September 2008 Archives
Paul Kedrosky finds the perfect image for the current economic state of affairs:
"If it feels to people a little like Lucy, Charlie Brown, and the football, that's because it should. Too bad we're all the football."
"I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good."
So said Adam Smith, and John Montgomery agrees.
One thing the announced remake of Plan 9 from Outer Space cannot match: the fact that the original production was a social enterprise. As Tim Burton's Ed Wood memorably portrays, the film was an investment vehicle for the Baptist Church of Beverly Hills. Pastor Lynn Lemon appears as the reverend presiding over the funeral of wrestler Tor Johnson.
That's the title of this Flickr pic of a Denver donation meter. The principle is simple: put in money and a charity will give a homeless person shelter for a proportional period of time, after which they're kicked back on the streets.
OK, so that's not how it really works. If you want to learn more about that, check out Weird Universe.
Every time I see this commercial, I wonder what could have prompted the people to sing and dance with such exuberance. Do they know that once the commercial is over they will disappear forever? No more continuity--they're just gone.
And then today I noticed the leap, like the leap of Butch and Sundance, and I figured, hey, that's they answer. It begins with the question of life--"What next?" They know, and so they sing, embracing the leap into the endless dark. It's Sartre with slot machines.
Y'know, I really need to get out of the apartment today.
Folks who know me personally--which now includes you if you read this site, 'cuz honestly, I say much more here than in the so-called real world--know that I'm originally from Pennsylvania's Amish country. The area has a rich visual culture, which may be one reason why some rather famous illustrators (e.g., Haring, Steranko, Kidd) emerged from the region or its more-or-less urban environs.
Adaptation to new media without losing one's integrity is another longstanding cultural preoccupation, which no doubt shaped my own teaching and research. To answer a question I've been asked lots of times, devout Amish have figured out how to have electricity, ride in cars and even access the internet while remaining for the most part off-the-grid.
Below: you too can learn Pennsylvania German on Amish Country TV:
Wilson Bryan Key argued that advertisers embed skulls and other imagery of death in marketing because images of death grab our attention.
If he had stopped writing books on subliminal ads and gone into marketing skull designs, he would not be a footnote in ad criticism history. He'd be one of the wealthiest people on Earth.
Via Skull-A-Day.
"I don't know what was so "Great" about the Depression, but that's the name they give it."
Having spent part of this morning in Time Warner 10-Qs--quarterly statements filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission--thanks to the Superman Homepage, I decided to continue the theme by taking a granular look at the market response to the House rejection of the bailout plan.
The tech news is a bit scary, though mixed, but as a comics-watcher I had to look at Marvel Entertainment as well. Right now the fall in its 4-5% drop in stock price pretty much tracks the % drop in the major indices.
"Don't trust politicians."--Psalm 146:3.
Image: Crooked politicians in the Virgin de Carmen parade, Peru.
An apt observation from Free Exchange, an Economist blog:
It is also remarkable that the issues were framed and debated by America’s leading economists almost exclusively online. No elaborate committee reports. No think tank publications. Even the questions at the Senate Banking Committee hearings were influenced by the online commentary. When the historians go back to suss out the bill’s genesis, they will have to devote significant time to a virtual exchange of ideas.
For years I've read about how the free market is amoral. Profit is its only value.
But as sexblogger Audacia Ray has learned, this isn't exactly true. Teaching people about diverse aspects of sexual identity is apparently too hot for the web, as evidenced by the cancellation of her Paypal, iTunes and Google Checkout accounts.
Sex in the Public Square recounts the story so far and makes a key point: by cutting off the most accessible means of revenue generation by a microenterprise, these virtuous vendors help create a web environment in which the only sustainable sex-related presence is raw corporate porn.
For years, we've heard about the near-mystical virtues of a "free market," and we keep on finding out that it's not that free; the Internet was sold to us as an "information superhighway," only to discover how easily toll booths and road blocks can be built, rendering it as mobile as the 405 near West Hollywood on a Friday afternoon. The smaller our public space becomes, the more restricted the channels for distribution come, the more we're reduced to passive listeners with no voice of our own.
Marvel Comics teams up with the Hero Initiative. Details & gallery links at io9.
First draft: 3 pages.
Final (perhaps): 110.
Nominal oversight, limits on executive compensation, a change in the tax treatment of preferred stock that will upset a bunch of folks.
