review the form and tell us if you’re good for it or a lazy shyster who’ll never pay us back.
Based on your land with coffee and the judgment of your character from your neighbors, we’ll either loan you the money or not.
No double-dipping. You can’t have loans with the Cluster and ASCAJA (the coffee cooperative I work with) at the same time.

My slides aren’t exciting and probably wouldn’t have helped get the million pesos from USAID in the first place, but they do communicate with our target audience, the humble coffee farmer.

So why didn’t my friend Victor just say what he meant? What’s with all the statistical misdirection and highfalutin vocabulary? Well, Victor gets paid a lot of money. If he just spoke like everyone else, maybe they’d stop thinking he was worth it. Victor must be a professional, to prove his dominance to those below and his competence to those above. Seeing the realities of the small farmer in la Dominicana, you might think, “Wow. Look at all these poor people. Look at the almost total vacuum of managerial capacity amongst these poor people. I think I need…a professional.” Then you would hire Victor and give him a million pesos to solve the problem.

The professionalization of help is not help. The long, text-packed PowerPoint presentations and hideous fourteen column Annual Plans are not help. Help is not white elephant infrastructure projects that are worse than plain vanilla welfare payments. Help is not attracting all the country’s best and brightest into grant-writing and project administration positions, when they should be starting businesses, creating art, inventing new products, and agitating for government reform.

Help is sacrifice. Help is altruism. Help is taking risks. Help is donating your time and treasure for the common good, while postponing personal gain. Help is art and entrepreneurship and invention. Help is becoming a teacher or mentor and sharing your knowledge with others. Help, as currently practiced by Big Development, is not help.

Capitalism and the Hacker Ethic

2008-11-04T11:20:00.000-08:00

One American cultural trait I try to demonstrate in my Peace Corps work is persistence. In the design of the accounting for the coffee association I work with, we were met with a number of obstacles. I would design the account hierarchy in one way, modeling the business as I understood it – one expense account here, another inventory account there, all these account payables over in aquel lado. As we continued entering the mountain of paper receipts into the program we would inevitably run into problems in the account model. I had understood the business one way, and it turned out to work another. No big deal right. These things are not set in stone, we’ll just rework the model.

But my project partner, the association’s operations manager, would get very dispirited. While I frowned and scratched my head and tapped my fingers, puzzling over the solution, Arelis would sigh and fuss and worry herself. She’d lament, "Oh, I guess this won't ever work. We'll just have to give up and try something else." This spoken by someone who had watched the association pay professional accountants thousands to try and fail to wrap their heads around the business. I said, "No, Arelis. That's not how we do it. We enjoy puzzles. We like challenges. We finish what we start."

Sometimes we'd resolve the issue within minutes, other times it took days. But I never doubted for a minute that the brilliant GnuCash system could not be molded to our will. I knew it was sufficiently flexible and robust for any business of our size. If there was a problem, it was to be found in our own thinking, our own creativity. This was not how Arelis, the association's Dominican secretary saw things. She'd see the puzzled look come over my face and would be ready to give up. This stick-to-it-iveness, this Hacker Ethic, is an essential skill for a small Caribbean island, with few comparative advantages but its own charming people. If these people can develop the persistence to educate themselves in modern commercial arts and technology, this place might get a reputation for more than sunny beaches and great cigars.

My Dream Nonprofit: Low Cost Custom IT, Wizkids, and Microenterprise

2006-10-01T16:45:00.000-07:00

I've been dreaming of starting my own nonprofit. I mean, I like the freelance web design stuff I've been doing, but I just feel so darned fulfilled (slash jazzed, elated, stoked) every time I have a one-on-one session with one of my entrepreneur clients at the nonprofit PACE. Nothing in my workweek makes me happier. This must be my life's work.

So, here's the plan. Every single person who walks through the door at PACE and JobStarts needs better software for their business. They need a simple database that they can cold call from. They need a tool to design, price, and present floral designs to brides-to-be and high-end hotels. They need an automated, paperless system for buying, upgrading, and selling used cars. They need to keep track of twenty real estate opportunities in a busy brokerage office. They need custom software.

The market for good software is infinite. Every small business could run better if they never had to touch the kludgy, unintegrated wreck that is Microsoft Office. Copy-and-paste, "where's that file on the network," and "why can't I layout text and spreadsheets for my proposals in one simple document?" -- this is the tortured existence of every small business around the globe.

I want my clients to run their entire business from a web browser. I want an interface where data about clients and data about products isn't scattered across twenty files. (It should all just be in the database!) I want software designed to mimic an actual business process, not processes molded to sucky software.

Building this will be hard, but not impossible. With cool tools like Ruby on Rails and Flex, my genius Brazilian development partners, and the manic flood of software architecture gushing out of my brain, we can build anything!

The other ingredient should be kids who want to build stuff. Kids who don't think of computers as immutable consumption products -- glorified televisions for typing out long-winded blog posts and watching YouTube -- but kids who have a feeling that computers are meant to be molded, fiddled with, hacked, and changed, but aren't quite sure how.

Geeks who want to give back will teach the kids how to build cool stuff with Photoshop and Illustrator, XHTML and CSS, databases, and Flex and Ruby on Rails. They'll build some toys for fun, but also what our small business clients need. It will be an after-school program, or maybe a whole charter school. It will be hella fun.

I'm envisioning some sort of hybrid between Npower, Y Combinator and BUILD:

Npower is a nonprofit that helps other nonprofits apply technology to serve their clients better. They build custom software, help people plan what they need (including a neat little web app called TechAtlas), and provide training.
BUILD teaches underserved kids how to start their own businesses. The result? Kids do better in school, go to college in higher numbers, and hopefully make a few bucks in the process. They become confident leaders and discover their potential to do anything.
Y Combinator is a venture firm that gives seed money to smart young people who want to build the next Flickr, YouTube, or Basecamp. They're part VC and part incubator, meaning they help the companies through their first year, as coaches and advisors who've been there. They fund startups in batches, as many as twelve at a time, summers in Cambridge, MA and winters in Mountain View, CA. Everyone has to move there for a few months and hack together. They've launched quite a few nifty products.

Almost every custom software product we build can become a subscription product. There's lots of used car dealers, floral designers, and real estate brokers. Build it once, start selling subscriptions, and keep making the products better. Subscription fees will help subsidize our education activities. It's a social enterprise model that could end up serving young wannabe web geeks everywhere.

Designing and building software should be something everyone does, not just computer scientists. Something doctors and lawyers do, something social workers and teachers do, and most definitely something kids should do. John Maeda wrote about just this topic a while back:

As computer science enrollment goes down worldwide, I am hopeful that there will be an increasing number of students from the liberal arts and non-technology minded fields that take on software development efforts wholeheartedly. Creating software systems that can not only think, but also have a conscience, shall be a critical factor as we move forward in this odd century of extreme proximity and ever-present distance.

The world can seem pretty dark these days. But like computers, reality can be changed. Alan Kay, one of the finest humanist technologists is famous for saying: "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." My hope is that we can replace today's hopeless apocalypticism of failing schools, corrupt governments, and endless war with the hard work of building a whole alternative society right next to the old one. At first a trickle, but then droves, can then just walk away, hand-in-hand.

Simple Web Tools for the Small Business

2006-09-16T02:34:00.000-07:00

There's nothing like watching someone's eyes light up when you crack some of the problems that have been holding back their business. I've been volunteering for a while at a microenterprise organization called JobStarts, where I pontificate on the power of cold calling, a solid database of contacts, and systematic, well-designed marketing campaigns. My clients are existing or aspiring entrepreneurs in the businesses of child care, construction, event security, catering, and chakra-aligning panties.

I'm supposed to be doing what they call "technical assistance" but I call it coaching, mentoring, and just plain fun. I get to sit down and take an objective and caring look at how people can take their business to the next level. Sometimes it's a money constraint -- like not enough working capital to build up inventory and fulfill orders -- but most of the time it's a shortage of the right kind of marketing. And with my background in commercial real estate, my solution is almost always: GET ON THE PHONE AND START CALLING!

More about that in a forthcoming post, in the meantime, here's some essential web tools for the new entrepreneur:

Take out some ads on Craigslist -- Write a quick explanation of what you do and how someone will benefit. Write a snappy headline. Include a great photo. Get an account to make reposting the ad simple.
Get a website. The simplest way to an online presence is with the software I use for this site, Blogger. You can write passionate posts about how your business changes your customers' lives for the better. You are passionate about your business right? If not, do something else. You can also post great photos of what you do (cakes, panties, parties, whatever). A few fabulous photos are better than lots of okay ones. Choose carefully.
Get a database. You can use a free one here. You should also check out DabbleDB or Basecamp. They're the coolest little Web 2.0 thingamajigs out there. They're cheap and worth it.

