tribal media

WHAT IS "SOCIAL"?

2011-03-26T08:36:00.000-07:00

A more recent take on Andy Warhol’s famous dictum puts us in a future where we will all have 15 friends. If you Google the word “social”, you get over 2 billion results. But, what is this “social” which we all take for granted and of which we all so readily speak? The word appears in history prior to the year 1387 as sociale borrowed apparently from the Latin via the Middle French. Routed from the Roman mother tongue, it originally meant “united or living with others” and “companion.”

Looking just one step further into the wilderness of word origins, we find its root in the Latin sequi which means “to follow.” So, here in a nutshell is where the Twitter transitive verb, “to follow”, finds its first use. If we search still further, we come upon its link to the Old Icelandic seggr meaning “companion or man” and ultimately, to the mother lode in Sanskrit where, as sakha, it simply means “friend.”

Here, we arrive at root origin of the Facebook transitive verb, “to friend”, closing the loop of a word that we use everyday to describe the expanding communication ripples that bind, link, and otherwise connect us at a click. Or to paraphrase what Terence, the Roman philosopher might tweet, “Nothing social is foreign to me.”

THE STRATIGRAPHY OF "SUCK"

2011-03-25T19:46:00.000-07:00

I kind of like to know what I’m talking about. At least, I like to know what the words I’m using mean even if I can’t make sense with what I am trying to make them say. We invariably use lots of words throughout our daily lives without reference to where they come from or how their original meaning has changed. Sometimes, we’re even distant from the slang that seems so current, but may be recycled. Words like “cool” have re-entered the lingo of new generations who don’t know that it came from the bebop beatniks, daddy-o. The first time I heard it since I’d first heard Kookie Burns say it on “77 Sunset Strip” was in Silicon Valley in the 90’s—and it came out of the mouths of some very geeky engineers. I still get a funny feeling when I hear Bill Gates use it in one of his testimonials.

There are other words that are also in common usage that are very distant from their origins—one in particular is almost as widespread as the word “like” and “awesome”. That word is “suck” and it’s been somewhat twisted not necessarily to mean something entirely new, but has found wide social acceptance despite its low origins.

When I was about 11, I bought some badges at the local hippie emporium. One of them said, “Dracula Sucks”, which my father made me take right off my Sgt. Pepper’s jacket and toss in the trash. I was surprised, and he answered what must have been my hangdog look by saying that it was “just inappropriate.” That was enough for me to spend the rest of the night seeking out its deep, dark, hidden meaning. I better understood when I discovered it referred to a sex act that my teachers probably would not see eye-to-eye with as a point of for extra class discussion.

But today, “suck” is so commonly used in commercials, on talk shows, by politicians, and in everyday conversation cross generations that it seems to have been denuded of its original meaning. It’s used to convey a general sense of something that is awful. Its reference to a subservient position for one participant in a sex act may be hidden in the mists of time—or at least in how well-worn it’s become as part of the daily lexicon used by schoolchildren and adults.

I wondered if its popular use might be excused somehow—maybe there was another meaning that forgave its vulgar origins. After some digging into a handy dictionary of etymology, I discovered that the word was part of a once popular phrase. It just so happened that “suck” also designated the sad lot of the runt of the porcine litter who was left to suckle on the hind most “teat”. Eventually, the expression gave way to “suck hind tit”, which is probably shrink-wrapped today in common usage as good old, plain, “it sucks!” So, the next time you are tempted to use it, remember that words are chameleons that double-up and sometimes come back to bite us like the time-tossed travelers they are.

(With thanks to Suw Charman Anderson and Peter Corbett: http://charman-anderson.com/2010/02/04/the-impenetrable-layer-of-suck/)

MAD MEN’s DON DRAPER: NOWHERE MAN IN SEARCH OF TRUTH IN ADVERTISING

2010-10-23T07:56:00.000-07:00

“Who is Don Draper?” is a question which is one of the central themes of the hit AMC series. A friend asked my opinion of this season’s finale and about how I thought the series would ultimately end. It got me to thinking about a lot more than Don’s dilemma and urge to confess. My confession is that I have a love/hate relationship with the show.

I grew up in the era that it depicts so well—what I hate is the mirror reflection of what I remember of that time as a child of divorce. But I what I love is the great dramatic craft and wonderful acting—even though, I did pick up one anachronism last year. In the offending episode, the ad guys celebrated on one occasion by breaking out a bottle of Stolichnaya—a gesture that certainly would not have gone over too well in the Cold War Era. I’ve subsequently seen bottles of Smirnoff in later episodes, which has righted the situation. That said, there is so much to admire about the art direction and attention to period detail that it almost makes you want to take off your fedora, take out a pack of Lucky Strikes, and reinstate the three-martini lunch ritual.

But getting back to my friend’s questions, I told her that I thought that the last scene of the finale was unnecessary. When I saw the masterful scene before it, I thought that it was a great open ending—after Don tells his ex-wife that he’s getting remarried, we see an empty bottle on the kitchen counter of their former family home, framed center stage like a dark, Courbet still life as the lights are shut off by the departing former couple in what I thought was a fade to black and end credits. The question becomes—is there a spark between them that will come between Don’s impending new marriage? We already should have reservations about the match knowing that he is an inveterate cad and his impulsive decision to marry his secretary does not auger well for faithfulness or longevity.

But the writers couldn’t resist the obvious and my enthusiasm was quickly dampened because it didn’t end there. They chose to continue, and cut to Don and his fiancée in bed with Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe” playing in the background. Now, the inference here—and a rather heavy handed one I thought—whether it is subconscious or not—is that the duo singing on the soundtrack had a fairy book Hollywood marriage that ended in divorce—hence, the seemingly sentimental, hippie love song casts a foreboding shadow over the betrothed couple lounging in bed. This final scene seemed to lack the subtlety of the one beforehand—do we really have to spell everything out in TV America? The kitchen scene struck me as something you’d see in a foreign film. The bed scene, typical soap opera.

OK. I’ll stop producing the show. Let’s get back to Don. He’s got a secret that is now burning after the last season. The perfection of his character is written down to his Dickensian name—his “adopted” namesake of “Draper” lends itself to two meanings—his hidden identity is sequestered under the draping of what happened in the Korean War; the other, is that, in addition to hiding personal truths, he is the perfect Ad Man because he’s so adept at all the shadings of truth that his profession requires.

The well-spun phrase “Truth in Advertising” (actually a law) certainly has a different spin to it especially with the platform now offered by social media. Consumers can instantly flex their muscles and spark negative PR grassfires that can grow into the kind of outright conflagrations that have sometimes brought corporate giants to their knees—remember the Domino’s pizza disaster when several misbegotten pizza twirlers posted a video on YouTube showing them adorning their pies with toppings that were…shall we say, not on the menu, but definitely organic? There are countless other examples that have motivated most major corporations to preemptively hire legions of twenty-year-olds to maintain a vigilant watch in the blogosphere for negative consumer rumblings. Mad consumers can now be an activist virus.

Back in the 1960’s however, we were living the American Dream and drinking the Kool Aid that turned us into that consummate culture of consumption which has for the last several decades displaced our standing as a manufacturing country—the rest as they say, is subject of daily reports on the unemployment rate, foreclosures, and the general Fall of the Dow Jones and perhaps Empire. One of the many things that “Mad Men” gets so right is the way that we were sold and bought a bill of goods in the 50’s and 60’s from unfiltered cigarettes to the bomb shelters that we didn’t need. It all seemed so simple—merely “duck and cover” until the inconvenience of an atomic attack passed over and we could return to our regularly scheduled programming.

So, Don Draper is really the Beatles’ “Nowhere Man” come several years early and in some respects, he is a reflection of several generations who lived through the post World War II era. He’s caught in between the sheets as a relationship train wreck that doesn’t know who he is and between the 50’s and the 60’s that are starting to explode as we see in the season just concluded.

Don is a hybrid archetype of both T.S. Eliot’s “hollow men”, and the discontented businessman captured by Sloan Wilson’s, “The Man In The Grey Flannel Suit”, a 50’s best seller and hit movie with Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones in 1956. Like this work, “Mad Men” has appropriately been celebrated as capturing the mid-century American “zeitgeist” just as “The Social Network” has been cited as doing the same for the Internet Era. The irony about Don’s secret is that he is about to enter a time period when his identity problem is
no longer be relevant.

Even though I enjoy the series, I hope that next season is the last. In America, the lifespan of a TV series is not motivated so much by its organic narrative shape and pulse, but by the economic imperative of reaching the magical goal of a syndicatable 65 episodes. This is the threshold for the number of episodes that can be “stripped” or be distributed as “repeats” five days a week for roughly half-a-year (26 weeks) before they have to recycle and repeat. One of the reasons that foreign, and in particular, British TV series seem to have an edge to them—take the seamlessness and naturally closed narrative arc of a classic series like “The Prisoner”, for example—is that rather than produce a show until it runs out of steam, foreign shows are written and produced as so-called “limited series”, a standard emulated well by some US cable network shows.

The end of “The Sopranos” was roundly criticized as a cop-out by many critics and fans, and is a prime example of how the American system is wanting at times. Sitcoms may be one thing to draw out as long as the stars stay the relative ages of their characters, but drama is better written as an entire story arc at the outset rather than running on tracks that have no final destination in sight—except having enough episodes to syndicate.

So, how should “Mad Men” end? Here’s my take: An energized client pitch is disrupted at the agency offices as a growing brouhaha emanates from the New York streets below. It's the sound of thousands of Peace Marchers parading to protest the Vietnam War and starting to fight with hooting construction workers. Maybe according to the series’ lifecycle, it’s a tad early for this and I’m committing my own anachronistic crime, but time lapse could help the series get through the inevitable relationship body counts which predictably lie ahead.

For all we know, Don may have already dropped acid in a future episode, thus confusing his identity issue even further like so many who psychedelicized. Now, with a burgeoning Peace Movement and Hippie Scene converging on our Nowhere Man, he is overcome by curiosity as everyone in the pitch meeting is drawn in astonishment to the high window to look out over the spectacle of history in the making. Impulsive to the end, he bails on the pitch and descends to the street. On the ground, he is caught up in the crowd, looking unsure of himself as his tie is loosened and jacket pawed by hippie chicks who welcome the “straight”. We last see him as he looks around in disbelief, not knowing whether to join “the parade” or run for his life. What he realizes quickly is that his desire to confess and his problems, in the immortal words spoken by Humphrey Bogart at the end of “Casablanca”, don’t “amount to a hill of beans” compared to the march of history. And the audience doesn't know either. End of story.

That way, Don Draper represents a whole generation of Mad Men, who like my father, were all so convinced that they were defined by their work. Blame the Cold War or Madison Avenue. Don is only special because he had to deploy a mask to cover up an identity issue that is no longer a big deal when assassinations, LSD, and Vietnam ripped open the facade of the mythic 50's/60's “Ozzie and Harriet”/I Like Ike/Apple Pie/Take A Letter/Zone, and everyone was revealed as not knowing who they were, where they belonged, and what tribe was right for them...Ultimately, Don can only find the redemption we all hope for him once the women finally take over, so maybe he gets hit on the head at the end with all the secretaries’ burning bras as they fall from high out of the agency office windows like a snowy ticker tape parade over Madison Avenue.

And now, for these messages from our discorporate sponsors…

(With thanks to Sarah Kelley)

DEATH BY DATA

2010-09-29T17:03:00.000-07:00

I just finished listening to the complete symphonies of Franz Josef Hadyn who is widely recognized as “the father of the symphony.” His achievement is incredible if only for its sizeable output—some 107 works in all. The reason I bring it up is not out of any odd feeling of accomplishment though the experience was filled with musical wonders—but because it’s made me think that before digital media came on the scene, it would not have been possible to listen to them all—unless, of course, I was able to sit through the four years of concerts that it took for the Stuttgarter Kammerorchester to record the 37 CD set.

The digital compact disc made available comprehensive box sets of individual artists, composers, and bands in diverse collections that encompass the history of music genres including the arcane as well. It may be kind of daunting to confront an artist’s complete works when they exhibit the scale of a Hadyn, for example. The Internet has also made it possible to expand one’s reach exponentially into the world of the consequential, in addition to burying us in minutiae and trivia. The question becomes—how do we go about discovery and finding meaning in this mirror maze of data?

It’s nothing new to say that we are suffering under the weight of information and the grip of technology. J aron Lanier’s recent book, You Are Not A Gadget, is as good as any in the list of jeremiads warning us about giving up our souls to silicon based-lifeforms. Personally, I experienced a tipping point this past summer with my inbox groaning for the mercy of the delete button and unsubscribe links which became my truest online friends.

The data available at a mere mouse click through search is imposing as well. Recently, my ten-year-old son expressed an interest in movies about World War II. He came to me frustrated by the wide range of choices offered by Netflix. It became apparent to me that his desire for discovery needed human intercession—and not the kind offered by several engines that pride themselves on non-robotic crawler solutions and even so-called "human search." Collaborative filtering and recommendation engines be damned, what he was asking for was curation.

The future of search is curation. I am convinced it will be at the foundation of many successful business enterprises and for individuals who can provide an editorial perspective on qualifying information. It’s not enough just to make the information available as we have been finding out. Say you were new to rock and roll—or Hadyn, for that matter. Where would you start? Google? Wikipedia? iTunes? And if so, how reliable are these methods? Google’s acquisition of metaweb last July speaks to emergent search methodologies that attempt to provide a layer of contextualization. Wolfram/Alpha is another that steps up the visual component of search.

In a conversation with Frank Zappa, he once pointed out to me that the binary mind behind modern computer technology is more limited than we think, particularly when taking into consideration the nature of time. He saw the conventional perspective of past, present, and future augmented by “never” and “eternity” and offered a vision of time as spherical and non-linear. He suggested that a computer that added these two features to the conventions of "on" and "off" switching would yield results that were more in keeping with the way that we live in time radially with our brains. Before he died in 1993, Frank joked that the Japanese “had probably already been working on it.”

The religious scholar, Mircea Eliade, once pointed out that the end of an era or great age often generates a popular belief that if all information were to be made available, that the Answer will then present itself. Of course, if Google were a religion, this idea would be the central tenet of the digital faith—and any entity whose corporate philosophy is “You can make money without doing evil” might arouse suspicions. Its mega initiatives like Google Earth and Project Gutenberg should raise an eyebrow at least. Who knows, maybe Google has already discovered the Answer to the Answer.

But, on the whole, I prefer to look for the answer in music, say in one of Bach’s inventions or in a John Coltrane solo, than in any old text-based search. It is here that we are presented with the age-old battle of what came first at the Creation—a subject of one of Hadyn’s master works as well—did the universe start with light as in a very special visual effect or was it in born of sound, mantra or "the Word"? I’ll place my bet on the sound of music any day because a Google search I just did yields 146,000,000 results for “Let there be light” versus a search for “The Big Note" which wins with 203,000,000--so it must be true...

JIMI B. GOODE

2010-03-12T19:28:00.000-08:00

Anthony DeCurtis’ recent New York Times article, “Beyond The Jimi Hendrix Experience” (2/28/10) is refreshingly accurate, especially about the circumstances of the great guitarist’s death, which he attributes correctly to “misadventure” as opposed to a heroin overdose (so often reported as fact especially in anti-drug propaganda). However, his characterization that Jimi “never spoke out about the pressing civil rights issues (of his day) either in his lyrics or in interviews” is simply not accurate. A look at some of the facts reveals an essential part of the man, his music, and his times.

Though it may not reference them directly, his song “House Burning Down,” (which appeared on the “Electric Ladyland” album) was written following the 1967 Detroit riots and implores in one lyric, “Try to learn instead of burn, hear what I say.” In live performance, Jimi usually dedicated “I Don’t Live Today” to the “American Indian,” in part, as tribute to his Cherokee Grandmother and in a heartbreaking description of the blight of reservation life. Any listener interested in his attitude toward race should reference the lyrics to both of these songs.

The scorched earth instrumental “Midnight” is apocryphally said to have been an improvisation recorded in anger and outrage the night after Martin Luther King’s assassination. Transcending color is a major theme in much of his body of work. It is also a featured element in his legendary and as yet unreleased musical autobiography, “Black Gold.” He spoke about civil rights during many interviews as well including one in which he said, “I wish they'd had electric guitars in cotton fields back in the good old days. A whole lot of things would've been straightened out.”

According to some of his closest friends, the fact that the African American community did not embrace him during his lifetime is said to have troubled Jimi. Despite his free street concerts in Harlem, promotion as the “Black Elvis,” attempts at recruitment of him by the Black Panthers, and his replacement of the original Experience with the all black, Band of Gypsies, Hendrix’s fan base remained largely middle-class and white—even though he greatly influenced contemporary black musicians like Miles Davis and Sly Stone. Among the biographies that treat this aspect of his life are David Henderson's well received, "'Scuse Me While I Kiss The Sky: Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Chile" and "Jimi Hendrix: Electric Gypsy" by Harry Shapiro and Caesar Glebbeek (founder of the Hendrix Information Center).

Like the era with which he is so synonymous, Jimi Hendrix was complex, conflicted, and deeply indebted to African American musical tradition. His success—typified by the fact that he was the first rock performer of any color to earn $100,000 for a single concert—was the hard earned result of playing as Little Richard’s guitar player, working the chitlin’ circuit with the Isley Brothers and other major R & B artists, and in acknowledging still other forebears as he did with his definitive, non-chalant cover version of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” (memorialized in the documentary, "Jimi Plays Berkeley").

Today, Jimi’s legacy as a fearless virtuoso is common wisdom. But, the part of his personal story that also needs to be told is that he was truly an artist beyond color—and that is why, as Mr. DeCurtis observes, he also continues to be “an enduring symbol of personal freedom.” His breakthrough as one the most celebrated rock stars of the sixties—and the only one “of color”—is an achievement that should be considered enough of a statement about race relations at that tumultuous time.

WHAT HAS CHANGED? KEY TRANSFORMERS IN HUMAN AND MEDIA BEHAVIORS

2010-02-18T16:34:00.000-08:00

Traditional media brands and networks are playing catch-up with trends that have been in effect as a result of the Internet for several decades now. In particular, four distinct shifts in audience and consumer behavior have resulted from the influence of the Web and each should guide our thinking about media, marketing, content, and new technologies. These are:

1) Interactivity—audience members and consumers are called “users” with good reason in this medium where the expected experience is no longer the “lean-back” one of the television living room, but the “lean-forward” engagement of a user who expects to have a say and the ability to interact and manipulate his “personal” media environment

2) Personalization—from MySpace to the iPhone, digital media is now super-charged with the capability of incorporating the individual and personal—from branding and iconography to collaborative filtering, choice, and having options are the way of the digital world

3) Immediacy—the web offers the kind of instant gratification that can be addictive from enhanced shopping experiences a la Amazon’s “one-click” buy button to the streaming media of sites like Netflix.com and Hulu.com

4) Community—arguably the most compelling transformation wrought by the Web, the specialization of human experience is now capable of being channeled into affinities of every special interest imaginable where, through the power of networking, like-minded individuals can find each other by just a click-through in a search window

This last transformation is critical because of the way that community has now extended to social media and thereby, changed the very nature of what networks can produce virally. The advent of distributed computing over ten years ago is a tribute to the accelerated power of the networked individual. As part of its value proposition, any new network would have to offer the capability of accommodating and encouraging user generated content and feedback.

Additionally, the community aspect of building network presence should not be restricted to creating Facebook and MySpace pages—several cable networks, for example, have made investments in acquiring several online newsletters to aggregate communities of special interest in the arts, music, and culture, and to create cross-promotional programming opportunities for web content to be broadcast on television and vice versa.

The introduction of time shifting behavior through the use of PVRs and TIVO as well as VOD are all reflections of personalization and the ability of the user to interact with media on demand.

All of the above transformations caused a sea change shift in the nature of media distribution. From peer-to-peer and social network sharing to crowdsourcing and user generated content, the inmates are now running the asylum and distribution that was once in the hands of media companies is now being given a run for the money by game-changing “user distributors”. The trend toward distributed authority of the flat organizational model where decision-making authority is at the edge is just one corporate reaction to this new empowerment of the individual and what Malcolm Gladwell calls “outliers.” Even savvy brands like Amazon have been caught up in the grassfire of a negative blogging campaign, hence, the evolution of the corporate blog as pre-emptive brand strategy.

While conventional wisdom proclaims that the dominant forces that will transform media will come from the introduction of new technologies and changes in the means of distribution, the most powerful transformative agent of change will be a coming generational shift. First signs of such a shift were evident in the advent of multi-tasking and new television formats such as MTV’s experiments with three ten-minute segments making up a half-hour show as well as Nickelodeon’s innovating a programming wheel of five cartoons within a half-hour block of a single show. The shift from the large plasma and HD screen digital surround sound of the home movie theater to the small screen and mp3 of the web and mobile phone are another sign of differing generational appetites in the consumption of media.

The power of web video is also a reflection of how different generations are utilizing media. Six billion videos were viewed on YouTube in January, 2009. Twenty hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Between 150,000 and 200,000 videos are uploaded daily. The growth of short-form video viewing answers a seemingly insatiable appetite among younger audiences for entertainment. The challenge facing traditional long-form and series is that the new viewer is a non-sequential consumer who is apparently less interested in these kind of formats than in instant gratification of what’s hot right now and it does not have to be scripted, professionally produced “broadcast quality”.

There is also a short-form video revolution going on. The single-most influential trend influencing the creation of content is the evolving short-form program format. If YouTube is any indicator, the audience of the future will prefer short attention span theater to the half-hour and hour formats that still dominate traditional broadcast. The average YouTube video is two-minutes and forty-six seconds in duration.

The growth of Twitter should be seen as another indicator for the coming power of snack size media. 70% of its current users joined in 2009 demonstrating a 1400% growth between February, 2008 and February, 2009. An average of twenty million tweets are sent every day with 3.8 billion sent to date.

