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New Charleston

Defensive ornamentation, East Bay Street, Charleston (Dan Conover photo)

Because Charleston was founded in the 17th century at the southern tip of a north-south peninsula, power and class here have always run on something of a north-south axis. So in the 1970s, when the area around the navy base incorporated as North Charleston, the name spoke as much about the new city's blue-collar identity as it did about its relative location.

Well, I think it's time we imposed a new axis on Charleston. Not North and South, but Old and New. 

Charleston, for all its considerable charms, remains a backward-looking city. Not "backwards," as in unsophisticated or unintelligent, but more enamored of its past than its present. So while the city officially recognizes the value of its "creative cluster," its "tech sector" and its "knowledge-based industries," Charleston's institutions, typically dominated by the same old families and traditions, remain wary -- if not openly hostile -- toward new ideas and new people.

Since that anti-outsider bias tends to limit opportunity, Charleston has developed a reputation as a place where who you know is more important than what you know. It's why so many talented people here seem to direct their energies toward celebrity instead of substance.

Once upon a time I wanted to change that. Now I believe we should let eccentric, odd Old Charleston be whatever it wants to be. I thank Old Charleston for preserving this beautiful city, and aren't we stronger when we value and preserve indigenous cultures?

Instead, I want to encourage Charleston's outsiders to start appreciating their own significance. The prosperity of the Lowcountry depends on the energy, creativity and spirit of people who moved here "from off," and once we start acting on that knowledge it simply won't matter whether Old Charleston recognizes this truth.

New Charleston doesn't have to beat Old Charleston. It simply has to stop looking to Old Charleston for permission.

What are we waiting for?

Go to a New Charleston event -- Kulture Klash, Pecha Kucha, BarCampCHS, a TweetUp or an SMCCHS happy hour -- and look around. Hundreds, thousands of musicians, writers, artists, designers, art directors, photographers, programmers, Web-heads, researchers, engineers, architects, entrepreneurs, chefs, dancers, filmmakers, actors and big-thinkers live here. How many are "from off?" Most.

Yet I still meet people who tell me different versions of the same story. Instead of being encouraged in their new ventures, they are visited by members of the local establishment who always deliver the same message. Get back in line. There's some kind of old-boy system here, and it wants to pick the winners of every contest in advance. I don't understand it, but there it is.

My question is, so what? Yes, these people have some money. Yes the city has various programs and perks it can dole out to the favored few. Yes, the local paper acts an unofficial enforcer of Old Charleston orthodoxy. Again: So what?

We don't need mass media to spread the word. We don't need membership in exclusive social clubs to meet interesting people. And the sophisticated tool users here can do more with less money in less time and with less formal organization than Old Charleston can even imagine.

It isn't as if they're offering us an alternative. You're never going to be accepted into the Old Charleston clubs, so why bother conforming to their rules? What have you got to lose by ignoring them?

When we stop fighting and cajoling Old Charleston, we can invest all that energy into building a healthy New Charleston. A separate culture that reflects the values of the people who came here by choice. A culture that's more egalitarian, educated, productive and open.

This change doesn't require government loans or angel investors. Just start small. Cooperate. Do business with each other -- and with the thousands of like-minded Lowcountry natives who are our good friends and collaborators. Support each other. Work together.

Opposing an existing power structure gets us nowhere. Building our own power structure, with our own open networks and values, is progress.

In conclusion...

You don't undo an old habit. You have to create new habits, and to make them stick you have to reinforce those new patterns until the old ones silt over.

That's how we're going to make progress. And the funny thing is, Old Charleston won't even notice it.

It will simply benefit from it, along with the rest of us. Now go forth, join ranks, and start inventing a new city.

(BarCampCHS photo via Ken Hawkins on Flickr)

The Big Pool of Money experiment

At last night's meeting of the Columbia chapter of Social Media Club, I mentioned something I heard suggested in an off-hand way at the Infovalet Conference in May. What if every American paid a fee as part of his or her monthly ISP bill, and then that money were divided up among content creators?

Of course, what I found ironic about this back in May was that the people suggesting it weren't suggesting that ANYONE be able to share in this revenue. The idea was that only content creators who happened to also own printing presses and/or FCC licenses would be eligible. That's absurd on its face, which is probably why that idea hasn't gone anywhere. Try selling that politically.

But as I drove home to Charleston, I reconsidered the idea. Which is why I want you to play along in a thought experiment with me.