It can be hard to get started on the web. Using these few simple tools, I think it will be a little easier for you.

Readers want to Learn

2006-01-05T15:11:00.000-08:00

It pays to give away all your secrets. Your clients want to know how to do everything you do, and they'll pay you to teach them. Don't worry, you're not giving away the recipe for Coca-Cola or the plans for a nuclear reactor. I'm talking about the little tips for making better investments, writing better code, or closing a tough sale.

The always brilliant Kathy Sierra hopes for more teaching blogs for learning the little secrets in 2006:

The more we help our users learn--through any means (formal training, better docs, a product that encourages discovery and deeper engagement, an experience that seduces the user into wanting to practice)--the more time they can spend in flow. And ultimately, the more likely it is that they will become passionate about whatever it is they're doing.
.....
I hope to see more teaching blogs (or websites, etc.) rather than comb blogs used solely for announcements. One of my favorite examples of this new kind of 'learning blog' is the new one from my horse coach/whisperer, cowboy Darren Wetherill. (Side note, Darren's Horse Bliss blog was mentioned by Hugh of Gaping Void, and the next thing you know, Horse Bliss was mentioned by Businessweek online as an example of what a business blog could be.

Readers enjoy discovery, give it to them. The more they learn from you, the more credibility, respect, and trust you build online. If you concentrate on posting all the secrets of your business (little by little now, you've gotta drag it out), you will build a reputation as an expert in the field. Even with all your secrets in hand, people will now there's more in that head of yours, and that nobody does it like you do. At the end of the day, most will realize you're better at this stuff than they are, and you'll get paid.

How to solve the drafts problem

2005-12-28T12:39:00.000-08:00

My Blogger dashboard has way too many half-baked posts in languishing in the wretched purgatory of "Drafts." I come back to them at times and they never seem to work. I despise them. I get angry at myself for writing them in the first place. Who are these bastard children? These broken ideas, these run-on sentences, these fancy phrases that go nowhere? Do I really write this drivel? Well, yes. Please accept it. The past happened and no amount of present day contempt will solve it.

There is one good thing about these drafts. They remind me that I have not mastered writing as a process, as something to be worked on, labored over, massaged and tweaked and cajoled. They are opportunities to practice acceptance of imperfection, knowing that it can only get better, even if it has to get worse for a short time on the way.

It's funny what this blog has become. Originally, a lofty place for the hottest ideas floating around in my head, it's become more of a notebook of good advice to myself. It's a place to store those rare moments of clarity, the tiny breakthroughs, the small beam of light shining through a crack in the wall of my confusion. Those moments can pass unremembered and unreflected, as so many things in my life seem to do. Or it can be recorded and cherished for days when I need refuge from a dark mood.

Today's lesson is one I must learn over and over, the problem of overthinking. So many things are left trapped in my head, unspoken for fear of not saying the right thing, unwritten for fear of never finishing. So much fear in overthinking. So much denial of reality. Such a stingy hand of thought that will not release the small sparrows of conversation, the bounding rabbits of a fresh paragraph.

Step One in my writing process must be release, must be opening. I'm so good at closing, boxing, defining, that I don't let things escape to take on their own lives. Living such a caged existence, my thoughts sit in their own excrement, breathe in the gases of their own waste and decay. Given some fresh air, allowed to escape into the wild, the thoughts might go on living for a long time, or might be killed by fitter thoughts. But at least there would be a fossil record, a pile of bones, some tracks in the wilderness. Those fragments can be shaped. They can be made new.

Step Two must be a search for essence. "Omit needless words," say Strunk & White. "Om," says the void. Things to put in, things to take out. But it must get thinner first.

Web Grows Faster than Brain

2005-12-16T18:17:00.000-08:00

Fresh off spearheading the redesign of my company's website, I'm looking to do the same for another agent in our office. The same only bigger. Much bigger.

So I'm trying to write him an email right now cataloguing some of the cool stuff going on with the web right now like the hottest designers, technologies, etc. -- and I can't access memories of the stuff fast enough. I should be writing posts as I go and just send him links to all of them. Collectively, they'd be my entire manifesto for a visionary new real estate site.

Instead, I've been surfing too much and recording too little. There's no cookie crumb trail through my vast ramblings through the web. The web moves faster than my brain. The only way I can keep up is to blog more.

I know I keep writing posts like this. "Blog more," I say to myself. Write shorter posts, with less editing, less self-censorship. More volume, less perfection. Here's to trying again.

The Five Mile Per Hour Lifestyle

2005-09-10T17:14:00.000-07:00

I threw my hands in the air, saluting the morning sun. A giant sunflower rose on the end of a cherry picker's boom. Jack Johnson played quietly, the people listened in peace. It was incredibly slow, unrushed, the other side of the planet from hurried. Just another sunrise over the salt flats of Black Rock City, Nevada -- the crescent moon city that is Burning Man.

This experiment in "radical self-reliance" immerses you in the most extreme conditions of beating sun and blowing sand, testing your patience and growing your humility. Money does not exist. The only things sold are coffee and ice, both as public health measures. You gotta have cold beers for the thirsty and medication for the caffeine addicts after all.

When everything's free, the richest are those who give the most. My first day out I needed a vital part for my bike, and found someone who had exactly what I needed -- all ready to go. We traded stories along the way and had a delicious breakfast of hot-off-the-griddle pancakes. We hit the spot and he gives it with pleasure. I ask, he answers. It's all just common courtesy on the playa.

You spend your days in this sort of social trade. Schmoozing with the pilots at the airport to get a fly above the city. There are no commercials or price tags to tell you how to act, just the spirit of compliment barter, the haggling of the taller tale. When everything's free, the richest are those who give the most.

Ceremony and ritual here are not bound by the holy books of yesterday. Find the artist-prophet-genius within you. I promise it's there in everyone, dying to crack out to invent ceremony continuously, to make the space around you sacred through an approach of respect.

When everything's free you spend an afternoon building a Mayan pyramid out of adobe bricks. Bricks you formed yourself from water and sifted dust. Another apprentice teaches you how to knead clay out of this crusty piece of earth, how to run a wire through the block to form sheets of clay that will be knifed into bricks with a ruler.

The alchemical solvent that makes this all possible is water, a precious fount of life in the desert. The stuff that keeps us from drying out to raisins -- Keep the pee clear and copious, kids! -- the stuff that glues dirt together so you can build with it. We should be careful with our earth's limited water, we don't want the whole planet to turn to desert, trust me.

You learn to trust yourself and your friends. You cement your most special relationships with love refined in the fire of the desert. You go to sleep utterly and blissfully exhausted every night, voice ragged from a long night of tribal storytelling, nodding heads, and smiling mouths. You spend a week devouring the world at a very slow pace.

Hundred Mile an Hour Lifestyle

2005-06-07T23:11:00.000-07:00

Breezing over oceans of image memes -- ima-memes
Hipster couture.
Rand Viking the Norse God. The cold inner fire of exploration.
The Nike symbol you've got plastered over your mindxperience.
The Totem OverAll.
Look at the major path through a city of Beverly Hills and West Hollywood and see what you see -- People Buzzing.

ADD/ADHD and Neuroliberty

2005-06-02T19:56:00.000-07:00

Millions of kids across the country are being medicated out of their excitement, tranquilized for their energy, and denied the right to wear themselves out naturally by bouncing and playing. I'm talking about the increasing number of children being diagnosed with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADD/ADHD), a pathology originally invented for children who have a hard time sitting still in class, but which is now being applied to adults too. Our society's habit of medicalizing everything and looking for magic pills to fix all our ills has made this vaguely defined "disease" a huge industry.

The drug companies have already saturated our schools so now they're after adults who have problems with procrastination, "wrapping up the final details of a project," or "remembering appointments or obligations." Doesn't that sound like, um, just about everybody? These quotes come from a simple self-diagnosis screener on a site called Adult ADD. What is it? built by the maker of an ADD drug called Strattera. The site is the first sponsored link to pop up when you type "ADD" or "ADHD" into Google. Looks like there's finally a solution for to my infrequent blogging!

The real attention deficit is the lack of attention from dysfunctional parents and schools. Kids need to run themselves ragged on soccer fields with mom or dad, not sit in front of PlayStation all day everyday. Schools need to stop cutting PhysEd, music, and dance programs where kids can use their bodies and start firing the vampire paper-shuffling educrats instead. Everyone needs to stop stigmatizing kids by telling them self-fulfilling prophecies about their inability to concentrate. We lower expecations by diagnosing them with a nonexistent disease.
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Further thought branches:

AbleChild: Parents for Label and Drug Free Education consists of a growing number of parents outraged over both the subjective labeling (ADHD, ADD, OCD, ODD) and pervasive drugging of our children.