Short-form program formats are not new and have been around since the 1970’s and 80’s when program insert series such as “This Day in Sports” and “Today in Music History” were successful informational commercials of sixty-seconds in length. But, these formats are a very distant cousin to webisodes and mobisodes that last only several minutes. ABC’s first online experiment in offering its primetime hours for download offers another illustration of how the offline and online worlds differ. As measured by Nielsen, there were some forty million downloads of which the average time viewed was two-minutes. Clearly, the remote control’s cousin is the click of a mouse away.

Social media can now be leveraged to reach target audiences in their native, online environments. The power of online video syndication is that it can reach beyond video networks such as YouTube and Facebook, and engage users through tactics such as community and blogger outreach, featured video portal placement, content seeding, social applications, game development, and other methods. The potential reach of video syndication networks like dailymotion.com, metacafe.com, vimeo.com is expansive.

Certain applications now offer the capability of identifying influencer activity on the Web. Usually, web site and blogs are ranked by popularity. Increasingly, tools like those provided by Buzzlogic and Visible Technologies offer the ability to actually reverse engineer networks of specialized interest. By identifying such nodes of audience concentration that appeal to a particular media brand’s core value proposition and program content, it would be possible to reverse engineer an online component to a vertically integrated network.

Mobile is the fastest growing channel in the world, offering new and exciting opportunities for marketing, advertising and content distribution. Mobile provides a conduit between media outlets, entertainment, e-commerce, and consumers. Mobile data capable phones reached a social tipping point with the introduction of the iPhone in 2007.

The market for mobile video content is growing at a rate of 20% a month. While they were only introduced a year ago, video ringtones and video screensavers account for approximately 10,000 downloads a month at a price point between $2.50 and $4 (on Tier 1 North American Carriers). Given consumer adoption rates for mobile data and the fact that the music download market still accounts for five million downloads per month (between $2-3), all next generation of handsets will support this type of content and will drive the expansion of this market. As such, the media network of the future will be well advised to create a mobile beach-head to take advantage of the platform for distribution of its content.

What kind of world is this transformative media environment creating? I have written before in this blog ("Is Personalization Really That Personal?", "National Nano Memory", "It's A Short Form World After All", "Why The Web Is Like A Time Machine") about the fact that there is no free lunch and that the allure of new technologies always carries a price, particularly in what may be lost as the result of supposed advantages in efficiency, ease of use, choice, and other features dangled like shiny carrots by new gadgetry. Automation and its impact on the declining of the Industrial Age workforce is one example of the trade-off in human terms that "better machines" have wrought. If something appears to be too good to be true, it probably is. Or as the Zen Buddhists would say, "Things are not as they appear. Nor are they otherwise."

Jaron Lanier, the computer scientist who coined the term “virtual reality”, has written a new manifesto which is essential reading called “You Are Not A Gadget”, which describes at length the perils invited by our increased love affair and reliance on technology, particularly the Internet and social media. Hardly a neo-Luddite, Lanier is not the kind of voice in the wilderness that one might expect to sound the Cassandra call to action and for conscious use of technology. Maybe that’s what makes his beautifully written argument so compelling. Or as Tuli Kupferberg of The Fugs once so poetically put it, “I now pronounce you man and…machine.”

At the beginning of the 20th century, Rudolf Steiner predicted that by the end of the century a non-biological lifeform would develop in parallel through a parasitic relationship with biological life. I think that he was prescient in describing our present day silicon-based lifeforms. Anyone who has sat at a keyboard for hours or been pulled by the strange attractor of the Blackberry keypad or iPhone apps knows that feeling of losing control and all sense of time. We might ask in our spare time in between Facebook and texting, who is actually being served here? Are we the digital canaries in the proverbial silicon coal mine?

I don’t necessarily subscribe to the singularity theory (the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence), remembering that the HAL 9000 onboard computer was incapable of lying in "2001: A Space Odyssey," and that he failed when he became paranoid through cognitive dissonance when his instructions were compromised by conflicting instructions as supplied by the NSC and White House—“people who lie for a living”—according to the script in Arthur C. Clarke’s sequel, "2010: The Year We Make Contact."

Perhaps the singularity is not near as Ray Kurzweil has supposed in his recent tome, but is already here. At least, I think that HAL probably had wisdom beyond his circuits when he said, “I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.” ...OK, already. I hear you. So, why not get off my soap box and let’s just change the channel and see what else is on—after all, we have over five-hundred channels now on TV at least and we’re just getting started on the Web and mobile…

Special thanks for Liz Gebhardt—http://www.thinkingoutloud.com—for the YouTube and Twitter metrics.

FINDING THE CENTER

2009-11-26T10:49:00.000-08:00

Where are you? It seems like a simple enough question at first. I’m here writing at home. I’m at work. I’m in a meeting. In LA. In the USA. In my hometown at First and Main. And if in doubt, there’s always GPS. But, are any or all of these answers really accurate ways of describing place in space/time? We may have come a long way locating ourselves in the last several centuries. Amazingly enough, it had been in estimated in 1740 that there were as few as 120 countries that were actually mapped in the entire world according to David Grann in “The Lost City of Z.” That left enormous regions of its landmass labeled with the captivating, but elusive description as “unexplored.”

Not only were there famously areas of the sea that were illuminated on early maps with dragons, sea serpents, and other monsters, but most people—whether navigators or just ordinary landlubbers—believed that if you ventured too far into the unknown, you would fall off of the edge of the world. The invention of the chronometer in 1773 did a lot to help maps along by providing the key measure of time.

Prior to that, the so-called Age of Discovery and Exploration may not have seemed so grand to the “discovered” tribal peoples who were doing quite well, thank you, without the intrusion of the conquering, gold and spice seeking boat peoples. It did much, however, to cure the notion that you’d fall off of a flat earth into the abyss. But, it wasn’t until the expansion of the British Empire in the 19th century that the lands and wild countries of the planet were finally mapped.

Google Earth has recently “mapped” areas that persisted as “unknowns”—like an area the size of Texas described in the best-selling, “Morning of the Magicians”, between Amazonian tributaries, the Xingu and Tapajos Rivers that was unmapped going into the 1950s—or the infamous location of Area 51, the top secret test facility whose existence has been denied by the US Air Force, now “mapped” using handy Soviet Spy photographs. Still, our recent sense of security in thinking that we know where we are with such tools as Google Earth and GPS may turn out to be false.

A recent NY Times article about a new scientific study indicated that the increased use of GPS is having a deleterious impact on the spatial abilities of humans. It may be one more example of how McLuhan’s celebrated perspective that saw media and technology as “extensions of man” extending the senses, are having quite the opposite effect. Could it be that sensory systems developed thousands of years ago are being deadened by the use of technology?

The difference between men and women’s sense of direction, for example, is the subject of many jokes and popular culture. Evolutionary biologists offer theories that there may be a basis in truth to differing navigational abilities of the sexes. They have theorized that women--who were stuck back in the cave raising clans and cooking--did not need to develop the same spatial acuity as their hirsute, club carrying mates who needed to remember geographical features for hunting purposes.

Our world--where we may be losing our compass, so to speak--is sharply contrasted by the tribal world. Take for example, the American Plains Indian ceremony known as the “smoke sacrifice.” First of all, the so-called “peace pipe” was the real deal. The tobacco that filled those pipes was the uncured variety, a highly potent hallucinogen. This is precisely why it spawned so many peace treaties that were not remembered by white men in the hungover hazy light of the following day. It is also the reason why tobacco was used ceremonially by native smokers in contrast to its convenient, addictive commercial form today.

The Smoke Sacrifice is illustrative of an orientation in the world and cosmos that tribal peoples have shared throughout time. The cardinal directions were not just points on the compass, but sacred points of origin which were associated with spirits, colors, animals, and other significators that defined the human world as allies. Anthropologist Dennis Tedlock has aptly called this orientation, specifically with respect to the Maya as “finding the center.”

The first puff of smoke that a modern cigarette, cigar or pipe smoker takes is usually pulled greedily into the mouth and lungs. The Smoke Sacrifice is initiated when the smoker blows six puffs of smoke in an offering toward the cardinal points on the compass and to the axis described by the nadir and the midheaven which runs up the spinal column. When this has been accomplished, the final puff is inhaled, thereby completing the ceremony by establishing the smoker as the center of the universe circumscribed by the sphere of smoke. In effect, one’s heart becomes that nodal, essential point of being. The ceremonial smoker is centered by paying respect to the sacred directions and is ready to move out into greater world of creation that always surrounds us wherever we are. Now that is GPS!

So, the next time someone asks, “Where are you?”, think on how many responses a truly accurate answer might have—because even without the smoke, the heart is our only guide in finding the center which is everywhere that we find consciousness.

THE DAY THE WORLD ENDED

2009-09-05T17:41:00.000-07:00

Last month, while American consumers were being prepped and primed by media outlets and marketers for the 40th Anniversary of the Woodstock Festival, another anniversary was taking place at the beginning of August. I don’t want to be some kind of killjoy and take away from the nostalgic image blitz of stoned-out youth frolicking in the New England mud bathed in the electric rain of rock gods and demigods, many of whom I still worship. But, as Frank Zappa once said to me, “The world will end in nostalgia,” so it seems logical that I can’t get thoughts of August 6, 1945 out of my mind. Maybe it’s because the hills above my house have been on fire for the last several weeks, raining down ash and producing atmospheric conditions around us that resemble the smoky, yellow eclipse lit haze of some other planet. Driving back home from San Diego, I could see the giant mushroom cloud pluming over Pasadena from over a hundred miles away.

At 8:15 AM on that August morning 64 years ago, a B-29 bomber dropped a single-bomb with the charming nickname “Little Boy” over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. On August 9, a second bomb called “Fat Man” was dropped on the city of Nagasaki. These particular targets were chosen according to Stephen M. Younger in his book, "The Bomb: A New History", because they “had not suffered from the devastating bombing raids that had reduced Tokyo and other cities to little more than smoldering ruins. The hills that surrounded Hiroshima and Nagasaki would focus the effect of the blast, further increasing the destruction caused by the bombs.”

“Little Boy” dropped in forty-three seconds to nineteen-hundred feet above Hiroshima and exploded. The height had been chosen “to maximize the damage produced by the expanding nuclear fireball.” Its detonation created an intense flash that was called “brighter than a thousand suns.” Within seconds, an immense shock wave and firestorm swept the city destroying everything in its wake including some 68,000 buildings. Three days later, as Younger reports, “the United States demonstrated to Japan and the world that Hiroshima was not a one-off event” when it completely destroyed Nagasaki with a second atom bomb.

I heard a recent, breathless radio promo for a show called “Surviving Disaster” on Spike TV that described it this way—you have 20 seconds to cover your eyes and about 20 minutes to take cover from radioactive fallout. The promo ponderously warned, “It’s not a question of whether it will happen, but when.”

Just how the show is drawing the conclusion of inevitability is unclear, but the leap from the catastrophic events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to nuclear attack as entertainment value is a mind-boggling, but not necessarily American impulse. Godzilla is not only an iconic film monster, but is held in Japan with an almost religious reverence. One reason why is that Godzilla, Rodan, and other Japanese monster movies have been seen as a symbolic, subliminal response, inspired by the Japanese experience with the atomic attacks. Godzilla awakes in the film as the result of French nuclear tests in the Pacific. Despite its grave delivery, the Spike promo is completely removed from the terrible reality of what actually occurred in August, 1945.

Estimates for the death toll from both bombings has been estimated at well over one-hundred times the casualties from the 9/11 attacks. This figure includes an estimated from sixty-six-thousand to one-hundred-forty thousand instant deaths in Hiroshima and an estimated forty-thousand in Nagasaki. We know that in the immediate five years following, one-quarter of a million more died with untold hundreds of thousands more in the decades following the bombings from radioactive related diseases. But statistics remove us from the human factor of disaster and the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is beyond human imagination.

Hiroshima has been called “the exclamation point of the twentieth century”, but two perspectives from survivors are more than enough to tattoo the pictures forever in one’s brain. Stephanie Cooke tells of one in her recent book, "In Mortal Hands: A Cautionary History of the Nuclear Age": “…a nineteen-year-old girl who survived reported a remarkable sight near a public garden. Amid the bodily remains, burned black and immobilized at the moment of impact, there was, she said, ‘a charred body of a woman standing frozen in a running posture with one leg lifted and her baby tightly clutched in her arms.’”

In "Uranium: War, Energy and the Rock That Shaped the World", Tom Zoellner describes how Japanese writer, Yoko Ota, remembers the white flash as “the collapse of the earth which it was said would take place at the end of the world.”

Zoellner continues, “Even President Truman, who was famously coolheaded about the decision to use the weapon on Japan, wondered in his diary if the act he would soon authorize was ‘the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Era, after Noah and his fabulous ark.’"

When news of the successful atom bombing of Hiroshima reached the team of scientists behind its invention in Los Alamos, New Mexico, “there was a general excitement, and scientists rushed to book tables at Santa Fe’s best restaurant to celebrate the achievement. But that night’s party on the mesa was a grim affair. Almost nobody danced, and people sat in quiet conversation, discussing the damage reports on the other side of the world. When J. Robert Oppenheimer left the party, he saw one of his colleagues—cold sober—vomiting in the bushes.”

The decision to drop the atom bomb is a controversy that will remain unsettled and is examined at length by Richard Rhodes in his books about the nuclear age. One school of thought is that the Japanese doctrine of "defense at all costs" was a bluff; another indicates that they had already expressed a willingness to negotiate a cease-fire through Russian back channels. According to the Russians, the atom bomb was secondary and it was the declaration of war against Japan by Moscow that was the deciding factor in ending of the war.

In her illuminating book, "Troubled Apologies: Among Japan, Korea, and the United States", Alexis Dudden describes both US media censorship and outright fabrication about the bombing of Japan as propelling “the basic story line for Hiroshima and Nagasaki that Americans would come to cling to as history at the cost of learning what was actually going on: ‘the bombs saved lives.’…the US government and its officially placed mouthpiece at the New York Times established as a fact that no one in Hiroshima had died from radiation and that only foreign lies (British or Japanese) suggested otherwise.”

The New York Times’ science writer who was an eyewitness over Nagasaki, William “Atomic Bill” Laurence, won a Pulitzer Prize for his early, evangelical coverage of atomic weapons. His account of the event demonstrates that he was not only distant from the event by mere altitude, but close to some kind of atomic rapture:

“Being close to it and watching it as it was being fashioned into a living thing so exquisitely shaped that any sculptor would be proud to have created it, one felt oneself in the presence of the supernatural…Awe-struck, we watched it shoot upward like a meteor coming from earth instead of from outer space, becoming ever more alive as it climbed skyward through the white clouds. It was no longer smoke, or dust, or even a cloud of fire. It was a living thing, a new species of being, born right before our incredulous eyes.”

Historically, not everyone was sold. Harvard physicist George B. Kistiakowsky witnessed the Trinity test in July, 1945 only several weeks before the atomic bombing raid on Japan and called it, “the nearest thing to Doomsday that one could possible imagine. I am sure that at the end of the world—in the last millisecond—the last man will see what we have just seen.”

John Hersey was the first to write of the human factor in his long August 1946 New Yorker essay profiling regular people on the ground in Hiroshima. The day after the Trinity test sixty-eight scientists at the University of Chicago signed a confidential letter to Harry Truman urging him not to use the device. They wrote presciently: “If after the war a situation is allowed to develop in the world which permits rival powers to be in uncontrolled possession of this new means of destruction, the cities of the United States as well as the cities of other nations will be in continuous danger of sudden annihilation.”

Leo Szilard, the scientist who persuaded his colleagues to write the letter, and the man who conceived of the chain reaction and worked on the Manhattan Project later referred to himself and other atomic scientists as “mass murderers.”

“Why did they have to go and drop another?" a wife of one of the atomic scientists asked upon hearing the news of Nagasaki. “The first one would have finished the war off.” Short of an apology, this kind of self-reflection on the part of civilians as well as the scientists—including Einstein—who were behind the creation of the Atomic Era, leads one to wonder what we can do to make amends today.

There is a long tradition—if not ritual—of apology in Asian cultures. It is one that seems to have been adopted for some time by Americans, who are now accustomed to press conference scenes where morally straying politicians apologize to the nation, their constituents, wives, and families for errant behavior. More recently, other kinds of less predictable apologies have appeared.

Last February, the Senate apologized to Native Americans for atrocities committed during the opening and seizing of their lands. On July 29, the US House of Representatives issued a resolution formally apologizing to black Americans for slavery one-hundred forty years after its abolition. After forty years of silence, at a local Columbus, Georgia Kiwanis Club on August 21, Lt. William Calley (the only Army officer convicted of the 1968 My Lai massacre), in an extraordinary and unexpected apology, expressed his “remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry."

Twenty years ago, Congress apologized for the World War II interning of Japanese Americans in concentration camps. Why not Hiroshima? None other than the author of "Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World" said the following in 1995: “The United States owes no apology to Japan for having dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Bill Clinton was just towing a bipartisan line.

Alexis Dudden traveled with President George W. Bush on a trip to Tokyo during 2002 on a mission, among other things, to thank the Japanese government for its support of the War on Terror and to launch plans to celebrate the 150-year anniversary of Japanese-American relations. Dudden relates that she “had an unexpected, theatrical education in one of the trajectories of Hiroshima’s history during (a) routine walk.” As she passed down the main boulevard near the Japanese Parliament and National Library, “several of the notorious black trucks popular with the country’s extreme right wing passed…with the lead van blaring the customary martial songs. This was not unusual, but the message pouring from the loud speakers stopped me flat—‘Welcome to Japan, President Bush of the United States of America! Apologize for Hiroshima and enjoy your stay!’”

She goes on to say, “Throughout the recent era of apologies all around—or maybe in spite of it—there has remained one matter on which Washington holds firm, regardless of who is in office—there will be no apology for Hiroshima or Nagasaki.”

Originally, the lowest projection of how many American lives would have been saved by avoiding a costly land invasion of Japan by using the bomb was twenty-six thousand casualties. Dudden observes, “Americans transferred what happened—the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—for an event that never took place—the proposed land invasion of Japan—to stand in for history. By the early 1950s, the imagined truth was American myth, and in 1959, President Truman wrote for the record that the bombs spared 'half a million' American lives, and that he 'never lost any sleep over the decision.' Over the years…American storytelling has come to count the number of ‘saved’ Americans as high as 1 million. (This number appeared squarely in David McCullough’s 1993 Pulitzer Prize winning biography, Truman, despite abundant evidence to the contrary at the time.)”

Apologies are more complicated than they appear. Dudden’s book details the way that formal apologies can be used to cloak deeper strategy to avoid restitution and financial penalties. As to the US government’s obdurate stance, Dudden concludes, “The chronic inability to confront how America’s use of nuclear weapons against Japanese people in 1945 might constitute the kind of history for which survivors would seek an apology, let alone why the use of such weapons might represent a crime against humanity, is sustained by Washington’s determination to maintain these weapons as the once and future legitimate tools of the national arsenal. It is not at all by chance that among weapons of mass destruction—nuclear, chemical, and biological—only nuclear weapons are not prohibited by international law. Were it otherwise, the likelihood that the history of America’s use of them on Japan would generate changes of attempted genocide against the United States or Harry Truman would increase exponentially.”

Last April, President Obama made strong statements during a visit to Prague about his commitment to abolish nuclear weapons. His speech called for an international summit on the subject by the end of the year. The Mayor of Hiroshima, Tadatoshi Akiba said, “As the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act, defining U.S. responsibility in a historical context." Akiba asked Obama to hold the summit in Hiroshima.

Our family had a Japanese exchange student staying with us for a year. After she had been living with us for a while, I felt compelled to speak with her about her hometown of Hiroshima and to apologize in my own way for what had happened before either of us had been born. She seemed surprised at my gesture and we spoke about the event in the abstract—her parents had been children at the time and spoke little to her, if at all, about their memories. I suppose that the American generation preceding mine who experienced the direct consequences of World War II might argue with my stance on apology citing my distance from the events that defined them, in many cases, for the rest of their lives.

I find it interesting that the word “apology” and “apocalypse” have the same prefix. Apology is said to be rooted in words originally meaning “regret, defense, or justification” and giving an account or story of oneself. Apocalypse is rooted in the Latin word meaning “revelation” and the Ancient Greek meaning “to uncover” as in to lift a veil. The prefix “apo” means “from, away, off”. Perhaps there is a connection between the act of apologizing and the avoiding of apocalypse—by this logic, if we lift the veil that hides our own truth, then revelation might follow. A year after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the esteemed Indian yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda, reflected on the discovery of uranium: “The human mind can and must liberate within itself energies greater than those within stones and metals, lest the material atomic giant, newly unleashed, turn on the world in mindless destruction.”

With the first new ruling party now established in Japan in over fifty years, an appropriate overture to the new government from the American President whose campaign mantra was “change” should be to agree to hold the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference in Hiroshima and take the world stage by opening his remarks with an apology to the people of Japan. Think about it the next time you are being served sushi—these people were our enemies? Or as Allen Ginsberg might say, “We are the Japan.”

IT'S LIKE, TRULY AWESOME, DUDE!

2009-06-12T17:06:00.000-07:00

Maybe we should give the word “awesome” some rest. I mean, is there anyone else out there who thinks that the word “awesome” is becoming a tad overused? This was all brought into high relief during a recent visit to Starbucks. My tendering of exact change was met by a hearty “awesome!” from the barista. Shortly after, I heard about the first twitter from space—one of the astronauts simply messaged, “Launch was awesome!” Well, there are literally miles apart in the way that this exhausted exclamation was used in both cases and I think it’s probably quite telling.

Afterwards, I happened to be speaking with Peter Merlin, who is the base archivist at Edwards Air Force Base and works for NASA. I mentioned the launch tweet and said, “Now, you guys really do know the meaning of ‘awesome’—take those Hubble images peering back to the edge of time some 13.4 billion years and almost to the Big Bang—now that’s a truly awesome feat, dude.” He’d just seen the space shuttle take off from Edwards piggybacked on top of its tricked-out 747 ride, and for anyone who’s ever seen the shuttle take off or land—well, you know that it is an experience that dwarfs one’s self—and is truly an awesome sight to behold.