But still no free ice cream and cake for everyone.
Today conservative pastors around the country are endorsing political candidates in an effort to have the 501(c)(3) ban on political campaigning declared unconstitutional. The group behind it--the Alliance Defense Fund--says that it will sue the IRS if action is taken against the offending churches.
That's nice, but in my not-so-humble opinion it's a waste of time, money & peace of mind.
A case from The Year 2000--Branch Ministries v. Rossotti--illustrates why. As that opinion notes, the Supreme Court has stated that having to pay tax is not a constitutionally significant burden on religious freedom. First Amendment freedoms do not necessarily entail a freedom from taxation, and churches, like other charities, have a legal right to form tax-exempt 501(c)(4) organizations that the tax code allows to campaign.
Again, as I said in a comment to my Twitter and politics post, I think the prohibition on campaigning is lame for a range of infallible super-smart reasons with which I know everyone would agree. I'm also well aware that one could argue the prohibition is an unconstitutional establishment of religion, inasmuch as it privileges apolitical churches over those for whom political endorsements are integral to their message.
But others have tried and died while attempting to climb this particular mountain, and my guess is that this initiative won't get existing precedent overturned. Of course, the composition of the court has changed quite a bit in recent years, so I'm not putting any money down in Vegas.
Art Lebedev's Fuck The Rain umbrella takes McLuhan's media-as-an-extension-of-the-self to its logical extreme. The umbrella does not merely extend our arms and skin; it expresses our frustration with having to need this covering in the first place.
Perfect for wet weekends when you have to go to work!
Arse Electronika is a sex & technology conference now underway in San Francisco. This year's theme: "Critical Perspectives on Sexuality and Pornography in Science and Social Fiction."
Here's the streaming live video feed and home page, with includes archived sessions.
As if Sex and the City tours weren't enough, the Washington Post provides this tour guide to New York sites featured in Mad Men.
It's only a matter of time before the cupcake wrappers in Bleecker Park give way to vodka bottles and picnic debris up at Paley.
New York is doomed.
Above: A Beautiful Mine, by RJD2, the source of the Mad Men opening credits theme.
The Flatiron Building, 1917: a United Cigar Store becomes a United States military recruiting site, complete with gun turrets.
Freud, who would have known what to make of this, was 61 years old.
Now the Flatiron corner is a Sprint shop.
Freud is dead.
A fascinating article in the NY Times this morning about technology and the NCAA. Things that stand out:
- the bylaw prohibition on info tech during games (interpreted not to include headphones)
- the contrast between the field info environment and the rest of the team's IT
- the stopper: concern that allowing tech during games would exacerbate the gap between rich universities and the rest
Art Clokey's brilliant USC student film. As related in the Emmy-winning documentary Gumby Dharma, a Warner Brothers producer saw it and asked Art if he could create a clay-based character that would improve the quality of children's television.
Beth Kanter has a thread going on Social Edge re social networking & social enterprise--a social triple threat. Her 6 points are essential, and there's a lot of other useful stuff there too.
After interacting with folks today re Twitter and politics, I figured I'd spend a few minutes on my break writing up a few professional networky things I've noticed while playing with social networks. These cut across gigs--not limited to SE--and include my experience working with my students, who have been great in helping to figure out what works and what doesn't.
- The first thing that comes to mind is that professional network has both internal and external components. Although we tend to focus on using social networking sites to connect with people outside one's current place of work, within an organization introducing useful tools can be an invaluable means of establishing one's value to others and the group. That's why my first couple comments in Beth's thread focused on internal networking.
- As I noted in that thread, maintaining a healthy signal-to-noise ratio can be key to keeping & attracting followers.
For folks like Beth or Robert Scoble maintaining constant contact strengthens the signal--their value added is engaging this stuff all the time, and stuff they send trends significantly toward the useful or positive connecting. Folks who try to mimic this by twittering every insignificant action every frickin' minute of the day--it's like weird jello molds or 1960s Swanson TV dinners, more a response to new tech than something genuinely enticing. - RSS feeds based on keyword searches are a great way to find & connect to engaging new people.
- Because short is the norm on Twitter, it's a much more user-friendly way to ping people periodically than, say, email. Especially for a Mr. Roboto like me, who writes more comfortably when imagining that no one will ever read it.
In keeping with my happy-go-lucky up-with-people spirit, I'm reading A.M. Sakolski's 1932 classic, The Great American Land Bubble.