What if we all paid into a fund that could be distributed among EVERYONE who creates content, of any kind, that can distributed online? Bloggers, filmmakers, musicians, reporters, pornographers, comedians, ANYONE.

How would it work? How could it be administered? 

The 21st Century in Retrospect

(...joined at 21:37...)

ALLENDE: From a conceptual basis, then, what year marks the beginning of the 21st century?

WANG: I don't know that I could pick one year that encompasses the entire shift. But I think we can definitely state the exact moment that the 20th century ended.

ALLENDE: Yes?

WANG: Nov. 4, 2008, and it ended sometime between the moment Barrack Obama stepped onto the stage at Grant Park and his first words to the nation as president-elect.

ALLENDE: So it was a political shift?

WANG: Not at all. It was a shift in possibility. The 20th century was predicated on material possibility, which included a mechanistic sense of weight and inevitability. A president like Obama wasn't supposed to be possible, because people believed the message that "the system" would never allow it. Electorates, agencies, corporations -- people understood them to be flawed, but people accepted the inhumane and inefficient authority of these institutions out of an ambient belief that high levels of friction, waste and corruption were inevitable in human society.

Editing Pontin's manifesto

This morning's Trad Media shout from the battlements comes from Technology Review Editor Jason Pontin, who uses posts by Clay Shirky and Dave Winer to argue that the electronic barbarians at the gate "know nothing about the business of media." On the strength of this statement alone, Pontin is sure to drink for free at meetings of his peers for at least a month.

Pontin's point? Those who say that publishers lack good answers to the profitable future of their industry are simply wrong. "While the details are still debated," Pontin writes, "the broad outlines of tomorrow's media are becoming clearer. Consumers must pay for more of what they read; publishers and the media buyers who purchase advertising must be given technologies that will make online display ads more competitive with the keyword ads that search firms sell."

Pontin makes his case in support of these assertions in an expanded version of his column that I'll refer to as the "How to Save Media" version. Since it covers much of the ground I wrote about in March, I was quite interested to read it -- and rather bemused to note how blithely Pontin whistles past some deeply gloomy graveyards.

Let's critique it, shall we?

2020 vision: What's next for news

"As you can see, opportunity abounds."

A client looking to invest in media asked me earlier this month for advice on what might replace failing newspapers. My response? There are plenty of interesting ideas in play, but the first meaningful test won't come until a major American city loses its only metro daily. So wait.

That's because metro newspapers are taking up the market space in which the innovation he's looking for must occur. Newspapers may be failing, but most do a passable job of limiting serious competition in their markets. What succeeds in the shadow of an established metro, therefore, may not be what ultimately winds up contending for the market positions vacated by Old Media giants.

I think that's decent investment advice, but Clay Shirky's March 13th essay on the end of the newspaper era placed some urgency on the question “What Comes Next?” And since I'm a recovering newspaperman who's been studying and writing and speaking about that question off and on for the past four years, I figured now might be a good time to stake out some useful predictions about the future of American journalism to 2020.

Historic context for the markets

"During the Great Depression, the Dow plunged 89% from the 1929 crash to July 1932. Then it went through some big swings before losing 49% in 1937-38 as the economy tanked again. World War II, which grew in part out of financial stress around the globe, followed. The Dow didn't get back to its 1929 high until 1954."

-- BusinessWeek, March 5, 2009: "Stock Markets: When Will The Bull Return?"

The fire that frees the seed

There are all sorts of analogies I could use for my oddball optimism at this particular moment in history -- creative destruction (John Tanner in Man & Superman: "Construction cumbers the ground with institutions made by busybodies. Destruction clears it and gives us breathing space and liberty"), spring cleaning, etc. But the analogy that resonates with me are those Western pine trees that need fire to reproduce.

For all our talk of a global economy, our economic "system" is a cobbled-together jumble of new technologies and old rules, of fresh opportunities and outdated restrictions. We could talk about many of them, but let's just look at two well-known examples.

Newspapers

It's generally understood that newspapers (at least American metro newspapers) are in dire straits, and we're currently involved in a debate that supposes that the decline of the nation's newspapers will mean the decline of journalism as a public good. As a former newspaperman with lots of buddies still in the trade, I can testify that those guys are generally unimpressed by my suggestion that we should save their careers by hastening the demise of their metro-daily employers

Besides, they argue, none of the known web-based new-media business models generate enough cash to support quality reporting. If any of those new business models were any good, they say, we'd already be investing in them.