How did a surfer’s exclamation like “awesome” become today’s unequivocal, number one superlative? This is a word that was traditionally reserved for approximating the transcendental—historically, its use is far from common because it has been generally used as a description of the indescribable—the mystical, psychedelic experiences, seeing into other worlds, the streaking of a UFO over Roswell, New Mexico, the vast impact crater of a meteor near Winslow Arizona, the majestic heights of the Himalayas, perhaps the mile deep expanse of the Grand Canyon or merely the jaw-dropping sight of contemplating infinite space in the sprawl of stars in a clear night sky.

No matter, the adaptation and morphing of words into popular culture provides a fascinating window into the evolution of language, class structure, and the evolution or devolution of consciousness. Let’s not only take it out on poor “awesome.” There are some other offenders that are equally annoying--and revealing. Take for example, the word “like”, another vastly overused, overwrought word that now has multiple uses beyond its original sense and some that no longer mean anything at all. That’s where meaning gets really interesting for my money.

Casual eavesdropping at a high school, local mall or watching any reality or celebrity talk show will reveal the word “like” abounding, crashing into consciousness in wave upon wave onto the shore of one's mind until it makes you submit to white noise like a jargonaut jingle—“It’s just like, well it’s sort of like unbelievable, you know—I’m like, well, he said to me that he’s not like, in love with me—like, not at all! And I’m like, if it’s not like, ‘love’, then is it like, a deep feeling, at least? Like it really hurts, you know. Like, oh, whatever!”

How did a word that was once charmed lower class Elizabethan popular theater goers when utilized discretely by the likes of William Shakespeare become the province of the stoned-out, 50's beatnik or hippie, watered down, safe for 60's TV version of the Maynard G. Krebs character in "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis" or 70's version of Shaggy on "Scoobie Doo"?

In this latter usage, it has evolved into some kind of verbal placeholder to mark time while the speaker scrambles to find the words and articulate a response. No one is saying here that natural speech is the same as prepared remarks—we don’t expect that our daily conversations demonstrate the same stilted flow as those based on using handy teleprompters and speechwriters. As such, our everyday dialogues are filled with placeholders of one kind of another—“um” is probably most common example in the US and UK, and one that is profiled in the wonderful book, "Um. . .: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean" by Michael Erard.

Prior use of the word “like” (before it was appropriated by today’s teenagers), was traditionally as a preposition or as a figure of speech. In this use, it is still known as a “simile” and seeks to compare two unlike things in the reader or listener’s mind. Shakespeare used one when he lamented of the dead Julius Caesar, “Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus.”

Perhaps what we are seeing in its new usage is the sad result of the modern mind becoming less capable of holding two separate ideas simultaneously. I’ve written before about the losses that can be associated with technology and its influence on behavior such as personalization.

Multi-tasking, much ballyhooed as an emergent asset of so-called millennials and other techno-savvy youth, also must have a downside if it is just a downsizing of the attention span of the user. And it’s not just restricted to exuberant digerati. Studies of cell phone use among drivers have shown that accidents are far more likely when activities are combined—in the case of men, they are 40% more likely to have an accident, and women 60% more likely to have a mishap—one of the reasons that many states now have laws about texting and handheld calling while driving.

Shortly after beginning to write this post, I bumped into Barry Sanders, author of the classic popular study of literacy and media, "A Is for Ox: The Collapse of Literacy and the Rise of Violence in an Electronic Age". His book provides an in-depth look at what we are losing as a society as we struggle to extract ourselves from the La Brea Tar Pits of daily media immersion. I told Barry that I’d recently become obsessed with the “awesome” phenomenon and was busy exorcizing myself through a blog post. He cheerily replied, “Oh, ‘awesome’ is a word from my century—the 14th!”

Consideration of the word’s origin in the distant past does shed some light on how far we’ve come in the evolution of the word. Actually, the first historically referenced use is probably before 1300 in “Arthour and Merlin” which was developed from an earlier age, when it was used around 1250 in “The Story of Genesis and Exodus”. Apparently, it had been borrowed from the Scandinavian, aghe or the Old Icelandic agi, both meaning “fear”. Interestingly, the Greek achos is similar and means “distress and pain”. Discovering its etymology, I was beginning to lessen my angst by hearing of its reference to pain. By Barry’s era in the 1400's, the Middle English word had spawned “aweful”, meaning “to inspire fear and terror” and by 1598, we see the first use of “awesome.” I was finally feeling like I was getting home.

But in 1997, I left my home in Hollywood and started working for a Bay Area startup. It was then that I was introduced to another word I hadn’t heard since watching Kookie Burns on “77 Sunset Strip”—the word was “cool”. Again, it’s another superlative and like so many slang terms and phrases that jump into youth culture—again, superlatives like “dope”, “tight”, “fat”—it comes primarily from African American jazz diction, where it originally described a genre as well as a state of artistry that audiences tried to mimic. "Juba To Jive", a dictionary of African American slang indicates that it’s been in use from 1650 or so, derived originally from Mandingo and entering into popular usage in England as early as the 1590's. By the 1930's, American gangsters and tramps were using it to refer to killing someone, or someone who was "a stiff". It also came to refer to a person who displayed “great self control”.

As the opposite of “hot”, it grew in the 1940's as an adjective to mean someone who was aloof, detached, unflappable and unflustered, but also a hip cat or chick who was as fashionable as the cool jazz, martini soundtrack of the times—as in “Cool, Daddy-o!” During the hippie era, it came to mean, “I don’t have any dope on me, officer!” as in “”I’m cool” or in the way that the Dennis Hopper character tries to reassure Martin Sheen’s in "Apocalypse Now" that Col. Kurtz (as portrayed by Marlon Brando), is “cool” despite the fact that his jungle camp is festooned willy-nilly with decapitated bodies and chopped off heads.

Perhaps more telling than common superlatives is another word in the commons, particularly among teenage vocabulary—“whatever”. Kind of the contemporary version of what The Sex Pistols once described in the chorus of “God Save The Queen” as “No future”, it takes the placeholder status of “like” one step further and can be seen as the ultimate dodge of having an opinion one way or the other. Like the color black that is favored by punks and inspired by the same boutique as The Sex Pistols, it is an expression of no color or opinion. What we may be bearing witness to is a media saturated generation with expanded options, information overload served in snack size bytes, but having no real power of choice.

In a fascinating piece by media writer, Paul Parton called "The Consumer: Adjusting To Internet Time", which appeared in Mediapost in 2007, he points us to what may be the crux of the matter: “Now, with the Web, there’s often no lag time between stimulus and response…an entirely new dynamic with significant implications for the way we create marketing communications and build brands…It’s advertising’s ‘butterfly effect’.”

The point is that previously, short attention span was a bad thing for building connections or creating a “cultural bond” between brands and consumers. Now, with Amazon's one-click, instantaneous purchasing app, impulse buying—long the province of convenience store counters and infomercials only—is now the industry standard. So, if advertising traditionally relied on what Robert Heath wrote in "The Hidden Power of Advertising" as “implicit” or long term memory, where brand messages work over time in the subconscious—is advertising now dead? That may be a subject for debate or at least a future post, but in this case, what is important is that, if the loop is closed so tightly in time, what becomes of the decision process if there is no lag time between stimulus and response?

What you get is not only “cool”, but another phrase I first heard in Silicon Valley—“cool stuff”. What exactly is “stuff” anyway? It’s in common use as a sort of come-on—as in “and other cool stuff!” As such, it sounds somewhat similar to “whatever”—just more…things of some non-descript, description. “Stuff” originally meant the kind of quilted material that was placed underneath chain mail in the Middle Ages—hence, it’s slang use as someone who is described as a “stuffed shirt”.

In 2005, there were a number of results published by scientists for experiments that showed human beings were still evolving. In particular, genetic research has led to conclusions that homo sapiens' brains have added or “selected” versions of genes over time that may have influenced cognition, and therefore, changes in capability of making what Terence McKenna once called, “organized mouth noises” or language.

But, as Christine Kenneally says in “The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language,”: “Not all change is good. As much as language enables us to control nature and keep our environments stable, it also makes possible the dramatic altering of our environment in unexpected and dangerous ways. The same language skills that promote technological innovations like water irrigation, road building, and air conditioning also produce the ozone destroying pollution and countless other ecological dangers of the modern age. Any of these phenomena could result in a sharp left turn for the human genome. And perhaps the same linguistic skills that give us science and currently some control over DNA, will lead to our own extinction in less obvious ways. Language and material culture have greatly increased the mobility of the world’s population, and some researchers believe that this will lead to an unhealthy and irreversible diminishing of variation in our genome. As more and more humans breed across the boundaries of genetic variation, we become a blander, more homogenous bunch than our diverse parent groups. This could be a problem…for the more we are the same, the easier it is for one single thing to make us extinct.”

Perhaps we are beginning to see this homogenization factor in language. Is understanding a brand logo the same as identifying with a clan symbol or totem? What is missing in the former is a connection to personal as opposed to corporate history. The latter fulfills the need for story in the myths of tribes and cultures. Maybe that’s one of the reasons that marketers have been speaking for the last several years about a brand telling a story and emphasizing narrative in testimonials and association with celebrities whose endorsements come with their own attendant PR mythologies.

We live in dangerous times for not only our environment, but language, too—when text becomes a verb as in “texting” and now ‘twitter”. The June 11 edition of Daily Finance, just announced that “Twitter Breaks the Verb Barrier”:

“It may be reducing us all to a bunch of semi-literate, hashtag-spewing teenagers, but Twitter's influence on the English language can't be ignored, in the view of the Associated Press. The microblogging service has reached a new milestone, earning a promotion from noun to verb in the new edition of the AP Stylebook.

That means AP writers (and others who observe the news collective's style guidelines) can now, without shame or censure, use the phrase "to Twitter" in place of the wordier "to post a Twitter update." Tweet, the preferred term for a Twitter post, also works as a verb, per AP. The timing is appropriate, coming a day after the Global Language Monitor declared "Web 2.0" the millionth word to enter the English language.

Think having your brand name recognized as a verb isn't a big deal? Tell that to Microsoft, which chose the name "Bing" for its revamped search engine in part because it thinks the moniker will "verb up" in the manner of Google.”

Is complexity of language a sign of evolution or devolution? Latin, a highly complex tongue, has long been considered a “dead language”. Many languages are going extinct as discussed in an earlier post. With some six thousand languages remaining on Earth, about half of the world’s population speaks only ten of them with English the most dominant one.

According to Kenneally, every two weeks, the world loses another language. She observes, “When a language dies, we lost the knowledge that was encoded in it. Though we assume that when knowledge is lost, it has been superseded by a superior version, a dead language, with all its unique ways of carving up the world, is as irreplaceable as the dodo or Tyrannosaurus rex. Unfortunately, even if we, and our languages, are still evolving, we still don’t know where we’re heading.”

The retired professor of physics at Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Study, Freeman Dyson, is more optimistic: “When teenagers become as fluent in the language of genomes as they are today in the language of blogs, they will be designing and growing all kinds of works for fun and profit.” Now, that's a scary notion which gets me right back to the original meaning of “awesome”—what a terror inspiring concept!

If we no longer know the origins of words that we are using continuously, almost automatically, is something already extinct in us? And do words lose their new meaning if they are beaten to death? If everything is “awesome”, then what words can we use to describe the truly awesome? But, things could be really bad—I mean, we could end up like the Hopi people who have no tenses because they have no word for the concept of "time". Does having a really short attention span lead to time travel or living in the moment of instant gratification?

Seriously though, the Hopi were onto something truly awesome in what the linguist Benjamin Whorf called “Hopi Time” as are the Inuit people who famously have scores of words to describe what we civilized folks shrink wrap to “snow”. Who are the primitives now? Are we downsizing not only our vocabularies, but our consciousness by shrink wrapping language for convenience sake? Where is the expansive, future hybrid lexicon of the youth tribes in "A Clockwork Orange" when you need it? Maybe a reference to this tribal linguistic superiority can motivate us to dig down into our own war chest and find some new superlatives or perhaps we can just go back to using the word “great” or some other expression of exclamation. Now that would be truly awesome, dude...

HOW TO THINK INSIDE THE PYRAMID REDUX

2009-05-27T21:20:00.000-07:00

For those readers who have been following the continuing, late breaking story from Old Kingdom Ancient Egypt of nearly 5000 years ago, I was recently graced and flattered by an email from the man who solved the great mystery of how the Great Pyramid was built:

Hi Kevin,

I'm Jean-Pierre Houdin and I'm very pleased with what you wrote about my theory...
HOW TO THINK INSIDE THE PYRAMID
Thank you...

I don't know if you had the opportunity to watch the NatGeo USA documentary about my work?

You should watch it:

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=3442C0E0D8EA2A33

Or you have the BBC2 Timewatch version:

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=0E083435887644B5&search_query=pyramid+houdin

A French documentary was also edited last year and was broadcast in many European countries.

The Japanese television NHK will broadcast their own documentary in Japan in the coming months.

I've received hundreds and hundreds of e-mails from all over the world, all very positives and most of them with these remarks I picked up from your blog:

"The jury may still be out in terms of how traditional Egyptologists have reacted to Houdin's theory, but to me, the idea makes logical, if not just plain common sense".
.../...

"The logic of Jean-Pierre’s theory is transparent and struck me as a breakthrough. It just made sense".

Egyptians were rationalists...The way they built the large smooth pyramids of the 4th Dynasty...makes sense (their "know-how")...
And they were as smart as we pretend we are...45 centuries ago...
The question : "How the pyramids were built" is our problem, not their...They built the pyramids...Period.
But since 200 years, all the guys willing to explain the construction started from a unique wrong idea: OUTSIDE...
Their answers are wrong from line one because the base of the studies is wrong...
How can you explain something when you start wrong?

I didn't invented anything, I just understood HOW THEY BUILT THE PYRAMIDS...I'm an architect...and that helps...a little...

The guys who deserve something are our Egyptian Ancestors...

What impressive work they did...

You should have a look at:

www.3ds.com/khufu

and

www.construire-la-grande-pyramide.fr

If you want more information, feel free to ask.

Best regards

Jean-Pierre Houdin

MY FIRST RECORD

2009-05-24T09:03:00.000-07:00

Do you remember the first record you ever bought? Well, I guess that I’m already dating myself here by referencing vinyl—in this case, 45 rpm recordings. But, I was given solace recently on a field trip with my son to a restored Victorian home nearby. We were touring with a couple of other families with children about his age who were around 8 or 9, when we entered what in the 1890s was called the “salon” and what we know today as the living room. Inside, the importance of music and conversation were in clear evidence with numerous chairs, settees, a large couch, a Steinway square grand piano that had made it by boat from New York and around the tip of South America, and an Edison Wax Cylinder Phonograph.

When the docent started explaining how this device was used, one of the kids who was inspecting its parts rather intensely asked with a shrug, “Where does the CD go?” It made me smile, but also feel better because he hadn’t asked where you would click to get downloads. The technology and instruments that humans have developed to capture sound and its organized form that we know as "music" may change, but whatever the manner in which we first hear and understand its existence is only matched by the musical entity who introduces it to us. And in a way, that primary experience can say a lot about us as individuals as well as initiate a trajectory for our musical futures. The extra step that we take when we actually consume music as a purchaser—whether on vinyl or digital format—may also serve as a sort of musical version of carbon dating, since music is distinguished as an art that lives by and in time.

In my case, my first acquisition as a consumer was at the age of seven and was Chubby Checker’s “The Twist”, released in 1960. I don’t remember where I bought it or what led me to buy it in the first place—though, when in doubt about my early music history, I usually blame an appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show”. But, I still remember that it was on Cameo Parkway Records and that the red and black label had an actual gold lined, cameo image of a refined lady in profile on it. This visual element is one that I grew to associate with music—and 45 labels were nothing once I graduated to albums, which arguably had already become an art form—if often a kitschy one—in their own right during the 1950s.

MTV added motion video to music, which to my mind often held the artist and audience hostage to a music video director and record label marketing department’s “vision” and “interpretation”. In the world of the download, we’ve now gone full circle. Once upon a time, it was the packaging that made opening a new record “album” like Christmas every time you went to the record store—even though you couldn't always judge a record by its cover. Now that has all but disappeared. More important, packaging was not only a marketing come-on, but also influenced music discovery.

I remember haunting my local record store as a teenager and seeing certain album covers that lured—and even frightened me into buying them. When a friend told me in 1967 that there was this band from England that were louder than The Mothers of Invention, I went and asked for “Are You Experienced”. When I saw the cover, adorned by a leering trio splashed in psychedelic finery, beckoning out of a fisheye lens with a look that dared me to enter—I had to think twice, but am forever glad that I didn’t hesitate too long. The first several bars of the opening song actually flicked a navigational switch on in my brain that has been setting a course for the heart of the sun ever since. It was also a record that was to rear its surrealistic head in a book I did with rock critic, Dave Marsh, who I collaborated with on the long out-of-print, The Book of Rock Lists published by Dell and Rolling Stone in 1981.

Part of the book included a year-by-year breakdown called “Top of the Pops” which codified our own version of the Top Forty Hits in Rock and Roll from 1955 to 1979 and we described as, “For the authors, one of the great incentives in a project like The Book of Rock Lists is the opportunity to inflict on the unsuspecting reader personal opinions about the greatest and most essential records of all time.”

Another series of lists set about codifying the greatest “Top 40 Chartmakers” or forty albums from each year (beginning in 1963) that made Billboard’s Top 100 Chart. There were many conversations about ranking these records. But, when we came to the seminal year of 1967, we had a lot to consider with The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, The Mothers of Invention “Absolutely Free”, “Otis Redding “Live In Europe”, “Fresh Cream”, The Doors’ debut album…and “Are You Experienced?” by The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Ultimately, Jimi won out, though in retrospect, “Sgt. Pepper” would seem the logical winner over time as classical rock music. No matter—it was all meant to provoke friendly debate just as Dave and I had experienced in its creation. And rock and roll doesn’t suffer academic treatment very well. I always cringe when I see it offered on some over-reaching college syllabus. It seems like the last nail in its coffin (see my earlier post, The Vampire Theory of Rock and Roll) to stuff Rock Music like some taxidermy object to gaze and wonder at, if not dissect for hidden meaning.

Another record that I saw on and off for months at my local record shop was Dr. John’s first record, “Gris Gris”. I was actually scared by the cover, which dripped with Voodoo talismans and trimmings and an image of a somewhat diabolical looking madman in shocks of red and green like some New Orleans Halloween hallucination. Somehow, I knew that if I bought that record, that my ears would never be the same. When I finally put my money down and listened to the spooky likes of “Croker Courtbullion” and “I Walk On Gilded Splinters”, this wasn’t just music—it was theater of the mind—and it was also introducing me not only to mojo roots, but to Mac Rebennack’s musical roots and opened up a lexicon from Huey Piano Smith and Duke Ellington to the weird, ethnographic swamp soup of Voodoo chants and Afro/Yoruba trance dance. Again, I’d never heard anything like it and my brain was imprinted with coordinates for future navigation to the Mississippi Delta and points east across the Atlantic and beyond to the so-called genre of “World Music.” It’s a journey I’ve been on ever since.

The other thing that Dr. John’s album came with was liner notes, a sub species of the album as an art or non-art form that is now all but disappeared with virtual music consumption. I’ve delighted in showing my daughter the liner notes from Bob Dylan’s many early albums written in his e.e.cummings mirror style of lower case, West 4th Street stream of consciousness. Dr. John’s liner notes were also written with a voice that echoed and added detail to the musical phantasmagoria within.

Liner notes were long established in the world of classical music and jazz, where the “seriousness” of the exercise inspired, no doubt, the necessity of anatomical dissection and explication. But, rock and roll was a late comer—I mean, what can you possibly dissect about “The Who Sell Out”, Never Mind the Bullocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols” or even “Sgt. Pepper” for that matter—but as the music developed a history and became more popular and recognized, the addition of liner notes made more sense depending on whether a musician could actually write or if an eager rock critic was available. A rare few, like “Freak Out” , provided a bonus map of an artist’s musical DNA. By citing his artistic influences at some length, Frank Zappa added to my future discoveries and not all were restricted to music.

How do digital music consumers discover new sounds today? The retail store has gone the way of the dinosaurs with the large chains going under from lack of relevance, but thankfully, with hearty, last of the independents like Amoeba Records flourishing as beacons in the wilderness. But, downloads and ringtones now have overtaken the brick and mortar market. According to Techcrunch, in 2006, music downloads were increasing at a pace of over 50% a year, while CD sales declined in that year 20%. More recent stats would certainly reflect this trend.

Collaborative filters like the iTunes Genius Bar are only as good as artificial intelligence can be in making associations between individual personal taste and similarities of potential interest. Peer-to-peer sharing of music is still a huge factor, even in the post-Napster universe, with Limewire and others still booming. Sharing lists of favorites on social media networks allows another view into personal taste that speaks to music as first and foremost a community of specialized interests. Music may have actually been the impulse behind the first human communities when their members invariably gathered around a campfire on the African savannah to sing for the hunt to go well and rain to abound—but that’s another story. The affording of samples on services like CD Now and Amazon are likewise helpful, but all of the above tactics still miss some of the mystery for me that exists when you enter a place like Amoeba in LA.

Usually, I am looking for something specific, like a digitized version of an old record—yesterday, for example, I was searching out a copy of The Rolling Stones’ “Their Satanic Majesties Request”—their characteristically dark answer to “Sgt. Pepper”. But, what I usually come out with is anything but what I originally thought I’d be buying. My friend, Jeff Elmassian, a brilliant composer and virtuoso in his own right and CEO of Endless Noise, a premiere music design firm for commercials spoke of an interesting experience while taking his teenage daughters on a pilgrimage to Amoeba.

On finding a certain record she was looking for, one of them told her father that she only wanted one song on the album and didn’t want to buy the whole thing in order to enjoy it. I remember the feeling many times myself when I had to fork up the dough for an entire album in order to claim the one song I liked. Not all albums were created equal and quite often, the hit single was a teaser that was the loss leader for an album that disappointed. We’ve come a long way in the universe of the singular download and shuffle mode mentality.