Plus ca change and all that.
It's an engaging if depressing read, and sometimes bets that looked busts in 1932 turned out to be quite prescient. Yet the central lesson about our proclivity for empty speculative land investments is remains at least a little relevant, no?
A few choice quotes:
America, from its inception, was a speculation. . . .
Much of this soil has again become the resourceless property of the state authorities, since the private owners have been surrendering them one after another . . . .
Such is the story of the . . . latest phase in a long series of cycles of land gambling and town jobbing, which has marked American business annals almost from the time of Columbus to the present day.
The final outcome is still in the lap of the gods!
Earlier today I explained how the 501(c)(3) prohibition on political campaigning had implications for Twitter, Facebook and other social networking by and for charities. In my class Wednesday we talked about candidate debates hosted by charities and the importance of maintaining a nonpartisan appearance. Below, Frank J. Fahrenkopf of the Presidential Debates Commission notes that this would have lead to the cancellation of the debates should only Obama have shown up.
One effect of online social networking technology is that it intensifies the environment that Marshall McLuhan called "all-at-onceness." Old divisions fall away--near and far, high and low, word vs. picture--in favor of composition.
Part of this integrative process is the fusion of the personal and professional. Topics that were once taboo in polite conversation--money, religion, politics--are now a salient feature of the connected self.
In most respects I have no problem with this. I see myself primarily as a Watcher when it comes to organizational technology--I'm interested in seeing what happens but have little to no personal stake in any particular tool.
But there's something going on that's gotta stop.
Namely, political campaigning in social networking accounts connected to 501(c)(3) organizations.
Here's the problem. Section 501(c)(3) prohibits charities from intervening in political campaigns, either for or against a candidate. The prohibition is absolute; if the IRS so decides it's one strike and yer out.
Yet if you pay careful attention to charitable Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, message boards and other social media, you can find any number of accounts associated with 501(c)(3) managers also being used to tout Obama, slam Palin, raise funds for a political party and so forth.
Sure, a person can express political preferences and still be involved with charity--so long as the proper distinctions are made. But in many cases that's not what's happening.
Here are a few things I've noticed recently.
A Twitter account promoting a charity slips in news of a fun fundraiser targeted at defeating a particular candidate.
The Facebook account of a program manager also incorporates campaign fundraising widgets and promotions for upcoming rallies.
A charity message board explores how members can leverage its resources to help a campaign.
For obvious reasons I'm not linking to any of this stuff. At the very least the integration of the political and professional provides grist for critics to call negative attention to a charity; at worst, it could provide grounds for the IRS to revoke a charity's exemption. This is why a number of charities with anxious lawyers maintain a strict ban on political campaigning by employees at work, on charity tech or utilizing the charity's email.
Particularly if you're a charity manager (i.e., officer or board member), you should maintain a firewall between accounts that promote your charity and those in which you advocate for your personal political preference. For example, a personal profile that identifies you as a charity's manager, lists the charity's website as yours and provides an email address that resolves at the charity's domain could be cited as grounds for concluding that the account is an extension of the charity, especially if the account is being used to promote it.
Again, charity managers are as individuals allowed to support and oppose political candidates. At the very least, take clear steps to establish that an account is personal and that you're not speaking in your capacity as an organizational representative.
Clumsy, artificial, against the unifying spirit of the web--yep, I agree with that, and more. But the IRS has made clear that the same rules that apply in the real world also apply on the web, as any group that has been audited for its page links can affirm--and even if the IRS doesn't come after your charity, your charity might come after you.
OK, this makes my day: a new comic featuring Jerome Kerviel, whose sham trading cost a leading French bank over 7 billion dollars. The book sparked so many orders that it has been pulled from Amazon until more copies can be printed.
The story of Mr. Kerviel - a native of Brittany, who rose through the ranks to Société Générale's trading floor without having attended any of France's elite schools - has made the 31-year-old a folk hero for many in France.
The pseudo-diary of Mr. Kerviel was written by an author who goes by the pen-name Lorentz and illustrated by Nicolas Million. The book starts with Mr. Kerviel as a young man at the bank, conscious of his humble origins as he compares his "three-button polyester suit" with the haute couture of his co-workers, saying, "I was all wrong."