An interview with Wrye Sententia (cool nom de plume for brain freedom activism huh?) from The Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics:

I read that Ritalin is the most popular drug on college campuses today as adult students are finding it an excellent study aid. [See "Academic Doping"] I’m not sure what this says about how society will cope with new generations of overachievers rather than more legendary generations of slackers, but maybe it’s for the best — at least it is for the GDP....this is what stimulant drugs for children are aimed at, what I like to call cubicle consciousness. I was just talking today with a neighbor who’s 12 year-old son has trouble concentrating in school and is being called a "borderline case" — which in his case, means that because his parents refuse to place him on prescription stimulants, he is repeatedly tested for learning disabilities and alternately scores "genius potential" and "diagnosed ADHD". Surprise, surprise! Either the diagnostic test or the school system is failing him. [Emphasis mine]

Thomas Szasz (author of The Myth of Mental Illness) reminds us that "psychiatrists have always used diagnostic terms to stigmatize and control people -- for example:

* black slaves who ran away to freedom suffered from drapetomania;
* women who rebelled against being controlled by men suffered from hysteria;
* until only a few years ago, men and women who engaged in sexual acts with members of their own sex suffered from the dread disease of homosexuality.

Kundalini Hollywood

2005-04-13T23:06:00.000-07:00

Kundalini yoga is Kinetic yoga. Forget gentle flow, it's more like force and quick-panting- fire-breath. Seemed like a kind of calisthenics -- lots of arm cirlces and reaches in a rapid tempo. All the quick breathing warms the body. Repetition brings agony, but forget that and concentrate on moving. "Don't worry, your arms won't fall off," says the youth yogi, and they don't.

Throwing your arms around generates serious leverage and tons of momentum. Muscles have to stabilize and resist that. Clench up the abs and the sex, and get one powerful core. You shouldn't step under a wreckingball of hands thrown from above the head. But you should do it to rip the shoulders and back.

Definitely new things learned to add to my own practic. Collect the stuff that works and put it to work.

Open Mike Night: The New(Old) Church

2005-04-03T16:29:00.000-07:00

They passed around a plate at the poetry reading tonight. If the words rose to prophecy, if the laughs shook your soul, if the images blasted the scales off your jaded eyes, please put in a $5 bill, not a crumpled $1.

This must be how religions begin. Talented words spawn an urge to creative action in the pilgrims. The words give faith that even if one's own Work In Progress never reaches Masterpiece, the process will purify and uplift us.

The action required of us today is to push our stories back upstream, up towards the media gods of Mt. Hollywood. Pick up your keyboard and camera because their divinity is ours.

Think Haiku

2005-04-03T16:05:00.000-07:00

I need to let myself write short posts. Prune the tree of infinite possibilties, unplug my brain's multiplicity module, and think more haiku.

The Present-Future is Hypercompetitive

2005-01-05T01:25:00.000-08:00

I hate monopolists. I despise them with every ounce of my being. I want nothing more than the complete freedom of every human person on earth. But when I talk about my laissez-faire tendencies I'm immediately met with one argument from my lefty anti-capitalist friends. Markets tend towards nasty monopolies that exploit the poor and brutalize the poor worker-consumer.

The government's job is to flick those robber baron cappies off their peak perches of power. Me ontheotherhand think enterprenurial competitors are happy to do that anyway. Google and Linux seem perfectly able to gobble Microsoft's market share. The same with Amazon and Wal-Mart. People are afraid to look the future in the eye for what it is: hypercompetitive.

Why I Voted for the Stem Cell Initiative: Supersimple Ethics

2004-12-29T15:47:00.000-08:00

Opponents of stem cell research would like the rest of us to believe that their objections to the burgeoning field are purely scientific. "Embryonic stem cells have not created a single useful human therapy," they protest. It looks like that tired excuse is on its last legs. A researcher at the Christopher Reeve Research Center at UC-Irvine has made paralyzed rats walk by injecting human stem cells into their crushed spinal cords. Human trials are expected in 2006. Considering researchers have only been working with these cells since 1998, I think this qualifies as excellent progress.

Obviously, the fight against the use of human stem cells is not about science, but rather about the issue of aborting early-stage human embryos, an issue of morals and ethics. A long discussion on this issue with my great uncle, a priest and monsignor in the Catholic Church, on Christmas has made me want to clarify my position on this issue a bit more. But first, a little background on personal experiences that have brought me to where I am.

In the spring of 2002, six members of my residential life team from USC were in a brutal car accident on the Santa Monica Freeway. Stalled in the fast lane behind a car out of gas, they were rearended at high speed. Injuries in the car ranged from bumps and minor fractures to punctured lungs and torn spleens. My good friend R. was paralyzed from the chest down. I spent an interminable, delirious, and nightmarish night in Cedars-Sinai Hospital watching one of the greatest givers of joy and sunshine in my life, a model of goodness and humor, lie motionless on an ER examining table. I watched heavy-handed neurologist prick her sides, checking for feeling. "Feel that? Feel that? Feel that?" "Ow!" Then he marked her with a sharpie. I cried in the waiting room.

When I voted for the California Stem Cell Initiative, I voted for my friend, R. I voted for therapies that might help her walk again. Maybe I left some potential people -- those embryos harvested for research -- out in the cold. Those little balls of cells don't enter into my moral calculus, though.

This was a case where I tried to use the supersimple basis of all ethics: the golden rule. I chose to use the "strong" version of the rule -- not "Treat others as you wish to be treated" but "Treat others as they wish to be treated." The corollary of the strong golden rule is that one should be able to trade places with the person affected by an action one takes. I couldn't trade places with R. if I had voted "No." I couldn't cut off a promising avenue of research because of our cultural hangups about abortion. I wouldn't want to trade places with her if my vote helped defeat an initiative that might cure her/my paralysis.

On the other hand, trading places with an undeveloped embryo is logically impossible. I have an independent mind-body embedded in an environment of friends and work and sights and sounds. An embryo has no sense organs, no mind, and no existence independent of its mother. It's basically an organ of the mother. I can't put myself in an embryo's shoes because it has no shoes.

We must pursue all types of stem cell research -- embryonic, adult, umbilical, etc. -- simultaneously. We must cure my friend R. and hundreds of thousands like her.

Rocking the Education System

2004-12-19T23:27:00.000-08:00

The way we organize and perform education in this country is broken. Generations of rules and habits have split knowledge up into little bits. We examine pebbles instead of rocky beach landscapes. Words on a page put real-lived-life into cozy genealogical compartments. Human touch is taxonomized into a dim gray cloud of abstractions.

Now when our teaching methods crush our natural learning instincts only a radical departure, a complete reorganization of the institutions can equip our young and old learners with the tools they need to remake the world and earn a living in a competitive world. And I think it can happen. My solution? Just walk away and let the dinosaurs die. Build up an alternative educational infrastructure and let the old wither away. Home schoolers are doing it and indie consultant-entrepreneurs too. It's time we let the kids go.

Smash the strangling grip of teachers unions. Give kids and their parents universal education vouchers and the right to choose so that schools join the modern innovation economy. Refocus on modern rhetoric: the business plan, the scientific paper, the flash animation, the google search, the cold call, and the op-ed. Chase goals and projects like figuring out how a car works by building one. Let students learn about cities by designing and gaining approvals for a mock real estate development.

In the movie School of Rock, a group of prep school kids joins a washed up slacker rock musician (the hilarious Jack Black) to put together a rock band. For four weeks that's all they do. Social studies is replaced with the complicated cultural history of rock music's development. Figures like Hendrix, Marley, and Johnny Ramone are recognized as the heroes they are in the modern epic struggles against colonial oppression, warmongering, and the rest of society's reactionary squares. After studying the complicated family tree of psychedelic rock to punk, the kids spend the rest of the day playing and writing music. Kids that can't sing or play an instrument get security detail or take over management and promotion duties. No one fails this class because it's impossible. Each child gets to play on their own strengths.

This is an integrated method of education where the bodily skills of singing and dancing and playing are not divorced from the intellectual requirements of understanding the flow of history or the logistical acumen of producing entertainment for consumption. This can work with any subject. Let's return to my mention of a mock real estate development for another example.