Singles were another method of music discovery back in the day when they were often pre-releases for albums by new artists as well as established ones like The Beatles, who would lead off with a taste of what was to come. Sometimes, singles had added value when they didn't appear on a follow-up record or when they did, only on a record several years later. The world of digital downloads has put the model of releasing singles on steroids—but now, the consumer has a choice to not buy an entire “album” and very often, there isn’t even a long form version to follow suit. My daughter was telling me last week about a new band whose “album” of four tracks she really liked. I crankily responded that we called a record with so few songs on it an “EP” in my day, and that it didn’t really qualify for the designation of “album” at all.

I forgot how polarizing and magnetic music is until a recent post which elicited a great response of emails and comments for which I am grateful. One such comment came from Kevin Henry, who inspired this present post. He described buying his first single, The Beatles’ “I Want To Hold Your Hand”, “a simple song at best and not earth-shattering my any means”, as he describes it, but one with the inherent power to inspire him remembering “clearly my father yelling to turn that crap off.” He goes on to say: “Today, when I look in the mirror, I wonder who that old guy is and I always sing a little to myself…’hope I die before I get old’...feeling a little sorry for myself and then a magical thing happen the other morning...my 17 year old daughter picked up my iPod by accident on her way out the door and when she walked in that evening she said with a smile...’who are these guys...this stuff is incredible’...and at that moment a connection took place between us as told her the story of my youth and realized that the revolution lives on.”

I’ve had similar cross-generational experiences with my teenage daughter who has embraced a lot of music I grew up with, some of it out of curiosity, some out of enforced listening, and some organically out of her own path of discovery. It’s inspired conversations over the years with younger co-workers at various places I've worked about how great it must have been to experience the 60s and whether “my music is better than your music.” I never quite got that line of attack. If, as Kiki Dee once sung, "I've got the music in me," then what we don't like may result from the fact that the music hasn't connected to where it plays to a harmony inside us.

To me, it’s all a continuum as Kevin Henry's anecdote above reflects so well. But, our first records put a stake in the ground, a tent pole like a clef which affixes music in our memory as the soundtrack to our lives that sets up thematic mileposts made up of sound. They have a way of intersecting our life stories at critical points where music can speak to us as if it were written just for us. Certain records entered my life in this way almost as if they were chapter titles—“Meet The Beatles”, “Absolutely Free”, “Muddy Waters: The Real Folk Blues”, John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps”, Miles Davis “Kind of Blue”, several classical music albums…and the list goes on.

It’s interesting to me that my very first record was a dance song. I had no idea at the time what a cover record was and that Chubby Checker was experiencing success with a number that was originally written and recorded by Hank Ballard. I also had no real idea what sex was at the age of seven either—“To make (beautiful) music with someone or to ‘have sexual intercourse’ is cited by the Online Etymology Dictionary as arriving on the scene in that “seminal” year of 1967. The more recent euphemism of “The Mystery Dance”, may be the more useful expression here.

But, on a primeval level, I guess we're all genetically wired to understand sound as rhythm first, whether it’s the pulse of our blood that steps up with excitement of different kinds, the rhythm of language before we know what words mean, the different kind off beats in the cries that a baby makes depending on her hunger, pain or want of company, the consuming, inspirational sounds of the natural world, the clickety-clack made by toy trains, the delight of tapping out rhythms with a pencil on our school desk to annoy the teacher—or as discoveries in what quantum mechanics has verified in what the Vedantas and the mantra tradition have known for thousands of years—it’s all vibration, man.

Bassist Victor L. Wooten describes it succinctly in his book, The Music Lesson: A Spiritual Search for Growth Through Music: “A-440 means that a note vibrates four hundred and forty times per second…if you keep cutting that number in half, 440, 220, 110, 55, etc., you will eventually get beats per minute. At that point, it’s called rhythm.” The oldest musical instrument that has been documented in the archeological record may be a bone flute from the Upper Paleolithic, but my money would bet that percussion was the original featured instrument of our furry, low browed ancestors. Click sticks like those used by the Aborigines in Australia most likely have forty or fifty thousand years of use. Banging on so-called “ring rocks” or using stones hit against each other seem like another natural movement.

What is music and where does it come from? Wooten refers to its unique origin as a word comprised of an ancient term for “mother” which is “Mu” and “sic” which he attributes as an abbreviation of “science”. Traditional etymology would cite the word's origin as a tribute to the Greek goddesses known as the Muses who are known to have served up a variety of artistic elements for humans to play with. Regardless of its meaning, music is unique in existing in both space (in memory and physical vibration) and time. Its very existence points us to the place that Dizzy Gillespie so eloquently describes as “place between the notes” and as memorialized in John Cage’s famous piece, “4’33”. It is the place where we literally catch our breath, our heartbeat, and where music is created out of the void, out of the great expanive silence, out of that Big Bang of Original Compressed Sound where the first note of song reverberated the original vibration as the Music of the Spheres and frequency that we all carry with us regardless of our preferred musical tastes. Or as the great classical composer of the 20th century, maestro Frank Zappa once said, “Music is the Best”.

I am very interested in readers sharing stories of how their first records impacted their lives and welcome all submissions to the comment section below.

HOW TO THINK INSIDE THE PYRAMID

2009-05-03T09:53:00.000-07:00

When you are sitting inside the King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid, there are many thoughts that come to you. The sweep of Ancient Egypt and its mysteries are still very present despite their distance of thousands of years from the present. They are also literally quite close just outside the Pyramid where the great Nile flows by, the world’s longest river and arguably still its most mysterious. Inside, just as outside in Egypt, too, the confluence of the sacred meets the profane—the odor of cold limestone is mixed with the faint acrid smell of urine, whether from bats or humans one cannot be sure.

The King’s Chamber lies at the heart of the Great Pyramid and is actually rather small room with dimensions of about 20 by 34 feet—still, it is daunting in its structure with its massive lintel ceiling of 19 feet high. Electric lighting now diminishes the mystery somewhat with several vertical lights framing the empty, lidless sarcophagus carved out of solid granite that is chipped away on one side from years of souvenir hunting as well as from the original intruders who probably used force to open it in the hope of retrieving any of Pharaoh Khufu’s mummified remains. More than anything, the Egyptian impulse is about monumentality and the Great Pyramid is a testament to this factor written characteristically in architectural form.

From the moment you see the Great Pyramid, you are entering a world of epic stone. You are also faced with another key feature of the Ancient Egyptian Mind—the Egyptians ascribed ultimate importance to the way that mathematics and what has come to be known as "sacred geometry" informed original and ongoing creation—and true to form, it’s all a numbers game with the Pyramid as well. The monument is made up of two million limestone blocks averaging two-and-a-half tons and three feet high, with some granite blocks (like those in the ceiling of the King’s Chamber), between 30 and 60 tons each. Experts have estimated that it took 25,000 workers some two decades to build it with tons of stone transported both from local quarries and ones as far as 500 hundred miles away.

Certain parts of the structure seem to defy logic and even gravity—the so-called Grand Gallery which leads you up to the King’s Chamber is one. It truly lives up to its namesake—you enter it from a passageway of about three-and-a-half feet high where you have to duck—into an sprawling expanse that is 157 feet long and 28 feet high. Even as it opens up widely, it’s not really a relief from claustrophobia that gets to you as much as wondering about the stone mass that surrounds you. It seems natural, if not a survival instinct, to consider how this immense weight is distributed and what is holding it all up. It is somehow reassuring that it has apparently done so without shifting since it was constructed.

Despite any misgivings, the overall sense one has is simply wonder and burning questions about its purpose and how it was actually built. Most amazing is not how it was built, perhaps, but that it was built at all and over 5000 years ago. Hollywood movies have memorialized one of the theories with the familiar scenes of thousands of slaves pulling massive blocks under the cruel lashes of overseers’ whips and the monomaniacal eyes of the Pharaoh looking out over the Gizeh plateau and at the ramp extending from the river to scale the emerging manmade mountain. The truth appears far less dramatic. It is clear from recent discoveries by Mark Lehner, in particular, of the village where the workers lived, that they were not slaves, but well treated and fed though accommodations were certainly barracks style without amenities.

A second theory proposes that the ramp did not lead up to the structure as it was built, but rather wrapped around it like a snake until the apex was finally reached and the capstone laid. For decades, these were the only theories besides those that call for alien intervention and levitation. A recent theory has set tradition on its head and has something to teach us about how to think “outside of the box” by considering the inside of the Pyramid.

A new book that is one of the first to actually merit its familiar title, “The Secret of the Great Pyramid: How One Man’s Obsession Led to the Solution of Ancient Egypt’s Greatest Mystery” by Bob Brier and Jean-Pierre Houdin, describes the journey of a French architect’s search for an answer as to how it was built. Houdin’s interest in solving the mystery was inspired by his engineer father. After watching a documentary in 1999 about the construction of the Pyramid, his father told him that the show’s presentation was all wrong. His idea of how the stones were raised to the top was novel if not revolutionary.

A PhD in engineering from Paris prestigious Ecole des Art et Metiers, Henri influenced his son, to create sophisticated 3-D models of the conventional theories to see if they held water, so to speak. His work easily discredited the single ramp theory. In order to deliver the stones to the rising Pyramid, the ramp would have had to have been extended over time as the courses of blocks rose. The basic problem is that the gentle slope that is necessary for workers to haul the blocks would have required the ramp to extend to over a mile long. In other words, “if the Pyramid were being built on the site of New York’s Empire State Building, the ramp would extend all the way into Central Park, about twenty-five city blocks.” Such a ramp would have taken a separate body of thousands of workers many years to construct. Also, it would have produced a tremendous amount of debris, which has never been accounted for in any nearby rubble heaps. Finally, the topography of the plateau just does not avail itself to the creation of such a ramp. It’s too small an area.

The second theory of a ramp that corkscrewed around the ascending Pyramid as it was built did not fare any better. The fatal flaw, it turns out, was that the Pyramid “has four corners, and as the Pyramid grew, the architects had to constantly sight along those corners to make sure the edges were straight and thus ensure that they would meet at a perfect point at the top. But a ramp corkscrewing up the outside would have obscured these sight lines.” So, it would seem impossible for the Ancient Egyptians to accomplish the construction of raising millions of blocks using a stone road that wound up the growing sides of the Pharaoh’s mountain.

Jean-Pierre Houdin spent years computer modeling how the building of the Pyramid progressed over the decades and was able to support his father’s theory through his findings. Interestingly, his father led Jean-Pierre not to look at the outside of the Pyramid for the answer. After years of research, Jean-Pierre proposed that a mile-long ramp corkscrewing to the top was to be discovered inside the Great Pyramid. In other words, it was built from the inside out. Subsequent research and scientific survey on site has been favorable and are outlined in detail in the book.

Take for example, just one aspect of its construction, the Great Pyramid's fabled outside layer. The Pyramid was once covered with flat "facing stones" that provided it with a smooth milky-white shining veneer. It was said that at one time the Pyramid shone hundreds of miles out in the desert like a great beacon.Only the Pyramid of Mycerinus (one of the other pyramids that make up the fabled trio at Gizeh), still has remains of its outside layer if you look toward its top. Unfortunately, the prized outer stones from all three Gizeh pyramids were mostly removed and repurposed at various historical times in the construction of the expanding metropolis of Cairo--including its Great Mosque where some of these original facing stones can be seen today.

Yet, if an outer ramp had been used to lay these precious, smooth faced stones, wouldn't the process have caused damage to their surfaces? If, however, the inside ramp theory is valid, then it would have made far more sense to lay the outer stones first and build in from them laying down the inner blocks, shafts, passageways, and two main chambers. The jury may still be out in terms of how traditional Egyptologists have reacted to Houdin's theory, but to me, the idea makes logical, if not just plain common sense.

Sometimes, we overcomplicate our search for answers by being too influenced by tradition—not only in terms of so-called conventional wisdom or intellectual inheritance—but our sensory bias. More often than not, I find that the art of the strategist is laying out the obvious or what makes common sense, when a client has lost his way in the scaling of his own mountain of business objectives. The requirements of building a business can often immerse the insider in details that distract and sometimes obscure the original essence of why it was created in the first place. Many times, the answer to a business problem is staring us right in the face and is not a matter of creating some nifty theory, body of evidence, and supporting tactics, but relying on our gut and what at first may seem illogical in the face of history or accepted facts.

In looking for our own answers—whether in business or in life—we may have to use less finesse and more brute force in our thinking. We may have to be more like the Arab intruder, Al-Mamoun, who in 820 AD found the original entrance on the Great Pyramid’s north side sealed from within and set about with his men carving out his own entrance. It’s not a pretty sight today, but Al-Mamoun burrowed until he hit one of the monument’s passages and was in like flint. The logic of Jean-Pierre’s theory is transparent and struck me as a breakthrough. It just made sense. So, next time you are trying to “think outside of the box”, maybe it would help to first think about turning it inside out.

There is a reason that the origin of the word “Pyramid” is based on the Ancient Greek words “pyra” and “mesos” literally meaning “fire in the middle.” Maybe the name, itself, is a clue for us to find that creative fire, that so-called “spark” which lights when we discover our own center, to quote the Zuni people. Perhaps the Ancient Greeks and Egyptians were able to identify this as a place in space and time where all the stones of being are connected to the infinite horizon as described by the “original mound” which, in turn, inspired the Pyramid’s divine form. Or as the wondrous English fabulist, Jeanette Winterson said, "Stones are always true. It's the facts that mislead."

THE CAVE MIND OPERATING SYSTEM

2009-04-25T23:15:00.000-07:00

Notorious, fabled “Beat” writer and author of “Naked Lunch”, William S. Burroughs, once defined “paranoia” as “just the state of having all the facts.” Now maybe I’m suffering a little bit from being overwhelmed by facts, but the smiley face has always made me suspicious that it can’t be all that good. At first, Evolutionary biology may not be the most likely refuge of the paranoid, but in the case of the smiley face, it’s brought me nothing less than religion.

The next time your better half, best friend, boss, helpful sales person or gleaming white toothed celebrity smiles at you, think on this—according to Evolutionary biology, the origin of the smile is the reflex that predators make when bearing their teeth at the sight of prospective food. Clearly, there is something we can learn from considering our animal ancestry and in particular, a lot it can teach us about behaviors that we either take for granted, assume we know all about or don’t even question at all. It doesn’t require lifting the veil of time and scrying into the mists of history—it only takes a glimpse at the new gods of sex, drugs, and rock and roll to recognize that we are creatures of biology, first and foremost. Maybe it’s time to use this fact to our advantage once again, given that there are predators like religious fanatics, evil bankers, credit card, and loan sharks on the loose.

I’ve always believed that there’s a lot we can learn from the Upper Paleolithic, a time period when many of our ancestors were retreating from the ice and snow into the solace of fire lit caves. “What can we learn from The Flintstones?” you might ask, besides the fact that all animated shows of yesteryear will at one time or another suffer from being turned into live action features as Hollywood studios trawl the depths of television for recycling purposes. Consider also a trend that Faith Popcorn described in her 1991 book, “The Popcorn Report” which she labeled “cocooning,” whereupon Yuppies are seen as retreating into the new cave of their media centric homes as a way to find relief from the modern rat race. There’s a reason that the root of the word “hearth” is easily found by dropping its final letter “h”. The fireside was once the “heart” of the home and may be again in the form of the postmodern, Green kitchen, if Kevin Henry is right in his latest post on his blog, “The Connected Kitchen”.

My bias is that art usually holds the key to human consciousness at any given time in history and looking at so-called “Prehistoric Art” probably possesses the veritable Keys to the Kingdom. Take for example, the 1879 discovery of the famous cave at Altamira in Spain, which has been called “the Sistine Chapel of Paleolithic Art.” One summer day, a Spanish nobleman and amateur archeologist named Don Marcelino de Sautuola was joined by his young daughter, Maria, in a cave on his estate which he had explored for artifacts many times before. Called by John E. Pfeiffer in his book, "The Creative Explosion: An Inquiry Into the Origins of Art and Religion," “one of the great tales in the annals of prehistory,” this episode can be seen as having something to teach us almost like an Upper Paleolithic OS about the powers of common sense and seeing to through the obvious.

Now the stuff of legend, his daughter (whose age varies according the particular account from five and seven to twelve), had wandered into a small, side chamber that was three-to-five feet high in most places. Don Marcelino had traversed it numerous times without noticing what made his daughter cry out loud, “Toros, toros, toros!” Interesting was that in his search for stone artifacts, he was always scouring the floor of the cave and had never actually looked up at the ceiling. As Pfeiffer describes it, “Nothing had prepared Sautuola for the shock of such a discovery. He had explored the chamber and thought he knew what was in it.” While he had used his lantern to avoid being bumped on the head by the protuberances that were covered with vivid paintings in black, red, pinks, and browns, it was by the lantern light that his child made the discovery simply by looking up. Little did she realize that in doing so and revealing the hidden prehistoric art that it would turn her father into an advocate tied to evolutionary theory and to his grave be much maligned as a crank and charlatan by the then protectionist, doubting world of traditional archeology.

An inspiration for his courage in facing harsh criticism that saw the cave paintings as forgeries, his story provides us with OS Principle Number One from the Upper Paleolithic:

1. SOMETIMES A BUMP ON THE HEAD IS A GOOD THING

In other words, always Look Up in addition to staring at your feet! This is also known as OVER, UNDER, SIDEWAYS, DOWN or the Yardbirds’ Principle since it’s named after their 1965 hit.

Many of the famous caves in Western Europe from the Upper Paleolithic were discovered by children. This includes the most celebrated one of all, France’s Lascaux Cave, discovered in 1940 by four youths who were chasing a pet dog named Robot, who had disappeared into a hole in the ground that turned out to lead to the great subterranean galleries below. Some are even named after their youthful discoverers like “Les Trois Freres” after the three young brothers who first crawled its lengths.

As Pfeiffer says about Maria, the discoverer of the Altamira cave, “…she was too young to have acquired a bias against looking up rather than looking down.” He continues that her father, “…had no real interest in the walls or ceiling of the cave. He was an excavator interested above all in what he could find at his feet, on the floor, such things as flint artifacts and bones and remains of hearths. The low ceiling of the side chamber was only a hazard to him, something to avoid.” The point is that life is at the very least, three-dimensional and we need to see ourselves both inside and out of the box in order to be creative and truly “think outside the box”.

This leads us inevitably to OS Principle Number Two from the Upper Paleolithic:

2. WHEN IN DOUBT, ASK A CHILD

When in doubt, don’t let age or experience be a factor. I remember once when my daughter was four and she asked me, “Daddy, why does infinity never stop?” For the first time as a parent, I had the survival instinct to ask her instead of trying to come up with any sort of reasonable answer. “What do you think, honey?” I asked her. Without losing a beat she replied, “Because they ran out of numbers!” You might be astounded by the insights offered by the unbiased eyes of the culturally agnostic and the brains of young souls who are closer to the tabula rasa.

Pfeiffer says, “Archeological records include many cases of art overlooked. The eye never comes innocent to its subject. Everything seen is a blend of what actually exists out there, the “real” object, and the viewer’s expectations, upbringing, and current state of mind. It is amazing what you can miss when you do not expect to see anything or, given a strong enough motive, what you can see that is not there. Unless the mind is properly adjusted or set, anticipating a revelation of a particular sort, nothing happens.”

Principle three, therefore, follows this theme of perception:

3. YOU CAN’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU SEE AND HEAR, CAN YOU?

Otherwise known as the “Up From The Skies” Principle after the lyrics from Jimi Hendrix. Or better yet, it could be called “Anticipate Revelation.”

Why do the Aboriginal people of Australia believe that our world is the dream and that the true world is the Dreamtime beyond our consensus reality? With 40,000 to 50,000 years of experience to draw upon, one has to ask the question. Like the San people of South Africa, the Aborigines are one of the only cultures who still have an ongoing tradition of painting caves.

You don’t have to get tribal to appreciate the Other Side of the Sky. There is a story about visionary English poet, William Blake, that is a case in point. Upon hearing a knock on the door, his wife once answered the caller’s inquiry as to whether Mr. Blake was at home, by responding: “No. He spends most of his time in heaven.”

Shamanic cultures tend not to throw out anything that works. In other words, if you are bent on survival, why dispose of the practical. This is just one factor that supports the efficacy of shamanism as an alternative medical practice as well as a way of seeing that there are many more worlds than ordinary “9 to 5” reality. Chief Seattle took this to its logical conclusion when he said, “There is no death, only a change of worlds.”

Like quantum physicists, cave dwellers and modern tribal peoples believe that the stone walls of caves are more like membranes between this world and that of the ancestors. So, placing a painting of one’s own handprint on top of an ancestor’s creates a link where one is able to touch and pass through to a kind of historic continuum to the ancestral chain of being. Drawing an animal is believed to have been an appeal on the part of hunters to ask permission of their quarry’s spirit prior to hunting for food.

The representations of animals in the Upper Paleolithic caves are so realistic that they seem to breathe, especially in torchlight and placed as they often are on outcrops that enhance their shape—the artists were obviously very familiar at close range to their subject and their depictions are in many cases without peer in the millennia that have transpired since. No less than the like of Picasso testified to this when, after seeing the extinct Altamira bison created 15,000 thousand years previously, remarked: “ None of us could paint like that.”

This raises how art enters the picture, which brings us to principle number four:

4. WHAT IS WORK TO ONE CAVEMAN IS ANOTHER MAN’S ART

In his illuminating book on cognitive archeology, “Shamanism and the Ancient Mind”, James L. Pearson says: “From the first discovery of prehistoric painting at Altamira to the stunning finds at Grotte Cosquer and Chauvet Cave in the 1990’s, researchers have tried to uncover the meaning of this Ice Age art and the function of the painted caves.” The field of study that undertakes to explore the caves and other sites associated with such decoration is called “Rock Art,” a label that, while helpful for academics, presents some semantic problems when looked at with the tribal eye.

The basic issue is not only how to define art—a challenge we’ll leave to the experts for now—but according to Steven Mithen in “The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art and Science”: “…the definition of art is culturally specific. Indeed many societies who create splendid rock paintings do not have a word for art in their language.”