It chronicles his rise to trader, showing him coming home to frozen dinners and renting Casino on DVD. As he begins trading beyond authorized limits, he takes his cues from random signs, like his concierge's observations about the weather or his horoscope in TV Guide. He mocks the bank's risk controls, fooling managers with a fake trade approval by photocopying a note onto German central bank letterhead.
Here's a pic from the train platform on my way back from class last night.
It's an example of the negation marketing strategy I noted yesterday. The aim of the campaign is to emphasize the ways the airline is not a business--it has people devoted to positive change, not flight attendants; people who deserve a caring environment, not passengers; et cetera et cetera et cetera.
In the nineties and earlier 2000s there were certain marketing advantages for nonprofits to emphasize that they weren't so-called traditional nonprofits--a bogeyman in many respects, akin to Brand X--but in other environments this same message can have substantial disadvantages.
Like I said yesterday, mastery of negative space is art. The McCain strategem is an example of how hard it can be--the "not campaigning" gesture would have been a heckuva lot more powerful if it had been made earlier and if McC & co. would have also canceled other interviews besides Letterman.
It's like what happened when Red Cross imagery focused on Ground Zero but 9/11 donations got channeled to infrastructure--the inconsistent gesture became much more conspicuous.
So I'm sitting here at Barnes & Noble looking at some books in connection with my research, and straight across from me I notice, amidst a bunch of books on hacking, this book on IT Auditing, one of whose authors is the founder of InfoDefense. What jumps out, of course, is the reference to Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulations.
We started to look at law, IT and nonprofit management in my class last night, and this book has reinforced the topic's importance. It covers not just SOX, but the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, HIPAA, state-law privacy rules, international law and standards organizations.
Welcome to my world. It's like I said to my class last night--when you wake up to how many legal landmines are out there, it's enough to make you want to pull the covers back over your head.
Eartha Kitt and Richard M Nixon - Jet Magazine Jul 1, 1954, originally uploaded by vieilles_annonces.
One of many images and stories in an invaluable Flickr set of scans from Jet Magazine. Click through for more.
Scott Berkun: "I know for sure my great grandparents would never have made it through this - Instead of being here writing this, I, like they were, would probably be a peasant farmer somewhere in Eastern Europe."
A Saatchi & Saatchi alum, Kate Roberts of YouthAids sells condoms & AIDS awareness like any consumer product: “You have to make something desirable, available, and affordable.”
For another look at the marketing of AIDS awareness, check out Elizabeth Pisani's The Wisdom of Whores.
Sometimes the most effective political strategy is withdraw from politics.
Commercial marketers excel at this. They learned long ago that you can sell more of your product by shifting attention away from the rhetoric of commerce and commodity.
Nonprofits should pay attention. Particularly in today's market blowback, you can be a more effective social entrepreneur by diverting attention from entrepreneurial rhetoric.
It's the subject of my article on nonprofit design. Some folks in the social enterprise community misinterpret my argument as a call for the elimination of market strategy from the nonprofit realm. That's not the point--my focus is attention management in identity design, which is quite a different thing.
Done well, you can maximize revenue and organizational efficiency by getting folks to see you as noncommercial & humane. It's an art--and as in any art, the key is to learn how to utilize negative space.
Yesterday I cited the NYC Sexbloggers Calendar as a great example of a fundraiser that expresses the values of multiple constituencies.
Now via the Contra Costa Times we have news of a fundraiser that attempts to do the same thing, albeit in a way that may be less evident.
The Naked Clown Calendar.
Again, lots of organizations are doing naked calendars, but for most it's nothing more than ersatz trendhopping. What makes the clown calendar work is the way it plays on human responses to transformation and disguise.
The creation of an alternate self through alterations in appearance and exaggerated motion inspires laughter, fear, unease . . . . As the calendar's creators explain, the naked clown calendar plays with these responses even further by reversing expectations of the norm:
"Our goal was to create this sort of craziness in your mind," says Chad Benjamin Potter, the lead clown on the project. "When you think of clowns you think of costumes and makeup and hair. When you think naked clowns, that's something else entirely."
The calendar benefits an MS charity--a disease suffered by the clown school's co-founder, and one that affects physical coordination central to clowning--as well funds scholarships for folks interested in the circus arts.
Last night I gave a brief chat re the implications of the market crash for the social entrepreneurship mantra of adopting business models. I'll provide the core points here via podcast or something later; gotta prep for class tonight.