The class could design and develop an apartment building over shops or a public library with an attached skate park. They'd have to go through all the approvals, fill out the bureaucratic forms for building permits, and understand the importance of how contracts govern business relationships. Daily debates could examine how we should balance local ecology, wildlife habitat, and farmland with new homes, auto malls, and big box stores. Kids are natural dreamers that can help us develop integral visions of pomo-prosperity that harmonize human2human and human2earth interactions. With the NIMBY's locked in ugly battles with the evil black-suited real estate developers, I think kids can help break the logjam of how we can build human settlements -- i.e. we can drink 3 minute lattes and still have safe spawning grounds for salmon.

Kids are given schizophrenia by splitting the school work day indiscriminately -- 40 minutes here, half hour for lunch, and another 90 minutes there. Hustling them about in hallways, burdening them with piles of meaningless textbooks, we deprive them of the natural process of discovery. Big brained mammals like us learn automatically. We learn language and how to tie our shoes from imitation and adaptation without the slightest effort while subjects like mathematics come with fatal difficulties -- mostly because its teaching is utterly divorced from the natural-sensate world.

Project- and team-based education that concentrates on a single enterprise like a battle of the bands or a real estate development can help stop the unnecessary atomization of knowledge. Projects return the pleasures of craft and vocation to complex knowledge domains like entertainment and city building. The webworld prizes connections and integration, it's time our education system did the same.

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Inspired by 21st Century College: An Outline, the ideas of Gregory and Mary Catherine Bateson, Buckminster Fuller, and many long conversations with Ket.

UPDATE: I thought this list of the top 1,000 things to know from marketing guru Seth Godin was pretty cool. We've got some good overlap.

A Picture Stops a Thousand Lawsuits

2004-11-11T22:09:00.000-08:00

Designing graphics to convey a complicated idea about the urban experience in real three-dimensional space is a non-trivial task. Information designers that can tell a simple story about how the built environment effects our lifestyles and moods. Not in my backyard has disabled us from making intelligent choices about the places we live and work. Public conversations have become split into absurd positions pitting imagined evil black suited real estate developers versus nature, mom and apple pie. They can only be resolved in endless lawsuits. Why not concentrate on building beautiful places?

The animation comes from City Comforts Blog, a site that examines the best solutions for living well in cities. How do you "read" this graphic? What does it say to you about the world? Look at the little person, surrounded by cars or framed between building or street. Where do you cars belong in our hierarchy of needs? Out front or in the back? Or should we eliminate cars altogether like my friend, Ket ("parking lots are stupid. silly humans.") might like?

There's no right answers to these questions. But the strength of the graphic is that it helps you start asking questions about how the new apartment building or Wal-Mart Supercenter will change your neighborhood. It offers a shared reference point to base rational public discussion and decisions on.

Now there's no denying numerous benefits to both layouts. The suburban design gives first dibs to people in cars and the urban one to people on foot. But both are about people. Cars are both peaceful individual enclaves and makers of aggression and separation. Driving is fast and convenient -- point-to-point, no transfers, no waiting, no walking. Indoor air conditioned place to air conditioned place, cars are comfortable and efficient ways to get around.

Walking gets our hearts pumping and slows things down so that our senses can gorge on falling cherry blossoms and the smell of coffee on a sunny sidewalk day. I think people want the sensual city of walking and the speed city of driving in its convenience and comfort. There are design solutions that can incorporate both.

Our cities are constantly remade. Hollywood yuppies disguised as starving artists displace the poor from gritty downtown industrial districts. Farmland and forests get gobbled up by sprawl. We can make choices about how that happens. Talking about the choices we have in our landscape in flux is made smarter and easier by graphics like David Sucher's. It allows us to sidestep confusion, obstructionism, and name calling so we can concentrate on building great collaborative cities.

Living Fearlessly

2004-11-11T20:15:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure why I've been psyched out of blogging lately. Letting fear get in the way of the stories I want to tell I think. I've left the cacophony of opinions, observations, arguments, love and hate that make me up all swallowed up and snuffed out. Not lacking desire but choosing inaction. My lack of posting nags my mind. I think "I really should be writing" while I distract myself with reading and blogsurfing. I entertain myself watching thoughts dance and play and then flitter away like dead leaves in the wind. I suffocate myself with online information overload the way others do with television. Detached and passive as a sponge I float over life bemused, inspired without perspiring. Dabbling in puzzle and curiosity to avoid direction. I want to stop planning and start improvising. I want to let flow flow and stop overthinking and over-researching everything to death. Viva la spontaneous post.

Marijuana Activist Marc Emery Free, For Now

2004-10-25T22:51:00.000-07:00

Marc Emery, a public example of the cruelty surrounding marijuana incarceration, is again free after a 61 day jail sentence for passing a joint (first discussed on this blog here). The video "Welcome Home Marc!" shows a leader energized by the sacrifice he made for the movement to stop the oppression of pot people in Canada. All the great freedom movements have required a charismatic leader to be jailed to energize the populace and bring the oppressors' cruel actions into public ridicule and outrage. Nelson Mandela spent 28 years behind bars to fight apartheid in South Africa, Gandhi pursued debilitating hunger strikes for Indian independence, and Marc Emery wrote inspiring blog entries (like here and here) condemning Ashcroft his henchman, the prison guard unions, and the corrupt cops and the drug lords they feed off, for what they are: evil.

That's right, the War on Some Drugs is completely, unequivocally evil, a human rights disaster, and a phenomenal waste of money. Conservatives like George "Axis of Evil" Bush and Ronald "Evil Empire" Reagan brought evil back into our politically correct public lexicon. So when I look at the destruction of families; the monopoly profits for terrorists and organized crime; the street wars that pit kids with AK-47's and RPG's against the police in destructive competitions of brutality; AIDS, cancer, and chronic pain patients imprisoned for using the only medicine that brings them relief, I can find no other word for it but evil, irredeemable, hideous, hypocritic evil.

War without end, without an exit strategy or hope for victory can bring nothing but tragedies like this one:

Quadriplegic man dies while jailed for pot possession
Jonathan Magbie, a 27-year old quadriplegic resident of Maryland, died in a Washington DC jail on September 24, after being sentenced to 10 days imprisonment for possession of marijuana.

The marijuana conviction was a first offence for Magbie, who was paralyzed from the neck down at age 4 after his school bus was hit by a drunk driver. Since then Magbie had been under almost constant nursing care, and got around on a chin-operated wheelchair. (A year after his injury, a young Magbie had met President Ronald Reagan during a White House ceremony commemorating National Respiratory Therapy Week.)

[Read the whole thing and don't forget the Washington Post articles.]

Can we not see this for the insanity it is? Are quadripalegics true threats to our safety or are they greater threats to the puritanical status quo? The War on Some Drugs is the lastest in a series of government efforts to eliminate minorities and freethinkers, to consolidate power and squelch dissent. There were the witch trials in Europe that destroyed centuries of herbal healing knowledge, the Nazi death camps for Jews, the concentration of Native Americans in reservations, and black slavery in service to the idle agro-aristocracy. All demonized peaceful, productive people in the service of wicked ideologies.

We must choose a model of public safety and health over the vindictive moralism of our current "punish the sinners" model. We must practice the same judicial forgiveness we extend to repeat alcohol abusers and drunk drivers to those who abuse marijuana, and leave the responsible consumers of the plant alone. Marc Emery is free, for now. He speaks for us. Let us speak for him, for freedom, and for peace.

Spellbound by Learning

2004-10-24T22:07:00.000-07:00

Grab hold of your education because no one will do it for you. That's the central message of the documentary Spellbound (trailer) that tracks eight young Americans from their homes in tough urban neighborhoods and beach houses to the National Spelling Bee. They make up the entire continuum of American culture -- one the daughter of illegal immigrants in South Texas, another from trailer park rural Missouri, another the daughter of elite parents in New Haven, Conn., the college home of both our presidential candidates, Yale. They vary in privilege but none lack a hunger for learning, competitive spirit or strong encouragement from parents and teachers.

Poring over word lists in a trance, the young spellers train maniacally, like elite brain athletes. One of the kids, Neal Kadakia, had the benefits of obsessively loving Indian parents and an elite education in posh San Clemente, CA. His father stressed meditation and concentration and rigorous training methods with computers and spelling coaches. Others made due with unabridged dictionaries, notebooks, and self-authored crossword puzzles. Whatever their resource levels, the kids had a passion to work at something and get better. They provide many lessons for the rest of the world's youth.

If you don't like spelling, race souped up Civics. Design t-shirts and mouse pads and sell them on Cafe Press. If you're bored, challenge yourself more. Write your own story every day and make it heroic because anyone can erect mind obstacles and cage their hopes, but only heroes can chill, take a deep breath, and go do it anyway. Don't give into those who want to crush your secret passions. Harness the energy you find in people or books or knitting and get some extra miles out of your brain. Feed your hungry desires. Seek out the support you need. Encourage the people around you because everyone needs a team of coaches. Reach out, strive, believe.