Is “rock art” art if the producers didn’t think so? For most of the 20th century, prevailing wisdom associated cave art with hunting magic. Others scholars and researchers like Mircea Eliade, Joan Halifax, Weston La Barre, Andreas Lommel, and David Whitley suggested that Lascaux, Les Trois Freres and other rock art sites depicted shamans and supernatural helpers.

World-renowned authorities Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams expanded on a preceding neuropsychological model and combined it with ethnography in their 1998 book “The Shamans of Prehistory: Trance and Magic in the Painted Caves”: “The way in which each individual cave was structured and decorated was a unique result of the interaction of four elements: the topography of the cave, its passages, and chambers; the universal functioning of the human nervous system and in particular, how it behaves in altered states; the social conditions, cosmologies, and religious beliefs of the different times at which a cave was used; and lastly, the catalyst—the ways in which individual people and groups of people exploited and manipulated all of these elements for their own purposes.”

The most fascinating connection that is made in the neuropsychological model is between the actual symbolic elements in rock art and phosphene action that takes place in the human eye, whether during altered or natural states. Just rub your eyes and you’ll see these shapes and signs that are created by the firing of the optic nerve. Many are universal forms like jigsaws, dots, rakes, and spirals that appear throughout rock art sites across millennia and all over the world. The question then becomes how much of what we see is conscious and how much is not?

In this view, what is considered as representational art has a connection to the ability to create symbols with intention, and turns creative expression into an index as to the level of consciousness of a specific culture at a particular time and space. Cognitive archeology says that the production of representational art requires a certain brain capacity that sees outside itself. When I’ve taken tribal people from different cultures to see the rock art sites in the local Santa Monica Mountains, they are always careful to offer interpretations circumscribed by their own culture. “To us,” they start with a disclaimer, “these paintings represent clan symbols.” But, they are always deferential about the meaning, intent or purpose for the tribe who created them. This perspective leads to our next principle:

5. SOMETIMES A CIGAR IS JUST A CIGAR

As Freud famously said. The bottom line in terms of my own experience at rock art sites is that you can’t dismiss that some of paintings and petroglyphs were just doodling and a sort of tribal version of “Kilroy Was Here” message. Maybe it was just a fine day around the water hole where hunter-gatherers had the luxury of some extra time on their hands and thought to memorialize their afternoon with their mark. So, we have to consider that some of the “art” may have not been conceived of as representational or symbolic at all, but just as either functional—as with hunting magic—or doodles that were pleasing to the eye but meant nothing more. But, one of the manias of our scientific age is to attempt to find a rational way to explain everything.

One of the difficulties in rock art research is that there is no Rosetta Stone handy to decipher pictographs and petroglyphs. Outside of cultures with living traditions of rock art like the Aborigine and San people, it is not straight forward to interpret what they mean. Instead, we are often left with the beautiful problem of confronting meaning ourselves as a primary experience without interpretation—with nothing between us and the original maker of the markings—and a rare occurrence that we should treasure in this media immersive world that interprets our experience of the world to death for us in over three thousand advertisements, logos, and consumer messages a day.

So, what may be art to us with historical distance from the circumstances and cultural context in which cave paintings were created, they may have had quite a functional purpose to those who originally produced it, whether it was to evoke the ancestors, supernatural or animal powers or clan territory. My take is that even though the scientific method and was born out of the Age of Reason and out of rejection of religious belief, it still is based in part on fear of the Unknown. The search for meaning is one way to moderate fear, leading naturally to our next precept:

6. DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK

Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is not a train. One of the most impressive thing about caves is the kind of absolute darkness that we ordinarily never experience. To enter one, you often have to deal with fear. On some primordial level, you feel as if you are leaving the lighted world to say nothing of carrying along the cultural baggage of the collective unconscious associated with the netherworld.

Imagine what it must have been like to descend into one of these places as a twelve-year-old initiate in Upper Paleolithic society, led by the most frightening person in the tribe—the shaman—and making your way by hook and by crook, on your hands and knees, in the mud and underground streams, listening to the drip-drip-drip of water seeping from the land above mixed with the strange sounds of nether dwelling life forms and suddenly seeing forms of animals and other strange shapes come alive with lighting of the shaman’s lamp. It probably was an experience that would give religion to any one of us.

A recent book by Martin Lindstrom called “Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy” features excellent material relating to the use of fMRI technology, but one finding, in particular, is quite surprising. The results of fMRI scans have demonstrated a connection between religion and consumer behavior. Apparently, experiments showed that the part of the brain activated during religious ceremonies and experiences is the same as the region which is active during shopping, watching commercials, and gazing at corporate logos.

Ad Age reported on April 6 about findings from the New York Buyology Symposium that presented brain scanning data making correlations between “cult-like brands” such as Harley Davidson and Ferrari and the emotional drivers associated with believers in the world’s largest religion, Christianity.

Dr. Gregory Berns is a psychiatrist who is also a leading authority on neuroeconomics, and biomedical engineering. Neuroeconomics is a study that combines neurology, psychology and economics and looks at understanding how individuals and groups make decisions, take risks, and experience rewards. One of the primary tools that they use is fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) which studies brain response by correlating specific neuron firing in the brain with the decision making process.

Berns’ new book, "Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How To Think Differently," reveals the limitations that the fear response places on creativity and innovation. In an extended interview in the current edition of Super Consciousness magazine, he says, “The importance of the distinctions in how each of us sees the world cannot be underestimated…perception is not something that is immutably hardwired into the brain.” He profiles recent findings that show how we are capable of transforming the way we perceive life and can redirect neurological firing. It’s not an easy feat, requiring extraordinary mental training and energy, but the idea stands as one of the fundamental principles of neuroeconomics.

According to Berns: “…one of the brain’s primary survival mechanisms is conserving energy. The brain does this by limiting energy expenditure during normal everyday awareness…for most people, though, breaking out of the comfort zone of their energy conservative perceptions is often a fearful proposition.”

He goes on to say that fear limits our ability to be creative and is a huge impediment to innovation. Similar to Malcolm Gladwell’s recent treatment in “Outliers”, Berns sees the great innovators as outsiders and iconoclasts who are able to face risk, “but cognitively reframe (such situations) so as to estimate some kind of likelihood of success or failure to make a decision.” He calls it “the optimism bias,” which allows them to “downplay negative scenarios” as opposed to buy into the uncertainty or ambiguity that are at the root of primal fear. It’s interesting that structural ambiguity is a feature of many video game design as described, for example, by Jim Gasperini in “Structural Ambiguity: An Emerging Interactive Aesthetic” in “Information Design” edited by Robert Jacobsen.

Economists call one kind of uncertainty risk where there is a possibility of success or failure, but one can estimate the odds and determine some likelihood of the outcome. Neuroscience indicates that the fear response is generated when we don’t have a complete picture or a state of ambiguity. The current financial crisis has inspired fear, according to Berns, because we don’t have all the facts about how deep it is and how far it’s going to go.

In a May Atlantic article about the financial crisis, Cody Lundin says, “Risk-taking went over the edge. We are inventing something new. We’re very afraid. We know from the Depression that people who lived through it didn’t change their mentality for the rest of their lives. They were sewing socks. They refused to take a lot of chances. My sense is that it will take 10 or 20 years to find that spark of risk-taking in people again.”

The way that we approach risk is at the basis of strategy. One of the things that our hunter-gatherer ancestors learned from animals is low risk behavior. Berns describes it as, “…head in the sand, everyone in the bunker, cut back spending, hoard what I have, and wait for the storm to pass. That is a very instinctual response and again, goes back to the survival instinct. When you are afraid, you tend to retreat and hoard what you have. Animals that have the capacity to think through the situation just wait it out. That is a low risk strategy and will probably work to maintain your status quo, which is fine if that is what you want. The innovator sees everyone else doing that, and it is precisely in those circumstances that it makes the most sense for them to take risks.”

Fear is, therefore, not the optimal operating system. In “The Science of Fear”, Daniel Gardner demonstrates how many irrational fears are based on the way that humans miscalculate risks. To be creative, perhaps innovate, and ultimately, to succeed, we need to transcend fear of the cave of the mind. In one of his notebooks, Leonardo Da Vinci wrote: “Drawn by my eager wish, desirous of seeing the great confusion of the various strange forms created by ingenious nature, I wandered for some time among the shadowed cliffs and came to the entrance of a great cavern. I remained before it for a while stupefied and ignorant of the existence of such a thing. With my back bent and my left hand resting on my knee, and shading my eyes with my right, with lids lowered and closed, and often bending this way and that to see whether I could discern anything within. But this was denied me by the great darkness inside and after I stayed a while, there arose in me two things: fear and desire. Fear, because of the menacing dark cave, and desire to see whether there were any miraculous thing within.”

Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending argue in their new book, “The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution” that recent genetic change has been far more expansive than the traditional “great leap forward” that scientists believed defined human beings some 40,000 to 50,000 years ago. This was the period which also gave us the birth of artistic expression with examples of the so-called Venus sculptures appearing 40,000 to 60,000 years ago and a flute dated at some 54,000 years. The actual beginnings of art are the subject of much debate and estimates can range up to 100,000 years ago. What is agreed on is that a creative explosion took place around 30,000 years ago, the date of the Chauvet Cave and amazingly, in full development. Whether Cochran and Harpending’s theory has validity or not, I still think that the invention of fire is pretty hard to top with language and art a close second and third. The nature of images, whether art or otherwise, leads to our final principle:

7. THINK BEYOND WORDS

Maybe it all comes down to what Fred Barnard once said in 1921 when he coined the expression, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” He was speaking about the signs on the sides of streetcars. No matter, if the cave mind operating system has a purpose for us today, it’s because it drives us with mysterious images to think beyond words, to face our fears, and find consciousness in the stars that light up our brains.

THE VAMPIRE THEORY OF ROCK AND ROLL

2009-04-04T22:22:00.000-07:00

Nobody knows exactly when or where rock and roll started, but it’s probably a good bet that it started at the crossroads in Mississippi where blues legend, Robert Johnson, made his pact with the Devil. There are many variations on this theme as all great origin myths deserve. One describes how Johnson was directed to arrive at midnight at a plantation crossroads where the Dark Stranger tuned his guitar. In another version, he was given a guitar by the father of all agents and learned how to play like a demon in just one night while sitting on top of a gravestone in a local cemetery. What we do know from Johnson’s contemporaries who described his amazing, seemingly overnight talent and success, and his surviving masterpiece recording are enough evidence to speculate on a supernatural origin for his unique skill. Whatever actually happened, the Faustian bargain certainly informed a lot about music industry business models ever since. But what’s more important is that rock and roll has always been informed by a death wish probably since it’s an adolescent music at heart that is uncertain about mortality, but as foolishly daring as a teenage driver with a fast car.

The first recording with the actual title, “Rock and Roll”, was released by the Boswell Sisters in 1934. Hardly a rhythmic cousin inspired by the long snake moan of the Delta Blues, this trio’s song spreads the message in a big band, pop setting, but the meaning is still clear despite it’s white bread, if swinging delivery. It’s still all about sex even though drugs and electrification would arrive later. Rock and Roll takes a cue from the industry standard of “farewell tours” in that, its death has been exaggerated and proclaimed many times from early cynics like Frank Sinatra and Steve Allen. The former loudly denigrated rockers as lowlifes, miscreants, traitors, and troglodytes. He especially singled out The Beatles who he called “creeps” and cultural enemies of the state—though he was later to repent with a rather flaccid cover of “Something”. Steve Allen famously tried his best to cut the young upstart rock and roll down to size by humiliating Elvis Presley during an early TV appearance when he had the King sing “Hound Dog” to a real dog set on a pedestal.

They were not alone in the 50’s when “concerned” parent groups, white “citizen’s councils” and other community organizations attempted to alert families to the dangers of this musical form which created juvenile delinquents and whose connections to African Americans and the sensual abandon of jazz were clearly outrageous game changers. Nobody could have predicted what was to come despite early warnings like the West African beat of Bo Diddley. You didn’t have to drum along to the “bump de bump, bump, bump, bump” to add the grind to the recipe and realize that this music was all about the beat and like a jungle telegraph echoed its earlier tribal origins.

Maybe the white status quo sensed that this revolutionary music of slaves and field hands like the great American 20th century poet, Muddy Waters, could lead somehow to overturn the Establishment—their instincts were correct given rock and roll’s eventual cutting of a swath from the Delta through to America’s blackboard jungles, urban sprawl and a neo-tribalistic sequence of youth mutations of sock-hops, boogeying in the back of mom and dad’s car and at the drive-in, screaming Beatles fans, love-ins at Monterey and Woodstock, fan sites, Hip Hop culture successfully invading the suburban mall, and web rings, and Band MySpace pages.

Even the attempted co-opting of rock and roll by safe, white singers like Pat Boone, for example, who hijacked Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” , divesting it of its undulating, native rhythms and innuendo (“Got a gal named Sue, she knows just what to do”) was only a blip. Disco was another Barbarian at the Gates which ultimately failed to take its mantle and actually inspired post MC5 punk, and was ceremoniously served its own funeral pyre at a disco record burning at Comiskey Park in Chicago in 1976. In a frightening reprise of 50’s censorship and parental concern, the PMRC (Parents Music Resource Council) spearheaded by drummer and Vice Presidential spouse, Tipper Gore, was successful in providing convenient labels for popular music to point out its incipient dangers to parents too lazy to listen to the lyrics themselves. Rock and roll survived the labeling system and other vain efforts to stop the beat of time.

Who killed rock and roll, then? Well, like its historical collateral damage of multiple rock and roll suicides, it actually succumbed to self-immolation like a speeding kamikaze guitar run—not in a grand crescendo of Marshall stacks feeding back overamped to 11 with smoke bombs and drums thrilling in deafening splendor—but in greed, naiveté, and most of all, as the result of a generational shift. The beginning of the end was actually in 1968. It was in that year that The Doors decided to sell “Light My Fire” to Buick as a soundtrack for a car commercial. It not only was a source of contention between Jim Morrison and the other three band members—because Jim didn’t want to do it—but the start of a lethal love affair between Madison Avenue and its musical concubine. It was Advertising that killed the Beast.

If Mad Ave killed rock and roll, then MTV was the nail in the coffin. The idea of “music” television may have sounded like a good idea at the time because the inmates had never run the asylum. Rock and roll was always an embarrassment in the television of the 50’s and 60’s. Shows like “Hullabaloo” and “Shindig” suffered from producers and network executives doing too much frugging at clubs with go-go girls and having bad acid experiences that became the TV light shows of op-art, fisheye, multiple single-frame, swirling psychedelia of wall paper surrounding recording artists of the day. Rock was certainly the wicked stepchild of the musical arts. It always seemed to be introduced as the embarrassing poseur, and black sheep of the family—which it was proudly when it worked well.

Ed Sullivan opened up the television stage in what seemed to be a genuine commercial desire to connect with music of all kinds—but the network censors did their best to emasculate bands like The Doors—who infamously did not change the word “higher” in their performance of “Light My Fire” and The Rolling Stones, eventually to become one of rock’s billion dollar conglomerates who did, in fact, change the lyrics to “Let’s Spend The Night Together”, by substituting “some time” in lieu of “the night”. Maybe the art of negotiation made them a better business proposition in the long term. As they say, "you can’t always get what you want."

But, creating visual interpretations by twenty-something, music video “directors” is dodgy because it eliminates the primary experience that is the salient feature of music as an art form. Music videos substitute a visual interpretation that is often quite literal or at the other end of the spectrum, totally contrived, as a substitute for the listener coming to terms with their own experience as it connects with what a song is saying. They were also blatant commercials to upsell records. When The Beatles did early videos for songs like “I Am The Walrus” from “The Magical Mystery Tour”, and “All You Need Is Love”, there was a purity and charm to them because they were unpremeditated and seemed almost like afterthoughts.

The other danger factor was pointed out to me once during a conversation with Frank Zappa just after MTV came on the scene. “How did MTV change music, Frank?” I asked. Without losing a beat, the Maestro intoned, blowing out a plume of smoke, “It turned musicians into models.”

It also had the effect of connecting popular music more directly with the advertisers who would be its nemesis. While it was a rarity for rock and roll to infiltrate the province of Madison Avenue jingles and Hollywood soundtracks, that began to change as rock and roll, itself, became less of a movement and more of a business. Its mass appeal could no longer be denied as it became newsworthy when colorful, Dionysian multitudes grew to attend festivals and stadiums. Even the gold and platinum standards for record sales had to be adjusted higher to accommodate increased audiences for the category. Movie executives were also smoking dope and doing the Swim, and started catering to yuppie audiences with nostalgic, Motown-infused soundtracks replacing or augmenting original motion picture scores. Like music videos, some movies such as “The Big Chill” leaned far too heavily on conveying emotional weight by literally using “The Weight” instead of dialogue and character to drive story structure.

In the 50’s and 60’s, rock and roll wasn’t really a business yet because it was easy to deny. I remember a visit with Little Richard at his house which had been at the Hyatt on Sunset for many years. He proudly displayed his gold records to my brother and me, and remarked that they were the first he’d ever received. This was in 1995. The rip-offs of seminal artists like Richard, Chuck Berry, and others who were denied royalties or entered into bad deals is now the stuff of history with some reparations made, usually through court settlements. Contracts in the 60’s looked like they were signed with a pen in one hand and a joint in the other. I watched “Monterey Pop” recently with my kids who are 8 and 15 and saw that—through their eyes and questions—that it was almost like viewing an ethnographic documentary. It all looks so naive and innocent, and many of the musicians were, too, with respect to the business side of music.

I’ve worked with D.A. Pennebaker on a number of projects who with Richard Leacock and also with the Maysles were largely responsible for cinema verite style of film making. Pennebaker is also well known for his great documentary, “Don’t Look Back”, which documented Bob Dylan’s 1965 tour of England. When I was clearing the video rights for “Don’t Look Back” and “Monterey Pop” as well as on another project for the 20th anniversary of Woodstock, I had to reference the original artist contracts. Jimi Hendrix’s contract for Monterey was signed by his lawyer and most likely never seen by him. The Who were paid $2500 for their Woodstock performance, and were only among several who insisted—and actually got paid for the celebrated free festival. Although he was the first artist to be paid a hundred-thousand dollars for one concert, Jimi left only twenty-thousand when he died. Tom Petty talks about when, as a teenager, he first signed with MCA Records and didn’t understand how books entered into it when he saw the clause about “publishing”. He had the courage and fortitude to eventually sue to get his royalty earnings from publishing, but many such sagas do not share such a happy ending. Even if artists were not paying a lot of attention to deal terms, there were a lot of record company executives, managers, shysters, agents, interlopers, and operators who were.

It was only natural that rock and roll became an industry in the 80’s fueled by cocaine, hookers and other fresh marketing tactics that innovated from the original 50's payola techniques. But most of all, it was the introduction of the CD format that changed the business model. And why shouldn’t it have? Imagine the first meeting where the concept was tendered: “I want to replace vinyl with this!” (Holds up disc which glints like gold in the Hollywood sunlight streaming through the high windows). “What is that?” “It’s plastic. The total cost is going to be about $2.50 to manufacture and including all your distribution and marketing costs! And guess what? We can mark it up as much as 100%! And it will create a whole new market for players, too!” The executive probably was cynical at first, especially at the low cost, but the rest is history as we replaced our collection with an audiophile digital version—even though “Who’s Next” still sounds better on vinyl.

Inevitably, in a lesson that Wall Street should have paid attention to, greed caught up. The Industry now only consists of several major labels left standing or somewhat tottering worldwide in a landscape of thousands of independent labels, a new singles business invented by iTunes, Limewire, MySpace fan pages, Mac garage band, and Amazon downloads. The Internet broke the bank with the Napster peer-to-peer sharing model and a generation that took piracy to another level entirely—evidenced now by Apple relenting last week on DRM. Not only were the inmates now running the asylum, but they were controlling the distribution, too.

The record business is now the iPod economy with well over 100 million sold, over half a billion iTunes software downloads, over $120 million in 2007 profits, and well over a $1billion worth of digital downloads annually. The major labels should have seen that we were on the eve of a new singles business—instead it decided it was a better idea to sue its own customers.

As the mass audience for music grew in the 80’s, arena rock established the tour and merchandise as the revenue model. With the decline in record sales in the last decade, looking to the 90’s heyday when million-sellers used to be the rule, now a hundred thousand unit seller is a big deal outside of certain legacy performers. The only two growth markets for records are for world music and Christian rock which grew from 4% of overall sales in 2000 to over 10% last year. Maybe Jesus will resuscitate the Big Beat, but given the cryogenic state of the industry today, it is clearly a job for an entity with supernatural powers.

Where we are now is that the music, itself, is the Trojan horse stalking consumers as the advertisement for the tour and merchandise. On average, there are forty-thousand concerts a year with average attendance of five thousand tickets sold. The average merchandise per person is 6-8 per customer, but it can be upwards of $20 depending on the artist and with annual market of approximately $1.5 billion. That’s a lot of t-shirts.

The band logo is the final stamp of the rock group as corporation. Advertising killed rock because it legitimized it. Rock and roll’s very existence was that it was the illegitimate child of rhythm and blues, jazz, the Delta, and far off Yoruba beats. As the baby boomers grew older, they became the captains of industry and technology and Madison Avenue and selfishly wanted to hear their own soundtrack—even if appropriated to a thirty-second spot. Bruce Springsteen ordered a cease and desist when Ronald Reagan tried to use his “Born In The USA” for promoting the Republican cause in the 80’s. That should have been a sign.

I mean, Fleetwood Mac in association with Bill Clinton is self-explanatory in a cuddly, yuppie sort of way. But now, rock music is a featured player without guilt and plays party agnostic at political conventions, on the campaign trail, and inaugural balls. How does this scenario equate with “Born To Be Wild” and the bikers getting blown away at the end of “Easy Rider”? How does political endorsement add up when compared to the spirit of Jimi Hendrix’s deconstruction masterpiece performance of the National Anthem during the Vietnam War and Berkeley riots?