Until then, this post on Philanthropy.com captures the response of many within the philanthropic community. Well worth noting whatever your personal commitments.
Mark Federman has a useful roundup on McLuhan on art.
As for the post's political point, I'm utterly ignorant of the issues in Canadian politics, but one response that comes to mind is to wonder whether government-subsidized art is truly a counter-environment or a mediated co-option of a counter-environment by the Emperor. The radical goes numb, the way The Rite of Spring has gone from riot-inducing to sleep-inducing at major metropolitan symphonies. Just asking!
The book above: Federman's McLuhan for Managers, which is excellent. Buy it, read it, live it.
Y'know, I've been in the do-gooder biz for a long time and done a lot of things that folks will never see. Nature of my gig, really--like I used to say in law school, there are people who save the world and there are people who do the taxes of the people who save the world, and I'm in the latter camp.
But every so often I see things that make me think, dayum, wouldn't it be cool to be in the former!
Last night was one--we co-hosted the annual social innovation awards with Americans for Informed Democracy. Great awardees and speakers, not including me--Ashoka's Bill Drayton, Kiva's Premal Shah, Justin Rockefeller of GenerationEngage, you get the drift.
And then I wake up to see this at Blog@ & Publishers Weekly: actress Mia Kirshner's graphic novel project, I Live Here:
A mixed media combination of comics, photos, journals and travelogues, I Live Here is a four-segment book collection, with each section–—and each artist—focused on the personal and social trauma of displaced people in a different country.
And the mechanics, now this really gets me:
It’s [going to be] four books; this is the first of four, and it’s a series. I mean, for me, my day job [performing on The L Word] paid for the book; it’s as simple as that. I didn’t look for outside funding, because I wanted to be sure I wasn’t taking money if the project wasn’t going to work. I would rather it be at my own [financial] risk. . . .
My partners and I have started the I Live Here Foundation. Doing a book is great, but it doesn’t help the communities we’re going into directly at all. But the one thing that I did feel like I could help with was the lack of creative writing programs in these areas. Our first creative writing program was in a juvenile prison in Malawi where I spent some time. I realize that these [creative writing] programs don’t address food and medicine and water, but what it does address is making people feel listened to and heard and validated. I think it gives them a sense of empowerment. That’s what’s next for us.
The last bit should not be undervalued--creative endeavors are essential for impoverished communities, both to provide an identity infrastructure capable of breaking the cycle and, equally important, to help folks feel that their lives have more significance beyond subsistence.
In short, to feel human.
Media communities are buzzing about this group's success in getting Scholastic to withdraw the Bratz line from in-school book fairs.
Here's the organization's slightly edited mission:
CCFC's mission is to reclaim childhood from corporate marketers. A marketing-driven media culture sells children on behaviors and values driven by the need to promote profit rather than the public good. The commercialization of childhood is the link between many of the most serious problems facing children, and society, today. When children adopt the values that dominate commercial culture . . . the health of democracy and sustainability of our planet are threatened.
Much better, it seems, to go back to a more innocent time before kids were corrupted by corporate values.
Like in this old children's book:
Folks lament the new New York as a cultural wasteland, but honestly, it's not dead yet. One of the fun things to see right now is the resurgence of graffiti as public art. No broken windows here--there's little concern that the marks on walls and pavement will foster more crime.
In fact, sometimes we even encourage school kids to do it, as in the collaborative monster graffiti project between public school kids and artist Kylin O'Brien.
That's the title of an upcoming exhibit of superheroic--and supervillainous--art by developmentally challenged artists in San Francisco. For more, check out this public radio report.
Y'know, stuff like this is actually not a bad sponsorship & marketing opportunity. I also love the title of the art organization's current exhibit: Most Culture Humbug Sexy People Like John Patrick McKenzie. Catch a glimpse at Creativity Explored.
One of the constants of human experience is that when something bad happens in the economy, we tend to ascribe the cause to irrationality--most notably, greed and crime.
As if on cue . . .
Since hearing Yelle's A Cause des Garcons yesterday on the Nubian Queen Comics MySpace, I gotta confess I've become a bit addicted to it for my work background today.
What kills me about this video is the way it represents the effects of media in daily life--the integration of the hair dryer music into the sound, the anthropomorphic transformation of mundane tools into things that affect the singer's life in odd and unexpected ways--good stuff.
Another good one from the same singer is the Ce Jeu video, which is a clever play on color and form.