The spelling bee hopefuls face difficult challenges in learning all the many sides English, but they come out with a better understanding of how to operate in a complicated landscape. English routinely poaches other languages for useful words like umbrella and burrito and is thus an amazing entry to the world of overlap and borrowing that drive value in today's global economy. Foreign luxuries like coffee and tobacco used to evoke mystery and power the way brand names like Mercedes and Louis Vuitton do today. Science and medicine fill books with jargon based on Latin and Greek. English is a chaotic mishmash, a cosmopolitan city of global cultural interchange, today's lingua franca -- a language for all. The ones that learn to keep up with it in all its global expressions will have incredible advantages.

A little while back Dan Sherman asked, "What's your immigrant story?" How did you sacrifice to overcome adversity? How did you push yourself and those around you harder? What desert did you cross without enough water? Each Spellbound kid had her own story of immigration, ignoring teasing "cool kids" or the dangers of the ghetto to find peace in themselves and their unique abilities. You are your own worst enemy if you don't invest in yourself.

NeoJob: Art Enabler

2004-10-13T01:03:00.000-07:00

Art Answers helps artists expand their repertoire from putting paint on a canvas to more complicated stuff like fire-blowing sculptures or complicated video projection schemes. Artists can concentrate on dreaming up new art, not geeky implementation details. With the growth of elaborate spectacles at opening ceremonies, Cirque du Soleil shows, and theme parks, art enablers and entertainment engineers that can meld technical knowledge with artistic vision wil be in high demand. And people wonder what's going to replace all the crappy code monkey jobs going to India. Do you want to be a Dilbert or a DaVinci?

Taking My Dad's Consulting Business to the Next Level with a Blog

2004-10-10T22:29:00.000-07:00

My dad took the plunge a year ago and started his own independent consulting business, called Building Commissioning. According to his site, commissioning is "The quality control component added to the design and construction process that ensures that new buildings operate the way that their owners intended." Basically, he debugs buildings. The unique proposition is that the design and building process works better when it's transparent, when the major players are held accountable for their decisions by an impartial third party. It's relatively new concept for the industry and therefore requires a lot of client education, which is why I think he could really benefit from starting a blog.

Gapingvoid megablogger Hugh Macleod thinks the function of companies is to be "idea amplifiers." The best way to inject your voice into the market conversation is with a focused and insightful blog about how you add value to a client's assets.

Blogs are funny things. Say something smart, people pay attention. Say something dumb, you're ignored... Regular blogging can help train you to better discern between to discern between smart and dumb. Makes it easier to extend this to the rest of one's business.

Perfect! My dad is in the business of discerning dumb stuff in the design and construction of buildings. A blog allows him to tell the stories of how his clients save money when he roots out the numbskull shortcuts that design engineers and contractors use. And he has tons of stories to tell, he's been in the HVAC and district energy engineering field for years. Every job is a post. Every new story about commissioning's vital importance in green building is a post.

The best thing is, nobody else is doing it! (There's only a couple blogs that I could find that come close: ACCABuzz, HVAC Planet, and EnviroPundit.) He could become the expert blogger on the field, building reputation, trust, and visibility. Already some companies are requiring job applicants to be bloggers. Shouldn't we expect clients trying to hire a consultant to do the same? And this trend can only increase.

Other suggestions for building an online identity for his firm? Buy some AdWords. Think about revamping the website with dirt cheap services from international designers on Design Outpost or Elance (or go all out and hire the amazing Sekimori). Check out some of the sites that promote blogs for business use like The Big Blog Company, BusinessLogs, and Business Blog Consulting. Subscribe to these and other webfeeds using Bloglines. Create custom feeds with Yahoo News Search and Blogdigger for phrases that you'd like to write posts on like "green building."

I know that I love talking about my dad's business with him. I'm sure lots of potential clients would like to get in on the conversation.

Linkosity: Blogumentary, Little Robots, and Iraq

2004-10-05T21:28:00.000-07:00

It's a blog post, it's a documentary, it's a blogumentary on the history of blogs. Essential viewing for those who've just discovered this powerful new medium.

Turns out the Bushies gave Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi some help in writing his upbeat speech to Congress and Dianne Feinstein is pissed.

Looking for today's avant-garde? Try Björk's trippy music videos.

A US Army Civil Affairs officer faces jail time for saying: "Ideology and idealism will never trump history and reality."

New robots to swim through your bloodstream and crawl through your intestines. Fantastic Voyage Ahead!

Why Evangelical Christians should not vote for Bush.

Katinka Matson makes unbelievable images of flowers (like the above water lily) with a flatbed scanner.

The Bush-Kerry Debate Recalls Galileo vs. the Church

2004-10-01T15:06:00.000-07:00

The debate hinged on of whether you should lead by facts or faith. The President chooses to ignore the deteriorating situation on the ground in Iraq, Kerry wants to incorporate actual data (1,000 dead, expanding insurgency, etc.) into a revised plan.

Bush plays the High Priest preaching a gospel of moral certainty. Other countries must follow our holy "doctrine." He repeats the ritual mantra of "staying on the offense" and the congregation nod their heads solemnly. Standing like a king over his podium, Bush declares, "I know how the world works." He forgets blowing up innocent children tends to piss people off. Every father that loses a child in this way becomes a soldier for Al Qaeda and the Iraqi insurgency. Families receiving a son or daughter in a flag covered casket wonder, "Are we doing more harm than good in Iraq?" But doubt does not enter into the liturgy of liberation and redemption played out on Fox News. His appeal is based purely on faith and emotion. But now even our few allies are losing faith. Thailand, Spain, Honduras, Norway, the Philippines, the Dominican Republic, Singapore have all abandoned ship.

John Kerry plays the part of scholar warrior, unafraid to point out the facts and present an alternative plan. He's Galileo to Bush's Pope. He won't allow dogmatic arrogance to prevent us from building a true coalition that should include troops from our Muslim allies like Turkey and Egypt, Security Council members like China and Russia, and other regional players like Pakistan and India. He understands a president is not just a commander-in-chief but also a diplomat-in-chief.

Kerry's said our policies must pass the "global test." This doesn't mean outsourcing our foreign policy to Geneva or Brussels but it does mean international problems (rogue regimes, WMD, terror, etc.) need international solutions. The UN is far from perfect. The corrupt system of kickbacks and corruption in the Oil for Food program is but one example. But it is the one international institution that cannot be accused of imperialism. Iraqis had no hand in the liberation of their country and are now forming a national identity in opposition to us, the occupiers, as I discussed here. Kerry can do the work to get blue helmets on the ground in Iraq. We must transition from "occupation" to "peacekeeping."

Real leaders don't stick with plans that are failing. Real leaders don't let the true target escape into the mountains of Pakistan or North Korea to quadruple its nuclear weapons capability. Real leaders don't ignore facts because they don't fit into his ideological boxes. Bush can't invoke infallibility to cover up his "colossal error[s] of judgment" and no amount of iron will or blind faith will change that. Kerry offers an alternative. We're going to see another very tight election and more good debates like last night's.

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UPDATE -- Some excellent related articles:

Tales from the Bushiverse: What the debates tell us about the president's psyche. By Julian Sanchez, one of my favorite writers at one of my favorite magazines, Reason.

Camille Paglia [ed. What a brilliant bitch!] returns to cast a withering eye on Clark ("what a phony!"), Kerry ("the hair!"), Madonna ("a monster"), bloggers -- and the "delusional narcissists" in the White House who led an out-of-his-depth president into a disastrous war. From Oct-03 Salon.

Dubai: The Middle East's New City on a Hill

2004-09-28T13:42:00.000-07:00

Running out of beachfront? Build more. That's what Dubai's doing to keep up with demand for beach houses for European vacationers like David Beckham. Dubai, a member of the United Arab Emirates, realizes oil won't last forever, so it's diversifying into tourism, media, knowledge work, and finance. Dubai is an alternative to the corruption and fundamentalism that plagues Middle Eastern governments. According to July's Wired, Dubai is The Road to Tech Mecca:

Using its short-lived oil wealth, the emirate has built "free zones," areas earmarked for economic liberalization, technological innovation, and political transparency. Among these, three sprawling industrial parks stand out. The first, Internet City, is a bid to make Dubai the Arab world's IT hub. Next is the International Financial Center, a stock market headquarters meant to match Hong Kong's, London's, and New York's, and to trump the region's 13 other exchanges. And there is Media City, home to Al Arabiya, which aspires to replace Cairo as the Middle East's media capital while broadcasting the emirate's vision of openness across the area.