When I was growing up in the 60’s, my junior high school gym coach used to call me “Hair” and vilified my music wishing that it would die. It made my passion for the music even stronger. Now, I find it irksome that Bruce Springsteen and Prince perform at the Super Bowl, and rock and roll is the soundtrack to television sports—adding its energy, guitar army, and percussive attack to connect with its viewers who all apparently have grown too old to remember when rock and roll was outlaw music. And am I alone in wondering what “Who Are You” has to do with forensics? Maybe it’s in memories like my battles with the gym coach where rock still lives—as a memory, the music exists as a reference point in time when a song or a band or a show references a moment in our lives that was significant—or even if it was insignificant as Robert Plant once put it—as something “deep and meaningless”. He also said, “I’ve lived a hundred years in rock and roll.” Perhaps that’s long enough for those who have really lived it, but that’s another story…

The day after Keith Moon died, my brother, Jeff, finally got to interview John Entwistle and Roger Daltrey for his movie, “The Kids Are Alright”. During the interview, he asked Roger about the future of rock and roll—a pointed question for The Who, at least, given that they’d just lost their key man. Roger said to him, “Rock and roll doesn’t have a future, so shut up!” That sort of ended the interview, but Jeff still used “Long Live Rock”, with its anthemic refrain, “Rock is Dead” for the end credits of the film—whether to give hope or irony, I’ll never ask for fear it would be a repeat of what Pete Townshend once said to him when Jeff asked what the meaning of his song, “Who Are You” was. Pete replied slyly, “Ask Harold Pinter.” My brother and I always wanted to riff on Pete's famous lines from "My Generation" and say to him, "Hope we get old before we die..." But, we never found the right moment and the lyrics seemed to have haunted him ever since anyway. Rock and roll does not look well in the mirror.

Rock and roll suffers from having become our classical music. It’s cross-generational now. When I was running the Jimi Hendrix Foundation, he had a greatest hits collection called “The Ultimate Experience” that had been selling twenty-thousand units a month for almost two years. Estate Creative Director and former Hendrix producer, Alan Douglas, wondered who was buying all these records and conducted a marketing survey. The results were that 60% of the albums were being bought by fans under twenty. Jimi was now effectively converting his third generation of fans from beyond the grave. But, then again, Jimi is a classical composer now.

Rock and roll shouldn’t age gracefully for some kind of old timers day, endless reunion tours, and unplugged sets. Maybe Keith, Jimi, Janis, Jim, Brian, Buddy, Ritchie, Gene, Eddie, Otis, and all the others were lucky in some way to be frozen in time. The problem with rock and roll is that it was always a euphemism for the mystery dance, so perhaps we were screwed from the beginning. And maybe, just maybe, rock and roll isn’t dead after all, but is just about to start out on one of its annual “farewell tours.” As the song says, “Hail, hail…”

EARTH 2.0

2009-03-28T20:20:00.000-07:00

Does anyone else find it alarming that there is now a back up plan for Planet Earth? In a Special Report in the 28 February 2009 edition of New Scientist, there was an article on the emergent field of Geoengineering that stopped me dead in my tracks. Here was a world of the future being described in terms of Artificial Trees, Space Mirrors, Cloud Seeding, Ocean Fertilization, Sunshades, Biochar, Carbonate Addition, and a host of other scientific remedies for what the article also described as our current stance “in the face of potentially catastrophic climate change.” Some methods are low tech like planting trees, others conjure sci-fi like placing mirrors in orbit. All address either taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere or diverting solar energy from the Earth in order to dampen the greenhouse effect.

At a recent meeting about Geoengineering in London of British politicians and a selection of climate scientists, “the politicians and scientists all agreed that since cuts to carbon emissions will likely fall short we need to be exploring ‘Plan B’.” That said, there was agreement that “there is no single global thermostat which will bring about universal cooling.” While many of the above tactics are decades from realization, the really scary thing is that several have already been “field tested.” The good news is that they have inspired calls for international regulation.

Ocean fertilization, a technique which employs the “seeding” of the ocean with iron filings to stimulate CO2-eating plankton, has been tried by a firm called Planktos ironically enough off of the Galapagos Islands of Darwinian fame. The impact on ocean ecosystems is unknown at present and inspired protests by environmental groups including ETC. As a result of the protests, the London Convention on Marine Pollution acted to extend its agreement with 80 countries to include Geoengineering and also imposed a ban on commercial fertilization. It all conjures up the image of some “Greenfinger” individual mad scientist or nation acting single-handedly to combat climate change.

New Scientist reports that we came close in November 2005, when Yuri Izrael, former vice-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Head of the Russian Global Climate and Ecology Institute attempted to persuade Vladimir Putin to release 600,000 tons of sulphur aerosol particles into the atmosphere “immediately.” No one knows what the impact would have been, but David Santillo, a senior research scientist at Greenpeace Research Laboratories said that if a nation or individual decided to go it alone, “there would almost certainly be an international diplomatic incident.” The US is not without blame either having conducted “rain seeding” programs during the Vietnam War. Whether it is severe drought or the rising of temperatures of between 5 and 10 degrees centigrade within decades, from methane releases to thawing permafrost and even “the breakdown of entire ecosystems”, the forecast is not for cheap sunglasses.

Still, our approach to carbon emissions is leisurely in the face of the fact that the US and China combine to now produce 40% of all such pollution (according to The Nation). The most recent European studies indicate a rise in the ocean levels of between 2 and 4 meters at the very least by 2100 along with shortages of fresh water—regardless of what measures are taken “yesterday” to control carbon in the atmosphere. We have "a very short window of time," Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, indicated in remarks at a Worldwatch conference last January, adding that the Obama Administration's stated goal of reducing emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 "falls short of the response needed by world leaders." Alan Weisman takes the idea of humanity’s impact on the planet several steps further and envisions what the earth would be like starting two-hundred years from now when humans disappear entirely from the scene. In his riveting 2007 book, The World Without Us, he presents a picture of the New York subways becoming underground rivers causing the streets above to crumble under the weight of skyscrapers and where the “asphalt jungle becomes a real one”. His scenarios are not the stuff of B movies, but are based on hard science and current situations like the nightmare of polymer "atolls" that are already growing in the gyres of the Pacific Ocean.

When I visited the Amazon in the 1970’s, I saw the scale of seemingly everything there as prehistoric—from the fabled Victoria Regia lilies that are so large that their leaves can be up to 3 meters wide with stems 7-8 meters long—to the world’s largest serpent, the Anaconda, which can grow to 45-60 feet long. (I have a photo of one which is only about 40 feet).What I felt most of all was the grandeur and power of nature which gave me faith that no matter what we humans were capable of doing to our home world, that the Earth had the ability to rebound in its own time. Weisman’s book also reveals an elegiac element in what he calls “the earth’s capacity for self-healing.”

I always wanted to visit the Amazon ever since encountering a mysterious reference in a book that changed my life called “Morning of the Magicians". I read the book when I was 15, and it enthralled me with arcane knowledge from the strange worlds of Charles Fort and contemporary alchemists living in Europe to the occult forces at work in Hitler’s Germany and the Thule Project. The obscure reference that titillated me most was the example the authors, Ernst Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, used to describe their perspective that despite the pursuit of science, there were still many worlds as yet unknown and new lands to be discovered. An area they cited between two tributaries of the Amazon, the Xingu and the Rio Tapajos, were said to contain thousands of acres of still unexplored territory. Later, coming across a Pink Floyd soundtrack for “Obscured By Clouds”, I was equally inspired by finding a map of New Guinea that still had areas that were marked with the same title of the movie.

The Xingu area is where a real Indiana Jones figure, explorer Colonel Percy H. Fawcett, disappeared without a trace. His story is now examined in a thrilling new biography by David Grann who retraced Fawcett’s final expedition in “The Lost City of Z". I was warned not to go to Xingu, but it was the humans that I was told about and not the native flora, fauna or tribal peoples. It was 1976 and the first leg of the Trans-Amazonica Highway had opened up the region to an influx of prospectors, cattlemen, farmers, rogues, mercenaries, and other characters straight out of our own historical Wild West. During my own “expedition”, I was warned that as a “gringo”, it would be unwise to stray far into the Interior.

What I found were t-shirts with logos, beer bottles, and communal TV sets that signaled the arrival of so-called Western culture and civilization, but what looked like the beginning of the end to me. It reminds me now of a hilarious incident described by Tony Horwitz in his 2008 book, “A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World". When the Mayflower Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock, they were met by Squanto, the chief of the Patuxet Indians who had already encountered enough white men to greet the Pilgrims in their own tongue. His first word of greeting to them was more like a question when he said, “Beer.” It’s not reported by history whether the Pilgrims were able to accommodate him, but no matter—his word set the karmic destiny of a nation, but that is a subject for a future post…or two.

My visit to the Amazon occurred before the martyrdom of Amazonian activist, Chico Mendes, and the real firestorm in the rain forest, but the jungle was already burning. I met one mercenary pilot who worked for an oil company and was just letting loose bombs over clearings in the vast jungle canopy wherever there was an opening that betrayed the existence of a tribal village. Lawlessness was the rule of the day and many of the towns in the Amazon looked like tropical, if very downscale versions of the typical frontier town of American Westerns.

It is well-known that the trees of the Amazon recycle carbon dioxide and generate at least 20% of the Earth’s oxygen. Yet, the fires that continue to burn the forest to clear it to make room for cattle grazing are so widespread that their plumes of smoke can be seen from outer space. But like the melting of ice shelves in the polar regions and many other situations that are either contributing to or the result of climate change, the Amazon is remote from our everyday life and like the statistics of climate models, is a concept that disempowers those of us who want to make a difference.

There are emerging ideas that might contribute to the kind of realignment of thinking that could enable corporations and individuals to a change of values. In a conversation last week with Kevin Henry of Bazzeo, we spoke about the concept of a Social ROI or Return On Investment. “What if, we asked each other, there was an index that guided companies and consumers to measure the potential social benefit—including sustainability—that projects, products, ventures and other commercial enterprises produced?” What effect would such an expansion of the traditional commercial value expressed by ROI have on the way that people not only invested, but also had on consumer choices? What if we could choose between companies that demonstrated an ROI for their shareholders and one whose SROI showed a commitment to giving something back? Clearly, we need to go beyond Corporate Social Responsibility and the current trends of “greenwashing” and bandwagon effects. It makes me crazy when I see an ad from a major oil corporation showboating what they are doing to improve the environment, alternative energy solutions, and my future.

The concept of Corporate Social Responsibility first appeared in the US several decades ago, but did not truly arrive as a field of management expertise until the turn of the 21st century. Originally, advocates from outside the business sector began pressuring corporations to adhere to more socially conscious principles. In short, the three areas where a need for change in corporate behavior was called for were in its social, economic, and environmental impacts. Recently, a stewardship ethics position has arisen within the business sector in response to CSR. The stewardship ethics orientation seeks to find ways to ensure that profitability and other economic criteria are met by practices that also serve to support social values and is a logical forerunner of SROI.

In today’s global economy, CSR has not experienced anything approaching universal acceptance. In the US, a majority of companies still have given only token acknowledgement of the need to appear socially responsible. No less than the Bible of the capital markets, The Economist, is still critical of stewardship ethics and environmentalism, and remains a steadfast supporter of globalization even in the face of very mixed results in emerging markets and the global meltdown. The conflict between dominant world economic powers and poorer nations continues to grow as the latter resist sustainability, which they view as a luxury that only grown economies can afford.

In another discussion last week with USC, UCLA Professor and Architect, Michael Hricak, he mentioned that the current LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standards for sustainable building fall short because they can’t quantify such components of the Green home as natural heating or passive ventilation. This leads to a second opportunity which is to augment such Green standards with those that go beyond the abstraction of carbon credits to innovations that will enable us to quantify nature’s contribution as a market. In other words, what if we placed a monetary value on the trees in the Amazon or the disappearing coral reefs of the world? The creation of a Green Stock Exchange model of valuation for nature would displace our current model which has us on a course set to create nature as a museum in the future.

Mark Hertsgaard first proposed a Global Green Deal in his 1992 book, "Earth Odyssey" and has outlined the plan once again in the March 16 issue of The Nation. He mentions that UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Al Gore urged world governments in February to address the global economic crisis with spending that "launches a new green global economy." They noted that channeling Germany, Britain, Japan, and the US's planned $2.25 trillion stimulus in spending into "carbon-based infrastructure and fossil-fuel subsidies would be like investing in subprime real estate all over again."

Sun Tzu, the author of The Art of War, a fifth century B.C. text which became the standard operating manual for Mao Tse Tung’s revolutionary army in the 1940’s as well American business management in the 70’s said: “The considerations of the intelligent always include both benefit and harm.” Arthur C. Clarke said on a similar wavelength: “The proper study of mankind is not merely Man, but Intelligence.”

Looking at the current state of affairs of our environment, it might be better if we pointed the Arecibo receiving dish that is wired to SETI@home in search of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and pointed it back looking for it on Earth. If Earthlings as a species were to receive a cosmic report card, we would certainly merit a “F”. But, we are very small in the cosmic state of things as the Charles and Ray Eames classic short film, Powers of Ten, artfully demonstrates in its portrayal of the voyage from the human microcosm to intergalactic macrocosm and back again to quantum microcosm.

There are scientists like Hans Moravec at Carnegie Mellon who see a future where we will be able to dispense with the natural world altogether and download human consciousness to machines, no longer necessitating the hardware of our bodies. Others like Gerard O’Neil and his kindred spirits forecast Space Colonies and altogether abandoning what Buckminster Fuller called Spaceship Earth. Another scenario, in some riff out of Erik Van Daniken’s “Chariot of the Gods”, has the Space Brothers showing mercy on our little world by coming to save us in the future. The statistics on all of the above occurring in the near future are less likely than the planting of the artificial trees discussed in the New Scientist article about Geoengineering.

Books like Michael A.G. Michaud’s Contact With Alien Civilizations: Our Hopes and Fears About Encountering Extraterrestrials have looked the pros and cons of what we might expect in such an encounter with what might be advanced intelligent or microbial life forms. There have been protocols developed for such an eventuality, but my favorite was tendered from a distinctly unofficial source. As a junior high school student, I worked for several summers in the mailroom of a New York publishing house. I remember that the subject of UFOs came up one day and my brother, Jeff, and I discussed what it would be like with our then mailroom boss, Herb, a brother from Uptown in Harlem. “What would you say to an alien if you met up with one?” I asked. After pondering the question for a moment, Herb’s eyes lit up and he replied matter-of-factly, “I’d just say, ‘what you got for the head?’”

One would hope that if we eventually meet up with an extraterrestrial, that they will see a paradisical home world and resident, conscious species that merit being rewarded by an intergalactic peace pipe and not vaporization.

THE BIG NOTE OR HOW TO APPEASE YOUR LOCAL ANCESTRAL SPIRITS

2009-03-22T09:38:00.000-07:00

Words have a strange power over us. Anyone can appreciate this who has been to a Death Metal concert or an opera, major sporting event, heard an orator like Martin Luther King, Jr. or witnessed Tibetan monks chanting “Om Mani Padme Hum”. Though most religious beliefs and scientific theories about the origins of the universe favor light at the beginning, there are some that don’t see, but hear the beginning in the form of the First Sound.

The science of Hindu “mantras” or sounds of power is one living example from the Sanskrit tradition that is thousands of years old. This tradition which also figures in Buddhism is based on the ancient development of certain words, syllables, sounds or groups of word that are distinguished by having the ability to create transformation as tools of power. The respect that the specific use of sound had in these Eastern traditions is no better borne witness to than in the early use of music and sound as a weapon that was regarded as capable of being terminal—a feature, perhaps, that some Death Metal fans secretly wish for.

Marshall McLuhan observed that Hitler’s rise can be attributed in large part not only to the dire economic circumstances of 30’s Germany, but to his absolute command of the radio. Had he lived during the Age of Television, McLuhan points out, his frenzied, frothing at the mouth, mad-eyed delivery wouldn’t have lasted a second.

Given the unique power of sound, it’s no wonder that the notion of its connection to the origin of the cosmos entered the realm of modern music as well. Pete Townshend incorporated the idea at core of The Who’s “Lifehouse” project with the song “Pure and Easy” which proclaimed, “There once was a note, pure and easy…” Maestro and 20th century classical composer, Frank Zappa, was more expansive in his expostulating of “The Big Note” in his early masterwork, “Lumpy Gravy”: "Everything in the universe is ... is ... is made of one element, which is a note, a single note. Atoms are really vibrations, you know, which are extensions of THE BIG NOTE...Everything's one note. Everything—even the ponies. The Note, however, is the ultimate power, but see, the pigs don't know that, the ponies don't know that..."

Zappa continued the dialogue in “A Different Octave” in his “Civilization Phaze III”:

Spider: We are ... actually the same note, but ...
John: But different octave.
Spider: Right. We are 4,928 octaves below the big note.
Monica: Are ya ... are you trying to tell me that ... that this whole universe revolves around one note?
Spider: No, it doesn't revolve around it; that's what it is. It's one note.
Spider: Everybody knows that lights are notes. Light, light, is just a vibration of the note, too. Everything is.
Monica: That one note makes everything else so insignificant.

As a great American satirist and sociologist in the tradition of Lenny Bruce and Robert Crumb, it’s hard to separate Zappa’s work from its milieu and the hippie scene that was often subject of his mordant critique. Still, he also said famously: Remember, Information is not knowledge; Knowledge is not Wisdom; Wisdom is not Beauty, Beauty is not love; Love is not Music; Music is the best.”

Or as Germaine Greer said in a 2005 article in The Guardian, “In Frank's world, every sound had a value, and every action was part of the universal diapason, a colossal vibration that made energy rather than reflecting it.”

In our personal lives—as well as in the world of branding—sound is no more refined and focused than in names. "What's in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet," says Juliet in Shakespeare’s immortal tragedy of “star-crossed lovers”. Unfortunately, these teenagers are from warring families, and she is telling poor Romeo that their family names don’t amount to a hill of beans compared with their love for one another. But, names do matter and harshly as they were to find out by play’s end. Fast forwarding to the 21st century, history surrounds us no matter where we live in the place names that we often ignore or are oblivious to. Names are key to understanding not only because they provide a clue to our own identity as individuals, but because place names can provide us a better sense of who we are by locating us in time and space.

After I first moved to LA, one of the things that amazed me was how close history was just in the passing freeway signs that beckoned in English, Spanish, and sometimes odd names like Malibu, Cahuenga, Azusa, and Cucamonga. Curious, I started trying to locate old maps and records to trace names that had this distinctly non-European flavor to them. I mean, growing up in New York, I knew that Manhattan was named after a tribe called the Mannahatta and that Wall Street was named after…well, the wall of a fort. But, maybe it’s just all the tall buildings and pavement that seem to have removed the past so entirely from the landscape—though there is now an interesting project called surprisingly enough, The Mannahatta Project, that was recently profiled in the New Yorker, and is recreating what the New York Island looked like prior to contact by Europeans.

But, it was so easy to squint my eyes somehow in the San Fernando Valley and look at the mountains, washes, and hillsides still intermittently decorated by chaparral and imagine what it was like only a century or less ago. History is close here relative to the Old World. The last full-blooded Chumash Indians died in the Santa Barbara area around 1900. I have a photo of an Indian village in Riverside (which is about half an hour from my house), that dates as recently as 1920. I say “recently” even though it’s almost 90 years ago, but the past seems more present here to me for some reason. Perhaps it’s just that Hollywood has made its mark by adding more ghosts even if they are frozen by artificial light to add a layer to the ancestral spirits and ghosts of the conquistadors, padres, prospectors, cattlemen, and railroad barons that seem to lie rustling just under the cover of the Santa Ana winds and coastal morning fogs. And I guess it was one of those coastal names that started a fascination and study that has lasted to this day with the Chumash people who lived here. I got hold of a Rosetta stone of sorts in the form of notes from an anthropologist named John Peabody Harrington who logged place names and other priceless ethnographic data from the few surviving Chumash during the early part of the 20th century. One such location was “Humaliwo” which in the original language meant to describe the place “where the surf crashes loudly”, a fact that would be appreciated by surfers at the same approximate location where 3000 villagers lived known today as “Malibu”.

The Chumash Indians of Southern California were extraordinary in many ways. They had the only ocean-going canoes in the Western hemisphere outside of the peoples of the Northwest Coast of the continent. They had a working knowledge of astronomy, a complex social system, trading culture, and were world class artists as evidenced by the rock art that still lies hidden to amaze the lucky beholder in sandstone outcrops, caves, and other secret places in their territory between Malibu and Morro Bay.

The Chumash believed that dolphins, a close aquatic relation of the porpoise, were guardian spirits who literally served to hold up the world. It’s no wonder that the Hollywood film industry found its center here for what better description of the artist? The dolphins accomplished this feat by swimming around the earth and weaving a web of salty spray in their looping up-and-down motion between the worlds of ocean and air.

According to local Indian legend, sympathetic spirit beings took pity on the lonely dwellers of the ancient Channel Islands and built a rainbow bridge to the mainland, thereby making way for the first pilgrimage of humans. Unfortunately, not all the humans in this exodus were able to maintain their balance on the bridge of colors; those were the “unlucky ones” who tumbled off before reaching land and transformed into dolphins when they hit the wild currents below.

Today, a curious vernacular adoption of the word “porpoise” employs the term as a verb to illustrate an up-and-down motion similar to the movement of these aquatic mammals. This particular usage is meant to describe periodicity in the life cycle of human beings, societies and even corporations. In this perspective, one’s life “porpoises” as we navigate the highs of comedy and lows or “slings and arrows” of tragedy. One role of drama and the arts is to provide human beings with a method to penetrate this mysterious cycle of time, and to create the absolute that is possible in the moment that time stops and we are part of the whole. “Porpoise” then can become twisted as a sound alike like a Marx Bros. routine to suit our agenda here to mean “purpose” at this intersection where the creative act defines space and time.