But this is where the pinecone-in-the-forest-fire analogy comes in handy. Because there are workable business models for Web-based journalism. The problem is that they won't take root and thrive until the fire burns off the undergrowth, prepares the soil and provides them a chance to compete. The biggest brake on media innovation isn't lack of ideas or some missing business model, it's that failing old media companies continue to occupy the big ecosystem spaces where innovation is most needed.

Local First & The 10 Percent Shift

Lowcountry Local First came about around the time I was pitching my previous employer a "Shop Local" online/print guide to locally owned business organized by products and services. That idea went nowhere, but LLF has been growing and becoming increasingly influential ever since. Tonight I attended my first meeting at One Cool Blow for a speech by Laury Hammel.

The shtick for the Local First movement is as simple as it is profound: Spend $100 with local independent businesses and $45 stays in the community (where it's subject to the local multiplier effect). Spend that same $100 with a national chain and only $15 sticks around. The rest "leaks" right out of town.

The movement is well under way, and its next step (a change from "building awareness" to "real, concrete behavioral change") is the "Ten Percent Shift." You sign a pledge to shift -- not expand -- 10 percent of your budgeted spending from national chains to local independents.

What's that worth to Charleston? Well, a study in Grand Rapids, Mich., concluded it would mean 1,600 new jobs, $53 million in wages, and a $137 million economic impact. Our MSA is home to about 640,00 people. Grand Rapids' is about 777,000. Your mileage may vary.

Hammel quotes after the jump.

Shorter version of "Jefferson and America 4.0" for XARK readers with actual jobs and/or lives

I wrote my last post more for me than for anyone else, because it's just godawful long. Here it is, in more considerate list form, for you, dear readers:

1. Jeffersonian Democracy makes for good rhetoric, but it's wholy unsuited for modern America.
2. Jefferson, God love him, was a much better philosopher than an actual political leader.
3. Jefferson's "yeoman farmers" don't exist anymore, and a political model based on individual self-sufficiency not only fails to describe our current situation, it actually leads us to terrible policies.
4. Civilization works by increasing stability, which increases complexity, which increases wealth. A back-to-basics conservative impulse is a recipe for distaster. 
5. Jeffersonian Democracy was more-or-less the soul of America 1.0 
6. (The Articles of Confederation were our beta test)
7. America 2.0 began during the Civil War
8. America 3.0 began with the New Deal and ended in the fall of 2008
9. America 4.0 is what comes next
10. America 4.0 is likely to be about sustainable economics based on a sharing of risks and rewards across the society.
11. Economic philosophies that suggest bad banks and companies should be allowed to fail misunderstand the value of the economy to the society. Value exists not on balance sheets, but within the complexity of the economy itself. 
12. The age of extraction economics is ending.
13. The way back to prosperity requires companies to share the same risks and rewards as the people. If the risks are borne only by the people and the rewards belong solely to the elite, then disaster will follow... as it just did.
14. Republicans and Libertarians do a great job of winning arguments by quoting Jefferson. To usher in America 4.0, Democrats must learn to rebut those romantic arguments with a new message about the realities and benefits of an interconnected world.

Happy Presidents Day.

From Jefferson to America 4.0

I owe my patriotic sentimentality to my mother, a teacher from Iowa who encouraged me to read and spent the early 1970s prowling yard sales for age-appropriate books about American history, which I promptly consumed. It is because of her that I worshiped Thomas Jefferson above all the other founding fathers, carrying his ideal of intellectual egalitarianism well into my adult life.

Last week she sent me an email titled "Thomas Jefferson's sayings in light of today." My hackles rose before I even opened it, since poor red-haired TJ has become the Patron Saint of Liberty in modern America, cited by all sides as proof of their fundamental wisdom and Americanism. And Mom joined me in ambivalence: "Don't know how I feel about a lot of these ... but it is interesting!"

Interesting and deeply bothersome is how I'd put it.

"When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe."
 
"The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work, and give to those who are not."
 
"It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle, which if acted on, would save one-half the wars of the world."
 
"I predict future happiness for Americans, if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them."

And so on. In short, the collection presents an American icon as Ron Paul with a pony tail, a Libertarian genius standing athwart history and shouting "Stop!" For every anxious American worried about the future of the country under Democratic leadership, this collection reads like Jefferson's j'accuse from beyond the grave.

Which brings me, this Presidents Day, to an uncomfortable duty. I come to argue not only with one of my greatest heroes, but in doing so, to argue for a new understanding of this particular moment in history. Because I believe we are in the midst of the fourth America revolution.