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An energy plan we can believe in

There are times in the history of our nation when our very way of life depends upon dispelling illusions and awakening to the challenge of a present danger. In such moments, we are called upon to move quickly and boldly to shake off complacency, throw aside old habits and rise, clear-eyed and alert, to the necessity of big changes. Those who, for whatever reason, refuse to do their part must either be persuaded to join the effort or asked to step aside. This is such a moment.

“Today I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years. This goal is achievable, affordable and transformative. It represents a challenge to all Americans – in every walk of life: to our political leaders, entrepreneurs, innovators, engineers, and to every citizen.”

Well. There's a simple, visionary plan from a guy whose life has earned him the credibility and stature to propose it: Reverse the trend in carbon emissions, end our dependency on foreign oil (thereby changing our relationship to the Middle East) and kick start our economy with new industries, new products, new services, new public works projects.

We rallied around Kennedy's call to put a man on the moon in 10 years and to do other grand things, "because they are hard." Well, we've got a better reason to do this: Because it's going to save our sorry asses.

Sure, we'll have the usual people telling us this is just more stupid libtard stuff. And to put it bluntly, screw 'em. They've had their time, and they blew it.

Anyway, I've just started a group at MyBarackObama.com to encourage the explicit adoption of this challenge. I'll post the URL as soon as it gets processed.

AP v. Bloggers: The cartoon version

News Item: Associated Press claims bloggers are infringing on its copyright, threatens action.

Right...

When a Bike is not Just a Bike

Although there were years during which I stubbornly refused to admit that I would reach this point, I recently decided that I needed to consider purchasing a bicycle to offset some of the distance running that has been my passion over the last twenty or so years.  It’s not that I’m having any problems yet—although I have to admit that it’s not as thrilling as it used to be—it’s more that I’m persuaded by the collective wisdom of all the guys I’ve met over the years who have told me, with a powerful sense of resignation, “I used to love running, but my knees gave out, so now I do a lot of biking.”  Before the knees go, I’ve been thinking, I might want to get familiar with the next stage of activity.   

Over the past few weeks, I’ve started looking into the type of bike I would like.  When I approach a purchase like this, I generally follow the following routine—although not necessarily in this order: 1. I talk to a lot of folks who are enthusiasts, 2. I do a bit of web research, 3. I go to shops and showrooms, usually with someone who knows what they’re doing; 4. I spend a week getting over sticker shock; 5. I make a decision and quit listening to anyone who might dissuade me.  It’s an imperfect system to be sure, but it’s a system that gets the job done.

Magic = Doing what you imagine

Twenty-six years ago I sold my clothes and books to buy groceries and Bugler tobacco to last me out the final two weeks of school and exams. Twenty-five years ago I had a script for a 10-minute film I could have shot with borrowed equipment if I'd had less than $200. Twenty-four years ago I could have quit my job cutting greens for $4 an hour and made double that if I could have come up with $500 to buy a used pickup truck and a push power mower.

Later that year (1984)  I thought it might be a good move to start a coffee shop in a vacant storefront on Howard Street in Boone, NC, just a few blocks from campus. Thought I could offer people a place to drink coffee and smoke cigarettes and talk talk talk.  I could have pulled it off for less than $1,000 in 1984, and I even had friends who wanted in on the idea. But they were broke too.

And so we didn't start a coffee house, and I joined the Army instead.

I like to remember this now, because it doesn't really seem that long ago that I lived in a world where I could imagine anything but I couldn't do very much about any of it. Not very many people could. The deck was stacked against people without money or access, and we shaped our dreams accordingly.

Best. Tech. Satire. EVER.

It's BRONZE ORIENTATION DAY!

If I'm ever again in a position where I'm supposed to speak to a bunch of newspaper and newspaper website people about new technology and web culture, I'm going to show this video and move on. And when people say stupid stuff, I'm going to give them stones.

Saw this last night on my new favorite show, That Mitchell and Webb Look.

"... zeitgeisty, and most importantly, slightly shiny!"

I've got a bad feeling about this...