With its gilded hotels and oil wells, Dubai isn't so much a city as an idea - one that can spread and revive its neighbors, just as Dubai has revived a creed that has long driven Arab history: Not Islam. Commerce.

Rather than sending young Americans to die in the desert, we should be encouraging natural human ingenuity in the Middle East. Companies that have set up shop in Dubai, including Dell, HP, Microsoft, and Oracle, are engaging in a positive diplomacy of peace by transferring technology and resources to the region.

Employing force and humiliation in our Middle East policies inflames anti-Americanism and does not serve our long term interests in the region. We lose the battle of credibility with Bin Ladenism when moderate Muslims equate America's violent methods with our peaceful traditions of free enterprise and self-reliant local governance.

True liberation in the Middle East requires what Walid Phares and Robert Rabil call a "resistance myth," their term for epic stories that inspire national pride and solidarity, like the Boston Tea Party in America or the Amritsar Massacre in India. These events help a young country solidify around a common identity so that a civil society of trust may develop. New democracies require participation and voice, not statue toppling and looting. The danger in Iraq is that

In the absence of a shared identity of resistance, religious solidarity could easily become the basis for many anti-Western Iraqis to create a new identity based on fighting the coalition. This explains the appeal of Muqtada al-Sadr's movement to radical Iraqi Sunnis and shatters the view that Sunnis will not collaborate with insurgent Shiites, and vice versa. Herein lies the danger for the U.S., especially if hostility against coalition forces becomes synonymous with a rehabilitation of Iraqi pride.

I'd rather the Iraqis rehabilitate their pride by beating the pants off slow-moving Western corporations. They too could set up free zones and luscious beach resorts.

The Muslim world wants to compete and can, if we let them. In a previous post, I discussed two Muslim-oriented brands, Mecca Cola and Halal Chicken, that plan to compete with Coca-Cola and KFC on a global scale. Competition can be the force that invigorates a resistance myth. Forget Vegas and Paris, in Dubailand we've got championship golf courses and perfect waves.

Sure, chasing after BMWs and iPods might taint the purity of pre-modern Muslim culture, but is that really such a bad thing when compared to harsh Sharia-law penalties like cutting off the hands of thieves? Are the bare mid-riffs of sexy Arab pop stars worse than caging the self-expression of women under an anonymous burka?

Let's stop the horrors of dismembered civilians in the streets of Falluja and Baghdad. Taking Dubai as a model of openness, we can refocus our efforts on investing in transparency and markets all across the Middle East.

Cub Scout Popcorn

2004-09-26T21:20:00.000-07:00

Cub Scout Popcorn takes specialty popcorn sales to a new level with a simple online store featuring a cute blog post about the group's sales training skits. Barriers to building fund raising sites like this are disappearing. With some help from one web-savvy dad, payment processing by eBay currency PayPal, and blogging software like MovableType, these kids are learning the technologies that will drive their future careers. Kids can adapt to the economy of the future if we let them play with the right tools. And as an Eagle Scout that used to dread selling popcorn door to door, I can tell you spamming friends and relatives to a simple online store is a major step forward.

Logos are the New Tea Leaves

2004-09-22T11:29:00.000-07:00

Brand names have added diversity to our vocabularies for years -- think of new verbs like "google" as in "I googled that creep at the bar and it turns out he really does own a startup dog resort" -- but now advertising sages are using brand association data to help predict the election. Who needs tarot and astrology when you've got state-of-the-art psychographic data for political fortunetelling?

Among undecided voters: Kerry appears to have the advantage because undecided voters tend to associate him with certain brands based more on their positive than their negative attributes: Apple is "young" and "hip", Target offers "value for everyone", Starbuck's is "young" (but also "elite"), but on the negative side, BMW is "expensive"

The BMW association will turn out to be the most harmful for Kerry. The freeways of coastal Blue States are clogged with luxury German engineering, but the vast blanket of Middle America Red States find it hard to connect with the French-looking liberal Massachusetts senator schussing down the ski slopes of Sun Valley or windsurfing off the coast of Nantucket. While both candidates come from equally aristocratic backgrounds, Bush has the monopoly on down-home swagger and the plain talk that gives him such mass appeal.

Bush is associated with the positive attributes of established mainstay brands like Bud Light, IBM and Ford ("reliable", "humble", "heritage", "solid")....Samuel Adams is "trustworthy" and "patriotic"

Bush's association with a mantra used to avoid consumer options overload -- "Sam Adams, Always a Good Choice" -- may override the Kerry-Apple urge to "Think Different " in this election. Most consumers won't pore over a listing of two hundred imported beers, preferring the Sam Adams "good enough" option. Most voters won't seek the facts about the nonexistent connections between Saddam and Al Qaeda or our spiraling deficits. Voter laziness plus Kerry's dismal charisma factor equals most voters sticking with the status quo.

Indian Bookmobiles

2004-09-20T20:39:00.000-07:00

bikaner_2-copia
Originally uploaded by error 402.

How do you get a copy of your favorite classic Gandhi treatise when you live in rural India, miles from the nearest Borders? Try a Digital Bookmobile or kitaabwala:

Helped by the crowd, 70-year-old Roopwati hobbles toward the van and demands Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's My Experiments with Truth. The van doesn't keep a copy but there's an easy way to remedy that. A command is given on a laptop, the signals are relayed and received by a dish antenna with KU band.

Then, it's printed and bound all in a few minutes. For a little less than Rs 20 [$0.50], the village woman gets the book she wanted saving an arduous journey possibly to a library or bookshop in nearby Delhi. Welcome to the world of Digital Bookmobiles.

That's right, for the cost of a pack of gum, you can get access to any book in the public domain that they've scanned into their system. This new tech is unlocking whole new worlds for India's poor:

"Books are the key to knowledge but they are no use if we hold on to it. Therefore, the moral of the story is digitise and replicate,'' says Dr Om Vikas who heads the Digital Library of India Initiative.

I love his napsterized reasoning: "digitise and replicate." Remember information wants to be free, if we let it.

Too Much Truck or Too Cheap Gas? The CXT

2004-09-15T13:28:00.000-07:00

CXT-3-full
Originally uploaded by neuralchemist.

POSSIBLY TOO MUCH TRUCK. LIKE THATS A PROBLEM.
Despite dismal sales of GM's Hummer this year, International Truck and Engine Corp is releasing the world's biggest consumer truck, the CXT (Commercial eXtreme Truck). The 14,000 pound behemoth is "built on the same platform as dump trucks and snowplows" and boasts enough cargo capacity to "put the Hummer in back and take it with you." I guess Arnold will have something to tote his in when he moves to Washington.

Judging by the blistering, red-faced rants that are already percolating into the blogosphere this is most definitely "too much truck" for most. There'll be accusations of sexual inferiority complexes, maniacal egotism, and, of course, the selfishness of those who ignore the rising costs of our petroleum-addicted economy.

Personally, I don't care what ridiculous vehicle people choose to buy, as long as they pay the true cost of driving the monsters. And that goes for everyone. Gas should cost between $5.60 and $15.14/gallon to cover the costs of kids with asthma, time lost in traffic, corporate tax breaks, and questionable military adventures in the Middle East. Don't get mad at the soccer mom driving alone on the freeway in her new H2 (or, ugh, CXT). Get mad at the politicians that quietly pick our pockets through taxpayer sponsored corporate subsidies for the defense and petroleum industries.
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Via my homepage, Planetizen.

Carnival of the Capitalists

2004-09-15T11:13:00.000-07:00

This weeks Carnival of the Capitalists is up at d-42.com. Good stuff on how the little guys are gaining ground in the sports world, how Google might make micropayments work, and the effects of depreciation law on job growth .

Work Club: Offices for Free Agent Clusters

2004-09-14T23:47:00.000-07:00

Gate3_entrance
Originally uploaded by neuralchemist.

Today's entrepreneurs are devouring large corporations from the inside. Fed up with the inane, creativity-crushing policies of their pointy-headed managers, more and more workers are striking out on their own and opening up businesses on kitchen tables, in basements and in funky loft apartments.

But what about in-the-flesh human community? The water cooler laughs about William Hung's heart-melting and side-splitting rendition of "She Bangs" the night before on American Idol. Getting the perfect referral to ace Friday's pitch while waiting at the elevator. Workers that hunker down too long at home sacrifice the unexpected windfalls of daily human interaction in an office.

So the agent needs an office that's not an office, a "third place." The solution might look a lot like Gate 3 WorkClub in Emeryville, California:

[WorkClub is] a collection of all the services you ever imagined to make your life easier - professional administrative assistance, computer support, marketing, business services, training, coaching, and more. It's a beautiful environment to work in, custom designed with a diverse variety of spaces to fit almost every work-style and preference.