It is not recorded whether dolphins or porpoises accompanied the first European explorers who first sighted the area now known as Greater Los Angeles. What is known is that these earliest explorers who were part of the Spanish Cabrillo Expedition in 1542, recorded on Sunday, October 8, their arrival at “the mainland in a large bay” (most likely Los Alamitos or San Pedro Bay) which they named “Baia de los Fumos” or “the Bay of Smokes”. This namesake was given to commemorate the haze that even then covered the landscape in an unreal, mysterious curtain comprised of vapors from campfires of the several dozen Indian villages that dotted the region as far as the eye could see. On the approximate site of one these villages (belonging to the Gabrielino or as they called themselves, the Tongva or “people”), and immortalized in old maps of the desert padres as the town of “Puvungna”, now sits the sprawling campus of California State University at Long Beach.

Though the record of what the village name means is shrouded in haze like the Bay of Smokes, it said to have an association with the word for “crowd”. We do know that the suffix, “gna” means “place of”, for example, as used in other Los Angeles area place names like “Cahuenga” --“place of the mountain”--or “Tujunga” --“place of the owl.” Even so, if Puvungna or “the place where crowds gather” is of uncertain province, it is still regarded as the most significant village documented by one of the most famous missionaries, Father Boscana.

The village of “Puvu” or Puvungna was known as the place where, according to Tongva legend, a great gathering took place to commemorate the creation myth of these local Coastal Shoshonean people. It is said that so many people would show up to the council from afar, that they would have to sleep outside the village limits, keeping warm by crowding together “in a ball.”

Father Boscana documented the shamanic religion of the local Indians in dramatic detail and drew parallels between the Tongva Creation myth and Genesis, citing similarities in their descriptions of the formation of the elements. Other sources have spoken about links between the Tongva narrative and Greek creation story as related by Hesiod, where the archaic Greeks, like the Tongva ancestors, were “acorn eaters” and animals who could talk and came out of the darkness. So, in the same place that ancient ancestors celebrated their stories of creation, the Academy now stands.

California poet Robinson Jeffers’ poem “Hands” memorializes an Indian rock art site deep in the Ventana Wilderness near Big Sur where a ceremonial cave is decorated with several hundred white handprints. He describes the aboriginal artists as speaking to us through time: “Look: we also are human; we had hands, not paws. All hail you people with the cleverer hands, our supplanters in the beautiful country; enjoy her a season, her beauty, and come down and be supplanted, for you also are human.”

Tribal peoples recount that the ancestral spirits are pleased when they hear song and witness the dancing and dramatic performances of human beings who still wear bodies. Our hands differentiate us from the four-leggeds. We are described in dated anthropological texts as “man the tool maker.” When we use our hands to create art, music, dance and poetry, we recreate the world. We also have the opportunity to consciously pay homage to those who came before. If our lives are creative, then we can be driven by a purpose that honors the spirits of Puvungna, now known as Cal State, Long Beach or Yangna, as the place now known as the City of Los Angeles was called by the people who lived her first. For in all of these places, the creation story is ongoing.

According to ethnographic sources, there is now a worldwide crisis of native languages going extinct. Linguist Michael Krauss who has dedicated his career to making the public aware of how language is threatened, estimates that the number of oral languages assured of being around by 2100 is 600 or just 10% of the present number. He further cites that about half of the 6,000 languages spoken on earth today are “moribund” a status due to the fact that “they are spoken only by adults who no longer teach them to the next generation.” The loss of a language is as catastrophic as the disappearance of a species. With it, we lose a piece of the whole.

Like the ancient Indian languages that are disappearing with the death of elders who are often the only remaining speakers, there are many place names whose meaning is now completely lost in time. So, one purpose that we can find in our lives, then, is to define meaning once again for these places by making sure that we amuse, engage and serve the spirits who were here first. Only then, is there the possibility that they will take pity on us and return the gesture by answering with inspiration to light our unique moment in time.

WHO OWNS THE AIR?

2009-03-15T16:39:00.000-07:00

The current “meltdown” as it is euphemistically labeled goes deeper than money and is really a question of values. As a recent article in The Economist called “Diagnosing Depression” said, “The word ‘depression’ is popping up more often than at any time in the past 60 years, but what exactly does it mean?”

There are two main criteria it cites from an Internet based search that differentiate a depression from recession—a depression involves a decline in real GDP that exceeds 10% and/or is a recession that lasts longer than three years. The Great Depression qualified on both counts with GDP falling by approximately 30% between 1929 and 1933. While there may not be apple stands out on every street corner yet, soup lines have been expanding at a rate that may parallel the two banks that the FDIC is now seizing weekly.

Karl Marx, not a man known nearly for humor as say the American comedy team sharing his namesake, may be at least sporting a rictus smile as he spins in his grave. If we are at the beginning of a depression, it will certainly merit the name Depression 2.0 because like the financial engineered debacle we are drowning in, it will be distinguished by a feature set uniquely its own. Technicalities and definitions aside, the current global economic crisis is also as much about the nature of meaning or what might be called by “the meaning of meaning” as it is about values.

Nowhere is this better showcased than in Bernard Madoff’s ability to hide an unparalleled scam while avoiding oversight detection—amazingly even without a single trade for a decade and with a professed 10% return annually—behind a supposedly “proprietary system” he called “split-strike conversions”, which he obstinately refused to define when pressed by the curious. According to April’s Wired and Greg Hays, whose firm Hays Financial Consulting specializes in fraud detection, this critical element of how to run a scam can be summed up as, “There’s usually some cryptic angle.”

Mike Olson of Wired likens this approach to the kind of “marketing scams (that) often push products with secret compounds that say, “triple muscle mass, hair thickness, and brain cells.” Like it or not, Wall Street is now firmly situated in the realm of P.T. Barnum. The New York Times has recently gone so far in two articles to call the “performance bonuses” and “management fees” received by senior banking executives as “looting”. With AIG currently defending its post-bailout executive bonuses and with what the LA Times called the “grudging consent” of the Obama Administration, we clearly are looking at a divide in perspectives, if not values. There seems to be a semantic gap here between “bonus” and “theft” the size of a Black Hole.

The form that this maze of mirrors takes is nor more transparent than with the arcana of derivatives, credit default swaps, and other financial instruments that were developed by the financial engineers or as they came to be affectionately known “quants” starting in the 80’s. Like the equations they are founded on, notably David K. Li’s Gaussian copula function first published in 2000, these values are all theoretical “windows” with often what are only secondary or tertiary relationships to “the store” or collateral. When even “the experts” have professed to not understand these concepts, then we are in the realm of talking heads on CNBC, Bloomberg, and the Sunday morning network “political” talk shows nodding like bobble heads in the back of a repossessed American car being towed away into the sunset. Even a worthy on the frontlines like Elizabeth Warner of Harvard Law School and Head of the Congressional Oversight Panel on TARP offered to Terry Gross last week on Fresh Air that nobody knows yet where the bailout money has gone, but that the process of transparency has started. At this point, the vastness of the numbers involved now that they are in the multiple trillions are just plain numbing since there is no way for we non-quants to reference them.

As the crisis continues to reveal layers of the onion and falls like so many cards in the Wall Street Funhouse, it’s these kinds of expressions of “value” that are a long way from a monetary system based on the gold standard backed up by bullion at Fort Knox and Bretton Woods. We’re way beyond something that Auric Goldfinger would lust for here and the depths of how far the cards will fall can only be described as an endless maze where we’ve just wiped our dung-soiled shoes off on the welcome mat to Wall Street’s House of Mirrors attraction.

So, if the financial basis for the system has now proven shoddy, if not shaken to its core by virtue of not being based on any reality except for greed and probability formulas—both shaky as foundations at best—what then, is the reality we find ourselves in? Psychotherapist Robert J. Sardello and Randolph Severson in a masterwork called Money and the Soul of the World (a phrase coined by Norman O. Brown), provide a clear picture of how we got here: “Bottom line thinking makes money appear as the one solid reality left…money is the epistemology of our Age. Money makes things happen. It is the source of action in the world and perhaps the only power we invest in. Life seems to depend on it…Perhaps in every other respect, in every other value, bankruptcy has been declared giving money the power of some sacred deity, demanding to be recognized. Economics no longer persuades money how to behave. Numbers cannot make the beast lie down and be quiet or sit up and do tricks. Thus, as we suspected all along, economics falsely imitates science. At best, economics is a neurosis of money…it enables functioning in the world, and before long all functioning revolves around maintaining the neurosis.”

Maybe it can be argued that this is a Western neurosis and that a billion Muslims would not subscribe to this apostasy. But we’re not alone—in February, the nation once held as the standard for emerging economies of this century—Dubai—received an initial bail-out of $10 billion from the U.A.E. The crisis of values is clearly a global affair. Or maybe, as Tom Tomorrow mordantly observes in his most recent column in This Modern World, the “current turmoil” is based on the fact that “Tax cuts for the wealthy have never been properly implemented!” His current post features a cover for a periodical called "The Magazine of Wall Street" from July 27, 1929 with the headline "Ten Best Stocks To Buy Now" and Tom's caption, "Little did they know..."

This past week, I was talking with Kevin Henry of Bazzeo, who has been an active voice in the environmental movement since 1974. As an early mover, he has now become a recognized arbiter of style, taste and innovation in the Green Home and especially the kitchen. We were discussing the history of how environmentalism has changed and in particular, how it’s experienced a sea-change in the last five years, in large part due to An Inconvenient Truth taking global warming into the mainstream.

We were discussing corporate “greenwashing” and the bandwagon effect, but Kevin elevated the conversation from my cynicism to his always infectious optimism. He said: “We’ve gone from consumers saying, ‘I’ve got to have that!’ to saying, “Why do I need that?’” Simply put, he spoke to a movement that is the subject of forthcoming lectures called "Consumerism To Consciousness".

This theme is at the root of our current economic crisis and holds the key to recovery. Weather expert and anthroposophical scholar, Dennis Klocek, has taken James Lovelock’s Gaia theory, which posited the planet as a living entity one step further. Klocek offers a formula which advances that the Earth’s consciousness is directly equivalent during any given historical epoch to the level of human species consciousness. Or to put it another way, E∞=H∞/C (E=Earth, H=Homo sapiens, ∞=Consciousness, C=Time). It follows that the sooner we continue of our own volition—rather than as forced by economic disaster—on the path of course correction toward deeper values connected to the whole—the better our future will be.

To survive this crisis of what stands behind value, it is common sense to base our currency on the living system we all share and should sustain together. It’s not a gesture like cap and trade toward substantiating the market value of the natural world that we need now, though to value nature as the market is the right direction. But we need to be careful for as Chief Seattle once asked rhetorically and with some irony of the Great White Father in Washington: “Who owns the air?” A Green WPA, however, would be a great leap forward to start rebuilding our infrastructure and manufacturing around sustainability and renewable energy.

To inspire hope and start on the road to a new earth economy, we will need many more living, breathing formulas like Klocek’s to replace the vampire quant formulas of Wall Street—but Klocek’s equation is a miraculous, bold and auspicious way to formulate an Earth Standard to a eco-system of organic values based on every breath we take…

IT'S A SHORT FORM WORLD AFTER ALL

2009-03-07T15:28:00.000-08:00

My eight-year-old son recently asked me when I started seeing in color. We were watching a black and white TV show on cable and had been talking about what some of my favorite shows were when I was growing up. This wasn’t my first close encounter with my children’s incredulity at my media shortcomings. Past incidents have included their disbelief that I grew up without videotape and DVDs. Vinyl recordings were also a revelation when I pulled some albums from my secret stash out of the garage and gently placed them on the altar of a new turntable.

Artifactual media can be a curio if not hold a talismanic power over newcomers. Sometimes new generations are beaten into submission through accidents of discovery or inter-generational wars of attrition. A major victory in my personal campaign in support of archaic media occurred last week when my teenager asked for advice on how to properly handle her new vinyl acquisition—an MGMT record. It was almost a cultural breakthrough until it was marred when I had to transfer the record to a digital file because my son had used my new record player to do some scratching—only without the benefit of having a disc on the turntable, thus shredding another hard-to-find needle and rubber platon.

When generational media worlds collide, minds are blown. In my case, I was captivated by my son’s perspective that before the advent of color televisions and what NBC called “living color”, we would all obviously only be seeing the world in black and white. Looking at the Wall Street quants maze of arcane derivatives and other financial instruments, I sometimes wish the world could still be deciphered in black and white. But what is interesting about my son’s comment is that we all seem to take the media we grow up with for granted.

There is now a generation that did not know life without the Internet and mass game changers like the iPhone and Wii. More important it seems than changes in technology and distribution are the generational shifts that change the way consumers use media. It also leads to questions about where the mass market and Main Street have gone and a conversation I had last week with the most brilliant marketer I know.

Fred Seibert is a self-proclaimed “serial entrepreneur” who among other things was largely responsible for branding MTV and currently has several of the top-rated animated TV shows. But, I don’t hold any of that against him especially since these accomplishments don’t always mean that he’s always right—even though visitors to his old office were warned by a large sign that they best leave their opinions outside the door because the person they would find inside was infallible.

Still, like the agent provocateur he is, Fred said, “The methodology to reach the mass market no longer exists.” Now, maybe I’m taking his observation out of context for the sake of this post, so I duly note that his comment originated with respect to the state of the music industry. But, we were also talking about how the television business was bound to follow suit sooner or later.

When I was watching an old episode of “The Honeymooners” on TV Land recently, the difference between the world of the long form, mass market universe of yesteryear and today’s short form, micro media markets was brought into high relief. The scene featuring a typical argument between Jackie Gleason and Audrey Meadows lasted for almost two minutes without interruption and only used one wide shot. The relationship of early television with stage performances is clear when watching this series as well as other fifties classics like “The Jack Benny Program” and “Amos and Andy”. It’s no accident that live drama like CBS’ “Playhouse 90” made up a lot of 50’s TV fare.

In the 60’s, television scenes got shorter, influenced most likely by the tempo of rock and roll. With the introduction of MTV in the early 80’s, quick cutting and handheld techniques became the order of the day and “scenes” lasted a matter of seconds, serving up music cuts instead of video edits, and in turn, influencing highly stylized, network TV series like “Miami Vice”. Media critic and sci-fi writer, Paul Levinson, has offered a granular look in Digital McLuhan of the dwindling length of scenes for small screen time from earliest television through the 90’s. He also notes that, in a reversal of fortunes that Marshall McLuhan would have appreciated, many movies in the last two decades are remakes of classic TV shows—so many so, in my view, that one wonders how many are left to dredge up in the archives. As Frank Zappa once said to me, “The world will end in nostalgia”.

Last year’s introduction of long form downloads of its primetime hour dramas by ABC displayed a fascinating metric—Nielsen Digital measured that there were some 40 million total downloads. But, the average time viewed was—guess what? Three minutes. The consummation of this sea change movement to short form was realized with the one-second Miller High Life commercial in this year’s Super Bowl. At $3 million per 30-second spot, it was also a relative bargain.

Still, Fox’s American Idol is still reaching what is undeniably a huge mass audience even when compared with the former power of top-rated shows from broadcast TV’s height such as “MASH”, “Cosby” and “Seinfeld”, which characteristically reached scores of millions of TV viewers. According to Entertainment Weekly, last Thursday’s Idol show attracted 21.2 million viewers beating Survivor’s 12 million. If I’m a consumer brand trying to reach a mass market, then even a portion of the total TV universe on any given night still represents a viable methodology compared to the short form universe of the Internet. However, television advertising has never been proven to have a direct correspondence between commercials and purchase. In the television business, it’s all about growing brand awareness. Even so, Short Attention Span Theater has arrived even as just a relatively unmonetized consumer trend. While YouTube’s valuation is $1.5billion, its 2008 revenues were $150million, a paltry sum compared with the $65 billion TV ad business.

Despite this stark earnings contrast, Cynthia Turner reports in that the overall Internet video audience is now 135 million strong. But, a growing share of audience isn’t necessarily market share. It isn’t a question of size that matters, but of how this new online video medium works as discrete from others. Largely as a result of the Obama Inaugural, YouTube was up after a flat December to 5.86 billion video streams in January with over 100m uniques. Paidcontent.org reported a week ago that Yahoo, MySpace, MTV.com, and YouTube are all considering eventual upgrades to HD as a way to keep up with broadcast. But, the question presented by mass media is not a matter of how many streams but where is the mainstream? And what matters is not necessarily how people are watching at any given time, and not even what they are watching, but how and for how long?

Appointment, scheduled viewing was the original standard for broadcast television. Video and cable chipped away at this model, but it was the Internet and personalization that finally did it in. TV is literally background to my daughter’s generation and a complement to other multitasked media input. In the on demand, VOD, PVR, short form universe, video consumption is not tied to time in the same way that hit TV shows once defined an evening when families had to sit down together in front of the pixel campfire to catch their favorite show—or else miss it entirely.

Even though CBS’s March Madness is nearly sold out for online ads, it is unclear how the short form universe is reaching users in a meaningful way. Short form video may have the eventual power of narrowing the focus to very specific demographics. Consumer viewing habits will continue to morph. In a recent piece, Phil Swann asks whether Blockbuster will go away. Maybe, but my answer to Fred’s question is that TV is still the methodology to reach the mass market.

Audience share is transformed with the introduction of every new visual medium. But each medium has its own value proposition and attendant feature set that can vary in differentiation from others with respect to process and content. But movies didn’t replace radio and TV didn’t replace radio—and the Internet didn’t replace TV. The introduction of a new medium doesn’t replace extant forms, but displaces them by defining new audiences as well as cannibalizing old ones—and their power to do so is always based on how they increase value for the consumer.

The bigger question is what impact the generational shift of video consumers who have grown up in the short form universe will have on making the video stream the standard and long form an occasional luxury seen at the movies or as PVR saved fare of five or ten minute shows on future integrated online and offline "broadcast" networks. But in concentrating on the expanding video web, we are looking in the wrong direction. My prediction is that it’s going to be the mobile video web that is the definitive, disruptive platform to watch. Whatever happens, one thing is sure—it’s already a short form world after all and our children will inevitably be faced with tough questions from their own kids who won’t believe them when they roll out their saved iTunes playlists and talk about how cool HD and iPhones were.

SOCIAL MEDIA SMALL AND BIG

2009-02-28T07:40:00.000-08:00

Social Media has done a lot for fame. While reality TV shows went a long way to enabling the average Joe and Jane to realize Andy Warhol’s prediction that everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes in the future, I read recently that Social Media is ensuring that in the future, at least social network users will be famous to fifteen people.

Reality TV has also changed our notions of reality—especially since it is actually a highly scripted medium—but I won’t give up any trade secrets here and the question of "what is reality after reality shows?" is better left for another post. While the medium of the Web has famously wired us all as global citizens—at least the billion of us who are now online worldwide—social media has also had the flipside of making our local "neighborhood" more relevant.

Social networks are now populated by over a quarter of a billion users, so the possibilities of growing one’s own network seem as big as a customized pyramid scheme. Facebook, however, places limits on how big or famous you can actually be. Currently, you can have up to 100 Friend Lists and up to 1500 friends per Friend List. The multiple isn't bad, considering that if you maximized your Lists to the limit, it represents the reach of a new music release that has done extremely well by today’s standards. Remember when a gold record award celebrated sales of CDs, tapes or vinyl of over 500,000 units and the platinum of one-million? Now, a 50,000 seller is cause for…well, some kind of celebration.

So, the Social Media Effect has made our own local universe of possibilities expansive, but compared with the expanding universe of Internet pages numbering over a trillion last summer, the world of social media has, in fact, shrunk-wrapped us all. One might find a distributed computer strategy handy to manage a social network that expanded beyond the known limits circumscribed by hosting and bandwidth on MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and other networks. Even for the media famous, there seems to be an organic eco-system dictating just how big social networks can grow—managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, Apple fellow, co-founder of Alltop, author and guru, Guy Kawasaki has 11,290 fans on his Facebook page. Still, if Guy decided to record and release an album to his "fans" and it sold through, he wouldn’t even make a dent on the Billboard charts.

What is happening has been best described just by the title of marketing genius, Seth Godin’s worthy and fun book, Small Is the New Big: and 183 Other Riffs, Rants, and Remarkable Business Ideas. It’s not necessarily a new idea—economist E.F. Schumacher’s 1973 book, Small Is Beautiful is not only a seminal text in its call for sustainable development, but in its advocacy of the small. A core idea growing out of the author’s study of village-based economics is its assertion of “Buddhist economics” summarized in Wikipedia: "[A modern economist] is used to measuring the 'standard of living' by the amount of annual consumption, assuming all the time that a man who consumes more is 'better off' than a man who consumes less. A Buddhist economist would consider this approach excessively irrational: since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption…The less toil there is, the more time and strength is left for artistic creativity. Modern economics, on the other hand, considers consumption to be the sole end and purpose of all economic activity."

The notion of the small having a far reaching impact goes back in Western culture to the Butterfly Effect theory first described in 1890, later in a 1952 Ray Bradbury short story about time travel (informing the phenomenon known as time paradox), and made popular by Edward Lorenz as part of Chaos Theory and his study of computer models of weather prediction.

Lorenz published his work in 1963 and presented it at the New York Academy of Sciences where "One meteorologist remarked that if the theory were correct, one flap of a seagull's wings could change the course of weather forever." The seagull was eventually replaced with the poetry of the butterfly and at an American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1972, Philip Merilees concocted a title for Lorenz’s paper as: “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” When we update our social network status, we are flapping our virtual wings.

Social networks are an organic growth the Web’s key value proposition of personalizing the world. The expansive potential of one’s personal social network is more akin to the relationship of the microcosmic—in this case, the personality—and the personal macrocosmic—or its potential reach to scores, hundreds, if not thousands of friends who then orbit our individual pages waiting for the next transmission of what we are doing, thinking, loving, sharing. But how deep can the quality and definition of “friend” be when it numbers in the thousands?

Charles and Ray Eames provided a stunning, classic video and book version of the relationship between the micro and the macro in their Powers of Ten. But humans need the comfort of scale in the form of intimate relationships, family, sports teams, fan sites, personal networks, and other tribal affiliations. The stars may be “all connected to the brain” as Pete Townshend once wrote in “Pure and Easy”, but sometimes the sprawl of thousands of stars on a clear night can present a canvas that is daunting as hell and not heaven in its infinite possibilities beyond human comprehension. We humans also have a tendency to get lost in a crowd.