I'm generally a pretty optimistic guy, and there's a general logic to that attitude:  Things have pretty much always looked bad to some degree, yet things have, generally,  gotten better over time.  So you shut your eyes and you keep on walking and you whistle past the graveyard and then, you know -- the sun comes out.

But now a-days you look around, you do the math, and you realize: Holy shit, dude -- are we fucked?

I get the sense that this is one of those moments when things are much worse than "they" are letting on. Which makes me think: We need an "F-Scale."  Like, if stuff is just sorta screwed up, but things generally work and you can pretty much expect that you're going to be able to keep your job and your house and suicide bombers aren't going to move in next door and really downgrade your property values, that would be F-1.

And then an F-10 would be economic depression, the destruction of the Bill of Rights, civil war and environmental collapse. And so on.

So where does that put us? Because when the Feds are bailing out the banks and the President is giving the economy a "You're doin' a heckuva job, Brownie" pep-talk, and currency converters in Amsterdam stop exchanging dollars because their value is dropping so fast, that's got to be like an F-7.

And when we're five years into a botched, brutal war and still hoping that the latest strategy is someday going to give the Iraqis a chance to build a society that's stable enough to do simple shit like, say, provide electrical power to most of the grid for most of the day, that's at LEAST an F-8.

And then we've got a political campaign where the entire focus of the past few days has been a concerted, deliberate attempt to destroy an inspiring presidential candidate by endlessly looping out-of-context statements by his preacher?  At essentially the same time that the President of the United States of America is openly advocating TORTURE? And the media doesn't even think the torture veto is really all that NEWSWORTHY?

Where's the F-scale on THAT?

Answers, please, on a post card...

Seth Godin: Ideas that spread, win

I'm working up a long-form piece for the media blog and it required going back and transcribing portions of Seth Godin's 2003 talk at TED. His topic: Sliced Bread and Other Marketing Delights. It should say something that a 17-minute, 5-year-old lecture still comes across as fresh -- if not radical -- but that's kind of Godin's point. Sliced bread wasn't popular for the first 15 years after it was introduced.

I've included a partial transcript after the jump...

Another g-damn magnum opus

I just published an enormous overview of my ideas about the future of media ("Foundations of 21st century journalism") over at my revived media blog. I'm rather appalled by how long it is (3,275 words), but it's a big topic. And I'm not writing for everyone.

The subheads:

Monoculture to ecosystem
Structured and semi-structured data
Scalability
Open Source
Informatics
The Blur: News, information and advertising
Newsbots and Intelligent Agents
Multiple revenue streams and business models
The Intelligence Briefing model
Mainstream retrenchment
Nichestreaming
E Pluribus Unum
Watchmen watchers
Credibility grading
Death of monopoly pricing and profits
Game theory
Social technology -- virtual and otherwise
The Web is Local
True Convergence
Curating information
New elites
The Creative Middle Class
Surplus people
Yes, newspapers are going away

This was written for the students and faculty at the Journalism Department at the University of Mississippi, but you're all welcome to have your say.

Talking to the next generation

Janet and I are preparing for a trip to the University of Mississippi next week. The agenda: Appearing on a media panel called "Quality in the Digital Environment."

My way of getting ready: Writing up my ideas -- the ideas that I can't (and shouldn't) communicate in a few minutes while sharing a stage with others. I started posting them at my otherwise defunct media blog earlier this month.

Introduction: Waking up the blog.

Quality and other essential bullshit.

Thinking versus Quorum Sensing.

Why quality is a moving target.

Gloom and doom.

More to follow...

Meme 2008: "Control doesn't scale"

Three words of infinite simplicity and value (via Dave Weinberger):

"Control doesn't scale."

Want to understand the convulsion that lies ahead of us? The transitions in economics, technology, management, politics, media and art that must be made if we're to benefit from the new tools? The divisions that animate our "culture war" bullshit sessions? 

Three words: "Control doesn't scale."

Think that's a recipe for anarchy? Think again. Think it's unprecedented? It isn't. Think distributed control is a geektopian pipedream? I disagree.