In other words, it's the office, outsourced. Toss out your manager for the encouragement of a coach. Jettison the geeks from the IT dungeon for your own computer services consultant. Choose only what you need from a menu of services, you're in charge after all.

The modular environment includes lounges for sipping morning lattes with co-entrepreneurs, seminar rooms for classes and conferences, and a rooftop zen garden for morning meditation or afternoon chillouts. The cube farm is replaced by "touch down spaces" zoned by a "gradient of noise levels" including Buzz, Hush, Inner Sanctum, and Privacy Booths. And of course, there's plenty of team work spaces for brainstorming the next venture.

One other brilliant feature is the Lab. It's a space for usability engineers, ethnographers, lawyers, broadcasters, and others to do their thing:

Software and hardware usability tests
Marketing focus groups
One-on-one interviews
Depositions
Jury testing
Talking head interviews
Qualitative research of all kinds

The work environments of the past are entering a new stage of evolution. Gate 3 offers a new hybrid of public and private -- a voluntary space -- a place you go by choice to do what you choose, where invention sparkles and conversation flows.

And remember (the first) Gate 3 is only one node on the network, more will follow. When boundaries dissolve you can answer emails in Starbucks and edit video in the park. The great Upholstery Wall of the Cubicle won't stop the world's net-nomads from pursuing opportunity wherever and whenever they find it.

Free the Political Prisoners of the War on Some Drugs

2004-09-12T23:55:00.000-07:00

free.marc.emery.300x160
Originally uploaded by neuralchemist.

A new study out from the Department of Health and Human Services (full report) shows drug use is still at record levels despite stepped up enforcement measures like arresting state-sponsored medical marijuana pharmacists and depriving HIV/AIDS and cancer patients, epileptics, and chronic pain sufferers of the medicine that gives them relief.

The pharmacist was revered marijuana botanist and author, Ed Rosenthal, who was officially deputized by the City of Oakland, California to provide medical cannabis under California's Compassionate Use Act (Prop. 215). The busted operation was a nursery of small plants patients could take home for growing a personal medicine garden. For providing safe access to one of God's plants and a legal medicine, he was condemned to a Kafkaesque trial where none of the information about his official government duty was presented to the jury. Jurors were infuriated when they learned they had convicted a man who couldn't defend himself:

"It is the most horrible mistake I have ever made," said juror Marney Craig, a 58-year-old property manager who voted to convict. "I feel like we were sheep, we were manipulated."

Marney's reaction would be everyone's if they understood the facts about marijuana. It's harm potential pales in comparison to alcohol. Death from teen binge drinking, bourbon-fueled domestic abuse and drunk driving are a few of the costs of this legal drug. Cannabis is non-toxic and has never caused an overdose.

Another public morality play posing as a criminal prosecution is the current imprisonment of Marc Emery in Saskatchewan, Canada. Emery was jailed with a trafficking charge for passing a joint after a speech he gave. Emery is a devoted legalization activist and entrepreneur from Vancouver, British Columbia. He's also a selfless philanthropist that plows most of the profits from his magazine, online tv station, and seed catalog into the BC Marijuana Party (includes Marc's prison blog), legal defense funds for persecuted medical patients, and one of the world's most innovative heroine rehab centers. A fiery but hopeful interview with Marc in prison can be found here.

Stop wasting tax dollars on making 700,000 arrests a year (one every 45 seconds) that only succeed in ruining the lives of citizens who choose to smoke and those who take the risks to serve them. Our farmers would be happy to grow medical and recreational marijuana. It's already one of the nation's top cash crops. A nation that produces artery clogging Big Macs can surely let struggling farmers grow an herb for laughter and health. Bring it into the open. No more gang killings in the street for territoy, put it in the grocery store, locked up next to the liquor and cigarettes.

We have to choose peace over war, knowledge over propaganda. Ask for the strength to be a peacemaker, to refuse silence, to open your mouth. Peace means that the free minds of responsible adults make decisions about what to put inside their bodies. Peace means depriving criminal syndicates of monopoly profits that prohibition gives them (Remember Al Capone?) and letting farmers, health clinics, and small business make an honest living.

Let the appropriate social strictures that we have for other legal drugs (e.g. "Don't drink alone.") promote safety for marijuana use. Don't let minors buy pot, but don't lie to them either. We have enough sons and daughters dying in a faraway desert, no more dead for drugs on the streets:

War - I despise
'Cause it means destruction

Of innocent lives
War means tears
To thousands of mothers how
When their sons go off to fight
And lose their lives

It's time to stop trampling on human freedoms with ideologies of fear. It's time to legalize marijuana and end the War on Some Drugs.

Flickr

2004-09-12T23:39:00.000-07:00

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing. I'm going experiment with it for posting images since I'm not a big fan of Google's Picasa-based BloggerBot service. We'll see how it works.

Tool: Sending Really Big Attachments with YouSendIt

2004-09-10T11:24:00.000-07:00

Sending bulky print-ready digital photos or massive PowerPoint presentations via email is a headache. Corporate Outlook Exchange servers choke on big file sizes and Hotmail and Yahoo accounts always seem to bounce too. If only everyone had GMail. Until they do, try YouSendIt, a free webtool that emails a hyperlink to your file after you've uploaded it to their server. Super simple!

Hey Benny You're So Fine

2004-08-13T17:54:00.000-07:00

Say it with me now, soft and slow in your most sultry bedroom voice: "Ben...Ben...Ben." Getting a little weak in the knees? Need a cold shower and not sure why? Turns out my name has that effect on people:

So what are the ingredients of a sexy name? For boys, a good name will contain vowel sounds made at the front of the mouth, such as 'e' or 'i' sounds; names with fuller, rounder vowel sounds such as 'u' tend to score lower. So pat yourself on the back if you're called Ben... but if your name is Paul you might have to work harder to snare a date.

They discovered this advantageous phenomenon by posting 24 pictures on hotornot.com, an online meat market where users can rate people's attractiveness on a scale from 1 to 10. When the photos were accompanied with names like Ben or Mike they scored higher than with names like Paul or Ralph. The conclusions of this breakthrough scientific work sound good to me. It's the researcher's explanation that makes me a bit uneasy:

The finding that men with 'small-sounding' names are attractive might seem counterintuitive, Perfors admits. "Front-mouth vowels imply smallness," she says. "But when girls are looking for mates, they don't necessarily want a super testosterone-charged guy. They want someone who will hang around and be a provider."

Small-sounding?! Provider? What happened to my raw sex appeal? I want women to jump into bed when I growl my singular syllable of sexiness, not size me up for future child rearing! I was thinking more along the lines of "Who's your daddy?" than Daddy Dearest. Guess you can't have it all. At least I'm not a Paul.

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For more cool science, don't miss the Annals of Improbable Research's Ig Nobel Awards. One of last year's ground breaking winners was "An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces." As my friend Brad says: Science!

Milennium Park -- Chicago

2004-08-10T22:05:00.000-07:00

Chicago, one of the country's most beautiful cities, just got $475 million of new jewelry, including a gigantic chrome coffee bean and multi-story video screen fountains for kids to splash in. Don't miss this amazing photo essay on a daring new public space.

Learning by Performing

2004-08-10T21:48:00.000-07:00

Blogging is anything but a one-way medium. It's a multi-way, raucous network of conversations. Some will just lurk, read, and absorb but others will be moved to write a response in your comments or on their own blog. The sphere of chatter allows one person's thoughts to feed into all the others. We're all watching each other. We're all performing for each other. My friend Lalarene's question "Is blogging a world of voyeurism or exhibitionism?" sets up a false dichotomy. The answer when it comes to most new technologies is yes and yes, an additive world of multiplicity and choice. Look out onto the millions of connected individuals, each only a random google away from peering through the window you've opened to your brain. Welcome to the global stage where you're both actor and audience.

The public conversation allows everyday people to produce and share their own digital culture, tinkering with ideas like with a car, adding a little horsepower to a puttering argument, painting flames on an underappreciated classic. All those parts we leave lying around in our heads, a stunning insight after that third cup of coffee, a rant festering under intimidation and rules, can come out:

Blogging...blurs the distinction between the private and the public....by doing both private and public communication simultaneously, you can save both time and effort, and that might make it economical to engage in forms of communication with oneself and with others that would previously not have been possible.

Our narcissism fools us into putting those nascent, half-formed conversations out into the world: "Hell somebody'll get a kick out of this, even if it's just my mom." Knowing how much we like watching others, we get off on the hope others might watch us.