Or as Elias Canetti once observed in his Crowds and Power, a fire sometimes has more power to unify a theater than a play can. The individual has the power to understand "the play is the thing" as a primary experience. But the natural force of fire has an elemental power that everyone understands with his or her reptilian brain—it’s fight or flight time, baby and ain’t no time to think about it when the whole shithouse is going up in flames.

Social Media theory posits that the group mind and crowd actually has the power to think and maybe even think better than one lowly Mensa member. But Canetti also said that the ultimate crowd may be the tribal pack of spermatozoa out of which, only one, has enough fame potential to survive the swim upstream to party down with the egg. So, let's send out the smoke signal--Social Media needs its own Darwin to sort out the details of who will best survive.

NATIONAL NANO MEMORY

2009-02-25T09:23:00.001-08:00

If you remember, the national dialogue in the US prior to 9/11 was secure in its comfort zone of celebrities and sex. In Los Angeles, the local conversation was about the LA Lakers who were anticipated to have another great season, an assumption that was celebrated by a growing number of Laker flags ceremoniously fastened to car windows and waving purple and yellow all over the LA freeways.

Cut To: Post 9/11, the Laker banners came down and were replaced by American flags, more numerous in number and sometimes larger in size when they weren’t the commercially bought versions. To say that a lot was lost in those days as a country is beyond an understatement. But, one of the things that we famously or infamously lost was the opportunity to embrace the groundswell of world opinion that was in our favor. The Bush Administration fumbled that ball when all but a handful of world nations sympathized with our plight and national tragedy.

Instead, and as we all know all too well, our leaders and news media cultivated and fed a national spirit of jingoism and Wild West style revenge leading to wars in foreign lands. They continue to haunt us at a weekly budget of $1billion and consume the declining American hegemony in an echo of Rome, which collapsed on the home front due in large part to the impossibility of sustaining its Empire militarily and logistically abroad.

As I joined the daily ranks of the freeway lemmings, it was hard to ignore to the procession of red, white, and blue accompanied by a medley of decals announcing “United We Stand” and the like. Still, it was easy to understand how hoisting and affixing the symbolic provided some grounding—if not hope—in the grim days and months following the attack on the World Trade Center. But about six-months after 9/11, I noticed that the American flags started to dwindle, then disappear altogether, and were replaced by the familiar swarm of waving Laker flags. It struck me as not only as premature to say the least, but somehow significant.

Did this transition back to cheering on a local sports franchise reflect something, however informal, about how long the national attention span actually was? Even though there was some self-reflective conversation largely on the so-called Left about why the attack occurred—round-up the usual suspects—Gore Vidal, Eqbal Ahmad, Noam Chomsky—it seemed that we collectively lost the opportunity to ask ourselves the many, hard questions—usually summarized by the Right and Left as “Why Do They Hate Us?”

My informal personal “survey” of the national short-term attention span may not be scientific, but it seems to me that we have long suffered from either a form of communal ADD or shoddy, selective memory. John Ralston Saul, named as one of Utne Reader’s 100 “visionaries”, observes in his prescient, 1995 book, The Unconscious Civilization: “…free speech and democracy are closely tied to an active, practical use of memory—that is, history—as well as an unbroken sense of the public good. Commerce has no memory. Its great strength is in its ability to constantly start again: a continual recreation of virginity. Commerce also has no particular attachment to any particular society. It is about making money, which is just fine, as far as it goes.”

I don’t want to add any gloom to the euphoria that has accompanied the entrance of the new Administration to Washington. Recognizing that President Obama is courageously facing an inherited “legacy” of his predecessor which is more like a firestorm, we are still realistically circling the drain of something that looks an awful lot like Depression 2.0. Several months ago, the “experts” finally proclaimed that it was “official”—we were in a recession—and had been so for a year. But, this wasn’t really news for a lot of non-experts who had not been waiting for the confirming metrics, but had seen it all too closely in the form of shrink-wrapped, personal financial circumstances.

If the six-month National Attention Span rule holds, perhaps all those red, white, and blue “Hope”, “Change”, “Progress”, and “Yes We Did” bumper stickers won’t be replaced, but the euphoria of potential change is due to leave us at the latest by springtime or six months after the Election. I obviously hope not and also hope that maybe this picture is just a shallow LA thing and not reflective of the entire Nation after all. Maybe it will just be Dodger flags fluttering in the smog. But somehow, I feel like I should be getting ready to hoist either the Jolly Roger or Tibetan prayer flags from my car window...and hopefully, it’s the latter. What do you think?

IS PERSONALIZATION REALLY THAT "PERSONAL"?

2009-02-20T20:09:00.001-08:00

Do you ever wonder what the meaning is behind the words that we use everyday? I admit that I’m a geek when it comes to etymology. My fetish is word origins and especially tracking down the roots of words that we just toss off, often without thinking much about them. I like to rustle through the OED and various etymological dictionaries, lexicons of slang, clichés, and the like at random, just to see what turns up.

The Internet has been widely acclaimed as possibly the greatest social transformer since Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press and moveable type. Among other things, the Web has made community, interactivity, and personalization standard features if not demands, and even requirements of contemporary life—at least for many of the billion people who are now online.

I’ve read a lot about social media in the last year—whether in The Economist or in such books as Wired writer, Jeff Howe’s Crowd Sourcing: Why The Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business, Clay Shirky’s classic Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations , and John Clippinger’s A Crowd of One: The Future of Individual Identity . Now the power of group think and action is not new as Howe points out. Early hunter societies quickly learned that two brains—or at least two atl atls—were better than one (a basic meaning of “crowd sourcing”), in striking down Pleistocene prey. Even though all of these books are about leveraging the many, they have made me think about what “personalization”of the individual—in the context of the Internet and technology—really means.

MySpace, iPhone, YouTube. It’s all about the individual one might think at first blush. Ostensibly, “personalization” means customizing features to suit an individual’s taste and style. But, are we really being bamboozled a bit here? When you’re setting up your Facebook or LinkedIn profiles, for example, aren’t you being crammed and compartmentalized into convenient categories of somewhat generalized interest? I mean, netvibes and other RSS aggregators offer the convenience of creating a semblance of your very own newsstand. Maybe there’s a precedent even in print media for The New York Times masthead still announces, “All The News That’s Fit To Print”, which some cynical, if insightful soul once suggested should really read, “All The News That Fits.” But, at the end of the day, isn’t a lot of information being left out for the sake of making it all fit—whether it’s in The New York Times or our social network profiles?

When you look up “personalization” in The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology, you are guided to its root in the word, “personal”. The use of the word apparently goes back to before 1387 when it was borrowed from the Old French word, “personel”, which came from the Latin word “persona”, which we are told meant to describe “a person”. More interesting is that its use to describe individuality or a distinctive character, was first recorded in 1795. Before the tide of European and American revolutions, which occurred just prior to that time the only individuals of note were generally monarchs and the royal classes who worked for them. Otherwise, there were the great masses or “commons”.

Even in the field of astrology, natal readings for individuals--excepting monarchs and royals--were relatively unknown prior to the 18th century. Mundane Astrology, as it was called, was the province of figuring out the future for countries and rulers, but the Average Joe was of little consequence in the prognostications of court astrologers. The rise of the individual, then, may be echoed in the actual need for the word “personal” to describe something more than just “a person”.

So, in describing ourselves within the social network “city limits” of a profile page, something has to go. Clippinger’s book provides a perspective from "social physics" with a debt to anthropology and sociology that says we are defined as individuals, in part, by our desire to be part of the crowd—and by what is reflected back to us by others and what they think.

It reminds me of something John Densmore, the drummer of The Doors, said to me once when I asked him shortly after the release of Oliver Stone’s biopic, what he thought of the movie. Given the troubled production during which the three “surviving” members of the band were all consultants—and then decided to bail “due to creative differences” with the director—John was quite diplomatic. “Well,” he answered, “I guess when they make a movie of your life in two-and-a-half hours, they’ve got to leave something out…”

Maybe when you are trying to personalize a medium that is far more than a mass medium—arguably the first truly global medium, you don’t want to design a network that will unravel out of accommodating too much uniqueness or the truly customized. Are we then losing anything of our originality in the process of being conscripted by the need for interactivity and community socialization that the Web indulges and has made de rigeur?

Jeremy Rifkin described to me how the Baby Boomers’ parents were the last generation who had a historical frame of reference—in other words, they defined themselves by looking back at World War II and the Great Depression. By contrast, Jeremy said that starting with the Boomers, the generations following were all defined by the Self and self-reference. The Boomers and those to follow are all “therapeutic generations”.

Western Psychiatry and Tibetan Buddhism would say that the Battle of Ego is one that we all face as human beings. In this Battle, we are thrown into an ongoing war that in essence seeks a balance of power between a healthy sense of self and the egoistic behavior at the root of neurosis and psychosis that damages others and therefore, ultimately ourselves. Who knows that the Web is now providing us with a playground where we will lose the Battle as our personal identities become branded by misleading marketing prefixes like “My” and “i” or by fitting ourselves neatly onto a profile page.

While Salvador Dali once remarked, “Perfection is to get lost!”, I don’t think we should give up the ghost without a good fight because technology undoubtedly brings with it benefits and progress, but when machines create efficiencies for us, what do we lose in the process? Is there another kind of "identity theft" at work here? There is no free lunch when we are not only consumers, but what is consumed.

WHY THE WEB IS A TIME MACHINE

2009-02-15T16:51:00.000-08:00

Have you ever noticed how your sense of time is affected when you are online? I remember when I first started exploring the Internet (in a bygone era when such activity was somewhat cutely described as “surfing the web”) and being interrupted by my wife at around 3 in the morning when she asked, “Do you know what time it is?”

I’d been online since early that evening and to tell the truth, I actually had absolutely no idea what time it was—or the hidden subtext buried in her question. When I contemplate how the Web has changed since then, one of the things that stands out is that the novelty of finding the new may have dissipated, but there is still a sense of being in a different time zone when online. Today, the so-called “three-second rule” which seems to rule a lot of web marketing and behavior dictates that a site’s “call to action” or “value proposition” must be readily placed in the upper right quadrant of the screen in order to capture the nano attention span of the current day web user.

So, in the 15 years or so since the first web browser, Mosaic, we seem to have narrowed our field of vision with an increased demand for instant gratification—the YouTube cannibalistic effect to see new video after new video as a contrast to appointment and series viewing habits that once dominated broadcast television—and now, out of the 11.8 billion web sites and blogs (as of 2005) to choose from, it’s given new meaning to the next channel is “just a click of the remote away”.

In this case, the next site is just a mouse click away and seems to be the result of a generational change as much as one directed by so much choice. This seeming infinite sprawl of sites called for an organizing principle much like a contemporary Alexandrian Library—just with all of its index cards thrown chaotically into virtual space—hence, the search engine appeared on the scene and now Google famously or infamously owns much of that universe.

Still, the one thing that infinity seems to belie is that we have a lot of time on our hands. I joke with some of my friends that they must have full-time staffs to manage their social media accounts. And Twitter is the most recent example of breaking down time into the nano. It appears that just like some virtual Alice, we are getting both smaller and longer in time through the Web. I still often forget how long I’ve been online—even if the time I spend “surfing” has been replaced by more targeted use. And when I think about where the time is going when I am online, I am often reminded of something that the Austrian Spiritual Scientist, Rudolf Steiner once said at the beginning of the 20th century.

In one of his more obscure papers, he predicted that by the end of the century, a new life-form would appear that was both non-biological and would grow in parallel with biological life-forms by using their energy to propagate itself. What if that’s where all the time is going? Sounds kind of creepy, but the reality is that the silicon-based life-forms have already arrived and may be thriving quite well on our backs.

In his 2007 book, New Theories of Everything, English cosmologist, theoretical physicist, and mathematician, John D. Barrow , writes: “Today, a science fiction writer looking for a futuristic tale of silicon dominance would not pick upon the chemistry of silicon so much as the physics of silicon for his prognostications. But this form of silicon life could not have evolved spontaneously: it requires a carbon-based life-form to act as a catalyst. We are the catalyst. A future world of computer circuits, getting smaller and smaller yet faster and faster, is a plausible future “life-form”, more technically competent than our own.”

Barrow’s last statement certainly gives pause. First, it certainly gives new meaning to the notion that the Singularity is Here (see Ray Kurzweil's book and also . Additionally, any advanced extraterrestrial tourists cruising in our galactic neck of the woods and seeing just how little we have evolved since the Upper Paleolithic with wars and climate change ruling the day—not millennia—would give this small planet an “F” on its cosmic report card. So, perhaps it’s not a big stretch that machines can evolve as a “more technically competent” species than us. And maybe we should be more conscious where the time goes when we are in the virtual pipeline looking for that perfect, next breaker.

My son has a Time Machine book that came with a delightful pocket watch whose hands and numbers run backwards. I’m still trying to figure out how to wind it. But, it’s led me to ponder that it would be interesting if human life had its own version of a web “history” or back button that worked as well as it does for the new breed of silicon-based life-forms. If they should eventually ask us to join them, perhaps this would be a deciding factor in their favor. As Jorge Luis Borges once noted, “The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.” Maybe the best that our partnership with technology can do is to point us in time in the direction of the gaps as we surf between the waves of web pages and electricity. Or as Tuli Kupferberg of The Fugs once said, “I now pronounce you Man and Machine.”

UFOS R US

2008-12-06T11:56:00.000-08:00

I met my friend, Dr. Kerry Joels ( ), when we were both working on launching the Challenger Center for Space Science for NASA shortly after the tragic accident. Kerry is a brilliant scientist, who also happens to be a pretty fair Country Music songwriter as well. He's been the Curator for the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Consultant on Distance Learning to Congress, has worked for numerous bipartisan Administrations and wrote The Space Shuttle Operators Manual and Mars One Mission Manual. He was a technical consultant on Star Trek movies and in fact, a child TV star, himself. In other words, he should know something about Outer Space.

So, when I asked him what he thought about the subject of UFOs and Extraterrestrial Contact, I thought I might get the usual cynical response to be expected from a science professional. In particular, I asked about the kind of purported close encounter represented by the infamous Roswell Crash in 1947. He said that he believed that it was highly unlikely that with the requisite advanced technology interplanetary tourists would use, such crashes were likely--especially given the low annual statistics for conventional, terrestrial airline crashes. That said, he continued that if there were crashes of discs and the like that have occurred, that he believed the likelihood was that the vehicles were commandeered by earthlings from the future.

Kerry has what you might call a Big Point as opposed to just "a point".

Why is it that we have a tendency toward projection as a species when it comes to our capabilities? It reminds me of the Erik Von Daniken, "Chariots of the Gods" thesis, which posited that monuments such as the Great Pyramid could never have been completed by human beings and therefore, had to have been constructed and left by aliens for human kings like Cheops to brand in their own image. A Japanese documentary crew tried to recreate the Great Pyramid by using means that they said were originally used by human crews. They failed miserably and ended up with a Mini-Me version that was lost in the great shadow cast by the original. Does the lack of Japanese architectural prowess supports the extraterrestrial origin theory?

It actually begs another question which is why can't we conceive that it is possible that previous civilizations and cultures were more advanced in some ways than our own? Given the cultural breakthroughs of the Upper Paleolithic some 20,000 years ago which witnessed the creation of art among other things, the advances of the last millennia pale in comparison to the discovery of fire and evolution of language.

So, why couldn't all these badly videotaped and photographed UFOs have come from our future? Or as Dave Thomas ( ) once said to me, "In the fifties, we thought that the future would bring the flying car. Instead, all we got was the P.T. Cruiser."

Perhaps, if we follow Kerry's perspective, we'll upgrade from flying cars and all get to drive flying saucers instead.

HOW NOT TO WRITE ABOUT THE FUTURE

2007-08-31T12:27:00.000-07:00

I am writing you from a future. A future where technology will appear to make things better because its immediate effects have been overestimated and its long-term effects underestimated. It is a future we can glimpse now if we look for clues in the “back pages”, the subtext, and scroll through to the source code. How you might ask, do we see into the future?

I’ve been trying for a long time. Since I started reading, my first books were about the past, prehistoric archeology—and the future, as in science fiction. Initially, I especially enjoyed childhood classics like Tom Swift, and Jules Verne, but eventually graduating to the classical canon of Ray Bradbury, Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke. As adolescence took over, there were detours to Harlan Ellison, Olaf Stapledon and to the fantasy and horror genres. I have been collecting books about the future ever since and now, some of my best friends are futurists.

Looking back, it’s interesting to me that I read about the past and the future when I was young, but wasn’t particularly interested in reading the newspaper. The philosopher, George Santayana, famously remarked, “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

His quote speaks to a first step in understanding the future by referencing the past—something I seem to have intuited at a young age before education biased me about the nature of time flowing in one direction—but time is another story entirely, awaiting another column, perhaps. In my work life, I graduated to reading books about the future and my collection has continued to grow. I read everything from books about divination, both ancient and modern, to theoretical works like David Orrell’s recent study of the science of prediction, The Future of Everything.

There are other engaging and important books like The Extreme Future, The Singularity Is Near, Turning the Future Into Revenue, as well as many of Robert D. Kaplan’s works and anything and everything by Jeremy Rifkin, who runs the Foundation for Economic Trends in Washington, DC. Books on scenario planning are also an especially useful subgenre. Others like Megatrends 2010, the sequel to the 1988 best seller by John Naisbett suffer from being too general to have staying power. And there’s always Faith Popcorn for those readers interested in more pop forecasting.

One of the best books I’ve read on the subject in the last several years is Future Hype: The Myths of Technology Change by Bob Seidensticker, a realistic and debunking look at how technology’s effects can be oversold. That said, one thing that I can predict with certainty is that books about the future don’t age particularly well—hence, my own story.

Eight years ago, I was asked by a well-established New York literary agent to apply what I’d learned traversing the world of traditional and new media to write a book about the future. An appropriately high-minded title with appropriately obscure subtitle soon emerged, The Audience of the Future Is Watching: The Birth of Tribal Media, and my word processor began to hum. I quickly wrote the first two chapters-- “Game Generation” and “It’s Like, Whatever—the New Language of Indecision”.
Somewhat unexpectedly, my enthusiasm abated. I had begun thinking about the future of my book, and went through various nightmare scenarios of planned obsolescence for my nascent work. In retrospect, my use of the antiquated word “audience” is telling of obsolescence, given that the term originally comes from the Old French word meaning, “hearing.”

So, here I offer the flap copy of my unpublished book about the future for you to judge to see if I was right about not wanting to write it. Everything is exactly as I wrote it ten years ago. Hint: I couldn’t resist planting one new bullet just to make it fun for those gamers to discover. Answer will be revealed in the next post.

Here goes:

•The machines will win the current war between silicon-based life forms and carbon-based bipeds.

•Personal computers and information will continue to develop as a parallel non-biological life form that will demand as its price of admission the loss of human consciousness.

•Data will become a time machine. Data flow will change our perception of time, slowing psychological time and compressing physical time.

•The simulated and the real will exchange places and attempt a coup on the human imagination.

•The difference between the human and machine will blur until science proves the existence of the soul.

•The upcoming final consolidation of media will narrow consumer choice.

•There will be a direct correlation between the near-term expansion of media distribution and a growing, critical shortage of content.

•The on-demand universe will, in fact, bring disempowerment of the individual through a growing lack of diversity in content.

•There will be anarchy at the frontier where multinational brands and youth tribes meet.

• Advertising and entertainment will combine to become one medium.

• Co-ventures between advertisers, celebrities and the studios will create a sponsored model for the motion picture business.

•Primary, direct experience of the world will become the ultimate commodity.

•The growing shift in control of distribution from the media conglomerates to the consumer will continue and the future integration of online media with on-demand, set-top technology will ensure that consumers remain in control.

• The audience of the future will grow to expect empowerment, as a component of their daily media intake and entertainment that doesn’t offer a proactive element, will not survive.

• Yuppie parents coddling of their offspring with media will turn children into “tiny adults” and childhood will become an artifact.

•The saturation bombing of our senses by media will create changes in the use of language and influence a shift from clarity and definition to the tentative tense and uniformity.

•Technology will grow more compact and make life seem portable, but will make our cultural obsession with permanence turn into a mania.

•Future advancements in telecommunications technology will have the apparent effect of bringing people closer, but will actually make their communication more abstract and increase the distance between them.

•Corporations will continue to believe that increased demographic knowledge of consumers through data mining will bring them closer to buyers, but the conversation between sellers and buyers will become a monologue.

•The end of puberty will create a world in which intimacy is more valuable than gold.

•Games and role-playing will spawn religious cults where barter and betting offer a substitute for cash.

•Multi-tasking will create new strains of learning disorders that will make attention deficit disorder seem like the common cold.

•The coming generation will have no brand loyalties, only community affinities.

•Violence and sex will prove false gods and demand replacement models.

•The average attention span will become nano and memory will become a drug.

•The dominance of the visual and decline of the word will cause literacy to become an underground cargo cult.

•The expanding daily media bath will finally turn nature into a museum.

• The role of the United States as a media imperialist will decline and innovation in technology and entertainment will largely come from abroad.

•History will totally disappear as a generational frame of reference and be replaced by therapy and the self as dominant cultural worldview.

Scholar and historian of comparative religion, Mircea Eliade, once posed that as culture declines, there is a mistaken belief that if everything is published--from the Tibetan and Egyptian Books of the Dead to the most arcane technical manuals--that the Ultimate Answer to our fate can be discovered. In fact, many true believers view the Internet as a kind of Alexandrian Library redux, now borne out by the Google Books Library Project, which seeks to digitize all the worlds’ books.

But, if there are any answers to be found, we must first ask ourselves if we know how to ask the right questions…or as Keith Moon of The Who once said to me, “The philosophy of today is the common sense of the future.”

The future is the future is the present.

Marshall McLuhan

We will be the best-informed generation to die of
ignorance.

Ruben Blades