Human beings have been giving up control in exchange for the expanding wisdom and benefits of freedom for as long as we've been a species, so there's plenty of historical precedent to instruct us on what course to follow. The unprecedented part is actually the rate of change, which means that the challenge in the scaling issue really lies in the feedback loops we imagine. We can't wait around and expect the old culture to vet new ideas for us. We'll have to invent the "new normal" on the fly, and  we'll certainly screw that up a few times.

But this is the central issue. And the other thing history teaches is that the people who have control generally don't like giving it up. So that's our short-term future in a nutshell.

Twitter's business model

Today both Dave Winer and Jason Calacanis wrote about the business model for Twitter (which I'm not only using, but working up for a Friday 5 treatment). Their posts came in response to this one. I liked this idea by Calacanis, which isn't so much about Twitter as it is about business:

Bottom line? Ev shouldn't worry about a business model for another two years. Just build the service to *massive* critical mass. Get to 100M users--which is where the service is headed. If the service gets to 100M monthly users it will be worth a couple of billion... That's what I learned at AOL: Once you have critical mass you can't help but make a fortune. An absolute idiot with 10-20M users can make a ton of money. So, get to tens of millions of users and forget about money... Running a startup is NOT about revenue anymore--it's about critical mass. It's about scale. When you're playing in the big leagues with unlimited access to capital you shouldn't worry about revenue BEFORE you have critical mass.

Running a startup isn't about revenue... if you've got capital and trust and a really good product that people want. But I still dig the thinking in this case, and it's kind of a riff on his opening-session comments at ConvergeSouth in October (from my live-blog notes):

His thought: It's just as hard to make a small business as it is to make a large one so...

"You might as well go for the moon shot... Think big but take very small steps... Do something that a large group of people (it) would appeal to..."

Our expanded selves & The Construct

I’m not a particularly active dreamer, so when I get strong messages in my sleep I tend to pay attention. On Saturday morning I woke up with an odd idea in my head, which made me take notice. On Sunday I woke up with more of it in place, as if my dreaming self had been installing the idea in segments.

It’s a Singularity idea, although I don’t think it’s necessarily just a post-Singularity idea. And here’s the way I think I’m supposed to introduce it:

We understand cyberspace to be the virtual space between all the nodes on all our computer networks. And I’ve defined my concept of Spookworld as being everything that exists between the nodes of organized deception.

This new concept is called The Construct, defined as everything that exists between nodes of intent. And since I’m really introducing two ideas here (The Construct and “nodes of intent”), I’d better start by explaining the foundational idea: scaling humanity to the Law of Accelerating Returns.

Bad credit

If you've been rabidly keeping up with the pending mortgage crisis in the U.S. and its global economic consequences, good for you.  I've been out on the town with princesses.

However, if you would like a lovely explanation of just what the hell the "credit crunch" is and why people everywhere are aflutter about looming defaults of thousands of borrowers, visit one of the top sites for U.S. news coverage: the BBC.

This little Q&A lays out nicely what the problem is and why it matters.  It's bizness news in English (no pun intended) for those who would like to be economically literate, but aren't masochistic enough to have an MBA. It's from September, but there are lots of links to news stories on the site if you'd like to know more.

Fox News Porn

Writers' strike explained

Via Boing-Boing.

Hard times coming?

This isn't the kind of story most media do well, and the subject is so large, so complex and so arcane in its details that getting your head around it responsibly is a full-time chore.

But is there ANYBODY out there feeling optimistic about our economic future in the coming year?

The dollar is falling. Oil is approaching $100 a barrel. The financial sectors are beset with various problems. Housing? That's a regional question, but the macro picture don't look so good to me. You've got some fundamental realignments and corrections in various sectors either underway or pending, and it certainly isn't helping matters that the White House is back to saber-rattling on Iran. Makes investors nervous.

Morale is low. Confidence in the government is nil. Our standing in the world is at a post-WWII nadir. Pakistan is teetering. The polar ice caps are melting much faster than the IPCC predicted.

I'd rather be an optimist, but I've got a bad feeling about things.

"Chickens to roost. Chickens to roost. We're coming home, over..."