Synthetic Serendipity

2004-07-24T14:20:00.000-07:00

There's a heart warming story in IEEE Spectrum about the power of teachers and collaboration by Vernor Vinge, the guy who coined The Singularity. Some clips:

YEARS AGO, GAMES AND MOVIES were for indoors, for couch potatoes and kids with overtrained trigger fingers. Now they were on the outside. They were the world.

...

"There are many different skills," she was saying. "Sometimes it's best to coordinate with lots of other people." The students nodded. Be a coordinator. That's where the fame and money were. But they also knew where Chumlig was going with this. She looked around the classroom, nodding that she knew they knew. "Alas, you all intend to be top agents, don't you?"

...

"But I have a theory of life," said Chumlig, "and it is straight out of gaming: There is always an angle. You, each of you, have some special talents. Find out what makes you different and better. Build on that. And once you do, you'll be able to contribute answers to others and they'll be willing to contribute back to you. In short, synthetic serendipity doesn't just happen. You must create it."

Good advice. Find something you're better at than anyone and build on it. Make yourself irreplaceable and surround yourself with people that bring out the best in you.

If that leaves you hungry for more you haaaaave to read Cory Doctorow's work -- razor sharp dialogue, mind-blowing technoscapes, and characters that come alive and start crawling around your head. He releases it all for free download and remixing under a Creative Commons license and sells more books because of it. He's also a co-editor for the top shelf blog BoingBoing.

Bootstrapping Tech for Social Justice

2004-07-23T15:47:00.000-07:00

The modern economy scares the hell out of a large portion of the population. The less educated feel doomed to lifelong Wal-Mart serfdom and the elite have nightmares about training their Indian replacements. (Some choose to outsource themselves.) Others can't even hit the lowest rungs on the economic ladder after a rough life on the street, broken families, and failing public schools drain their self-esteem. To help build the personal business networks that can drive a career forward, a San Francisco non-profit called Street Tech is experimenting with social networking software LinkedIn (others maybe more familiar with its cousin Friendster) for graduates of their low-cost computer training programs:

[The hope is] to allow marginalized and disadvantaged folks to build a personal network that allows them to leap over the old boys/girls networks that have traditionally shut them out...that social networking can be used as an effective tool for social justice. (link)

Strong social networks are one of the primary driving factors towards a successful career. Anyone can learn the skills of computers or finance or real estate but knowing the right people -- building trusted connections for leads and referrals -- is essential to accessing the best jobs, most of which never hit the jobs websites.

So after getting their Microsoft Certified Professional designation, Street Tech graduates can safely and efficiently test the jobs waters online:

One of the real advantages I see to a tool like LinkedIn is that it allows the hiring manager to feel more comfortable about a referral because, in theory, the referral is coming from a trusted source -- thus making their chances for success much higher than if that same hiring manager just received a stranger's résumé on his or her desk. Second, our students can use the tool to search out numerous employers at one time and don't have to go to numerous job boards or make cold calls without first having an inside connection. Finally, the Internet is a much safer place for our folks to start out. Here they are anonymous and will not be judged by their physical experience or lack of mainstream professional graces.

Even those on the margins of society can build tribes for support. The mighty Aztecs were once a weak nomadic tribe that got bullied all over central Mexico till they found their own swamp, er, island to build their famous capital Tenochtitlan. After serving as mercenaries (entry level jobs) for the Tepanecs of Azcapotzalco, the Aztecs became the most powerful empire in Mexico. Likewise the Street Tech grads can build alliances with some key contacts online and eventually build careers that rival those who came up through more conventional channels.

Bootstrapping the ever faster, better, and cheaper tech tools allows the disadvantaged to close the digital divide. The common fear that a global technocratic elite will consistently outpace the poor and eventually evolve into a separate species does not fit the facts: the cost of technology per unit of performance -- especially the bio-info-cognotech products whose value lies in their knowledge, not material content -- inevitably drops to zero.

The explosion of mobile phone use in the developing world is a perfect example of this trend. More people access the internet through their phones than conventional PCs. Huge political rallies in young democracies like the Philippines are coordinated by SMS text messaging. Farmers in India can check daily market prices for their crops to avoid getting screwed by the local government commodity buyer.

The first generation of online social networking tools are still cumbersome, but they will improve. The disadvantaged will have to play catch up against those born into better circumstances, but they'll have better tools to do it with. Our greatest challenge comes back to equipping learners with the meta-skills like critical thinking and communication they need to quickly and creatively adopt the best new tools, a good subject for another post.

Fast Food World

2004-07-22T15:51:00.000-07:00

Bashing the worldwide expansion of American fast food brands is a favorite sport amongst anti-globalization activists, but it looks like Americans aren't the only ones with their eyes on global franchising supremacy. Indian entrepreneur Dheeraj Gupta has launched his own concept to bring cheap and tasty food to the masses. His product is a traditional favorite called vada pav, a batter-fried mashed potato with bread and chutney. His brand, Jumbo King. The company's competitive edge? Hygiene and automation:

Easily the most hygienic vada pav seller in the city. The wares are untouched by human hands before you reach hungrily for one. Stainless steel machines are used to cook, mash and peel potatoes. While the bread is caramelised, the vegetable oil is changed every few hours and filtered water is used. The vada pav comes wrapped in paper, with a little onion on the side.

Gupta already has three outlets located near busy train stations -- another trick he learned from Ray Croc who always said McDonalds was in the business of real estate first and food second -- and has plans for many more.

Another example of locally-grown brands poised to give the Americans a run for their money is Halal Fried Chicken in Paris, France. Halal Chicken offers the city's many Muslim immigrants extra crispy meals they can trust. Halal, like Judaism's kosher rules, specifies rules for the care, feeding, and slaughter of animals for human consumption. The Marketplace report on this new phenomenon mentions that KFC has been halal for over three years but doesn't publicize the fact. Do they want to avoid tainting their brand as something "those people" eat? Seems like a bizarre marketing choice, but I've heard racism can be as strong in France as here in the States.

These aren't the only bright shining knights battling the forces of free market colonialism and the global consumer monoculture. Another French Muslim company called Mecca Cola looks to cash in on anti-American sentiment around the world. The company's founder, Tawfik Mathlouthi, puts it this way:

It is all about combating "America's imperialism and Zionism by providing a substitute for American goods and increasing the blockade of countries boycotting American goods."

Agree or not with Mr. Mathlouthi's assessment, boycotting American products is a more productive method of dissent than blowing up buses on the streets of Jerusalem. The cola, which comes emblazoned with the slogan "No more drinking stupid, drink with commitment," has enjoyed brisk sales and might have led to the 40% decline in Coca-Cola sales to Saudi Arabia in the first quarter of 2002. And taking a cue from generous American social entrepreneurs like Ben & Jerry's, the company donates 10% of profits to charities operating in Palestinian territories and 10% to European NGOs.

These developments demonstrate that globalization is more an additive than destructive force. The consumer gets Coke, Pepsi, and Mecca Cola. If she doesn't like the taste or values of a brand there's always alternatives. Foreign brands that fail to modify their products for local cultural conditions will lose market share to nimble, home-grown brands that understand what makes the country's consumers tick. In the end, everyone gets cheaper, better tasting, and more culturally sensitive products.

Eckotek: Wormhole to Knowledge, Fun, and Adventure

2004-07-19T22:54:00.000-07:00

In this space called Eckotek, I push back against the information onslaught by spinning my own mix of global culture, presenting my own takes on the toughest problems of the day, and spreading my vision of a world animated by artists, entrepreneurs, and learners.

The project is borne of my refusal to be a passive receptacle for of other people’s stories, some hungry eye balls to be tickled by cathode ray tubes. My voice will not be drowned out by the dopamine-draining buzzzzz of the mediasphere and its cable news fearmongers and reality television hallucinations. The fear and ignorance that mutilates innocent children and beheads infidels will not sway my hope in humanity’s limitless capacity to invent cooperative/competitive solutions.

Many blogs choose to specialize on a specific knowledge domain but I have waaaay too many interests for that. Instead I'll be a crack you trip on heading elsewhere in a Google search, a flash in your peripheral vision, a whisper that infiltrates your own thoughts and interests, a wormhole to transport you from one knowledge universe to another.

As in the fleshworld, I'll wear many hats here -- Capitalist Shark sniffing out the Next Deal; Party Ethnographer exploring the mysterious confluence of music, place, and chemical; SciTech Junkie on the lookout for the coolest new breakthroughs; and Policy Wonk proposing solutions for our world's many woes. I welcome your comments and suggestions here at the site, but rampant comment spam might disable that in the future. Even better, start your own indie publishing empire at Blogger to engage in the blogospheric dialogue. Make your mark in the electronic sand and then encourage someone else to.

Enough introductions, let's go play.