(Nov. 17 update: Here's what Ed's found...)

iWhiners

As I'm sure many of you have seen, there has been quite a bit of controversy in the iWorld over Apple's recent announcement that they were dropping the iPhone's price. Although it is true that this price cut comes not too long after the iPhone's debut, I'm also having trouble believing that people didn't "expect" a price cut. Yet, to read some of the reactions to the news, you'd think Apple had pulled off the biggest swindle since Springfield bought a Monorail.

After initially taking a hard line against the iWhiners, Apple has since loosened up a bit and offered to try to make things "right." I find myself agreeing with Steve Job's views that, while it is important to be considerate of one's existing customers, the technology game is played fast and being an early adopter of technology should not be for those with weak stomachs, small wallets, and giant tear ducts.

So, while I think that Jobs and Co. devised a brilliant apology package (store credit instead of a rebate) that shows why Apple is still at the top of their game, I believe the early adopter iWhiners should still be ashamed of themselves, and take a moment to think about the impact of their complaining.

Smart. Very, very smart...

What's the most valuable thing a product can get? Buzz. Mass-media attention is a form of buzz, but buzz that's sprayed down from above lacks the authenticity of buzz that bubbles up from below. So if you're trying to get buzz, reaching out to bloggers is a smart marketing idea. But how do you do it?

Let's go to the Xark Inbox:

Hi there,

I really enjoyed visiting your site and reading your posts on Xark!.  Thank you for sharing your thoughts and opinions with others.

My name is Andrea and I'm from RocketXL, a marketing agency based in Los Angeles.  I know you probably get pitched with products all the time, but I'm working on a great new HBO show that is probably right up your alley, called  TELL ME YOU LOVE ME, premiering on September 9th.

As a leading independent voice in the online community, we value your input and we'd like to offer you never-before-seen show clips for review, which will hopefully spark some great conversations on your blog.

We're looking for your honest, journalistic opinion of TELL ME YOU LOVE ME and the vital relationship issues that the show raises. Please let me know if you're interested and I can send you the video clips. I'll be looking forward to reading your review.

Show Synopsis: TELL ME YOU LOVE ME looks at the connection, or disconnection, between sex and intimacy, as seen through the stories of three couples who are at different stages of their relationships, all of whom see the same couples therapist.

We've posted all of the show's vital info that you can use on your site. Please visit: www.rocketxl.com/tmylm/assets.htm

Thanks,

Andrea
Rocket XL

Rocket XL | http://www.rocketxl.com
811 Traction Ave. #2B
Los Angeles, CA 90013

OK, let's put this in perspective. Xark has been pretty steady around 13,000 hits per month (that's a slow day for one of the big entertainment sites), so it's a safe bet that Andrea from Rocket XL isn't one of our regular readers. It's also a safe bet that the company's robots identified us as a potential target for their campaign based on a keyword analysis that picked up on posting trends here. Auto-search-and-replace-blog-name and hit SEND TO ALL.

How smart: Seed the blogosphere with respect and attention, see what happens.

Any Xarkers who want to take a stab at Tell Me You Love Me, go right ahead.  Look at the online materials and send Andrea an e-mail.

Bailouts Aren't What They Used to Be

Late last week, I began reading a news story on MSNBC that centered on Bush’s “bailout” of those individuals who were losing their homes in the current mortgage crisis.  Before getting very far into the story, my attention was drawn to a link for a reader discussion entitled, “Should U.S. bail out subprime borrowers?”   Arriving at the discussion, I found page after page of angry notes, furious citizens fuming about how unfair a “bailout” would be.  The logic, which I’m completely sympathetic with, went something like this:  “I pay my bills; I only buy what I can afford.  I’ll be mad as hell if Bush bails out those people by paying their mortgage.”

The problem is, and this may well ultimately haunt Democrats as well (and it should bother all of us), the term “bailout” is misleading in this circumstance.  While Bush has proposed a number of ways to help keep borrowers lenders in their homes, most of these ideas seem ultimately aimed at allowing a refinancing of the loan—it’ll still have to be paid, but the time will be extended, different terms introduced or so forth.  Yes, in some ways, it’s a slight change in the rules, but the policies don’t carry the force that the term “bailout” implies.