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Archives for February 2003

Brand You

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Back in the ’90s, during the Net boom, Fast Company published an article by Tom Peters titled “The Brand Called You.” The idea was for professionals to start handling their own lives and careers with the same approach that a company takes in managing its brand.

The term “branding,” of course, comes from cattle, and there was always something suspicious about the idea of bringing such thinking into the realm of individual lives.

Now we have a new kind of branding on the personal level: Real honest-to-god physical branding. People walking around with corporate logos and advertisements not only sewn onto their clothing and plastered over their accoutrements but actually tattooed on their foreheads.

The idea is the brainchild of a London marketing outfit. Students who agree to be branded receive $6.85 an hour for three hours of being “out and about” with their foreheads on display.

Moo!

Look, Pa! No economic policy!

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The reports from inside the Beltway keep telling us, with numbing repetition, that George W. Bush (“43”) is utterly determined to avoid the fate of his father, George H.W. Bush (“41”). Not for 43 the sad fate of 41 — who fell from the glory of a military victory over Iraq in Year 3 of his presidency to the ignominy of electoral defeat in year 4, because voters decided he wasn’t doing enough to get a recession-burdened economy moving again. 43 is on the case! 43 will keep one eye on the bread-and-butter economic issues even as he locks his aim on Saddam Hussein. No one will be able to say that 43 doesn’t care about the economy — Karl Rove is making sure of that.

And yet, from the vantage of one year before the ’04 primaries, Bush 43 looks amazingly, uncannily like a replay of Bush 41. The economic policy details differ, but the political shape is parallel.

Despite all the rumors, the recovery doesn’t seem to have arrived in any neighborhood you or your friends actually live in. Nearly three years of the current downturn have left the economy still feeling like a disaster area. The Republicans now control both houses of Congress, but the Bush budget is such a hodge-podge of giveaways to the wealthy, outright deceptions and deficit-inducing, tax code-complexifying “reforms” that even the president’s own party is rejecting it out of hand. His all-but-launched war on Iraq — completely unaccounted for in that budget — has roiled the markets and put corporate spending on hold. His team still can’t get its message straight (do deficits matter or not?). Is anyone home?

Yes, a year is a long time, and a lot can happen between now and New Hampshire 2004. But we’ve had three years of George Bush, and three years ought to be enough time to get an economic policy together. Bush’s is MIA. Unless there’s a major turnaround in the next six to nine months, the Democrats ought to be able to make something of that. If they can’t, they don’t deserve to govern.

Postscript My readers correctly point out that we’ve only had two years, not three, of George Bush. (The perils of late-night posting.) I guess it just feels like a long time…

10 years of digital storytelling

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If you’re in the Bay Area you should consider this event Thursday evening at the Yerba Buena Center: “Voices Known: Celebrating 10 Years of Digital Storytelling.” This is a kind of anniversary party for the Berkeley-based Center for Digital Storytelling, a major hub — maintained by Joe Lambert and Nina Mullen — of the digital storytelling movement that I’ve been writing about, on and off, for years now. It’s a live performance featuring Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Awele Makeba, Brenda Wong Aoki/Mark Izu, Scott Wells and more. Tickets are $15-25 (info at 510 548 2065).

Oh, really? No sir, O’Reilly!

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Tom Tomorrow features an amazing transcript of the O’Reilly show in his blog today.

I don’t watch O’Reilly’s show myself; after seeing him a couple of times I became quite convinced that he is an overbearing blowhard with whom I did not need to waste any portion of my earthly existence. But this transcript is astonishing. O’Reilly has invited one Jeremy Glick onto his show: Glick, it seems, does not think invading Iraq is a good idea. Glick’s father perished in the 9/11 attacks. O’Reilly is unable to hold these two thoughts in his head without having it explode. By the end of the transcript he is shouting “Shut up! Shut up!” at his own guest.

A good day for slashdotting

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Some days Slashdot is just an endless loop of Microsoft-bashing and obscure developer jokes. Other days, like today, it’s a treasure trove.

First, they alerted me to this bit of browser-skulduggery: Did MSN deliberately set out to make Opera users get a “broken” version of its home page? I tend to be skeptical of such claims — on the Web, things break easily enough by themselves, so my default assumption is glitch before malevolence — but the Opera site’s explanation sure is persuasive.

Then I clicked over to this unbelievably fascinating explanation of the continuing mystery of hiccups. It seems that the latest theory suggests they are related to that stage of our evolutionary development when we had gills; and fetuses hiccup as they’re recapitulating that stage. But read the New Scientist piece for yourself.

That old broadband song

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“Broadband” is in the news again, sigh. The word has a huge capacity for mischief, since it means so many different things to different people. Today broadband means high-speed, always-on Internet connectivity, usually delivered via cable or DSL. Broadband is, we’re told, the axe that will break AOL and the torch that will fire up the tech economy once more.

I’ve been a broadband skeptic for years based on my own experience and my observations of my friends. I don’t think broadband “transforms the Web experience”; it just fixes it. Broadband makes the Web work the way it’s supposed to.

What broadband does not do, and will not do, is turn the Web back into a TV-style broadcast medium — which, I’m afraid, is what Hollywood and the media industry keep crossing their fingers and hoping will come to pass. Sorry, guys.

To be sure, broadband does enable all sorts of interesting peer-to-peer and Web services-style applications. Wonderful. Only Hollywood and the media companies, far from investing in new ways to use this broadband potential, are actually terrified of these tools.

Truth is, right now broadband is just a good, reliable way to get your e-mail, read your Web sites and maybe download some music files. And that’s what it will remain until someone comes along to show us the next great thing.

I like the way Mitch Ratcliffe put it in a recent post:

  The unexpected will decide this market. That is, someone is going to come up with an engaging client that turns broadband into a symphony of excitement people will flock to. And, frankly, that game is still wide open to all the players, dial-up laggards included.

Actually, Napster was that “engaging client.” Look what happened to it.

The Bush budget: Passing the buck to our kids

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I was going to rant about the Bush budget, and how full of misrepresentations and bad assumptions and failures to make tough choices it is. Then I realized that there isn’t enough time in the day for me to cover all that ground. So let me just point out that we all have extremely rotten luck to have such a merrily profligate president at this moment in history — one whose fixation on a lopsided tax-cutting agenda has rendered him entirely indifferent to the way he is mortgaging the nation’s future.

“We will not pass along our problems to other Congresses, to other presidents, and other generations,” Bush told us in his State of the Union. Sounded good. Only that’s precisely what his budget does. In simultaneously boosting spending and cutting taxes, Bush is putting our economy into the same train-wreck mode that we last experienced in the wake of Lyndon Johnson’s “We can fight Vietnam and have a Great Society” spending spree. It took two decades to clean up that mess.

For the past 20 years or so, observers who’ve taken the long view have pointed out that we are sitting on two demographic time bombs. When the baby-boom generation retires, we will face a federal budget crisis like we’ve never seen before. Bush’s father (“Bush 41”) and Bill Clinton both put the government on a course to begin to deal with that problem by raising taxes, and sure enough by the end of Clinton’s term we had a growing budget surplus. The Social Security problem hadn’t been solved, but it looked like the government would have some of the tools it needs to handle it. Health care costs are the other time bomb; Clinton’s good-faith effort to deal with that crashed and burned, and Bush seems unwilling to open the necessary discussion on how to fix the broken system we’re left with.

So now we have deficits as far as the eye can see, and a president who thinks it’s more important to eliminate the taxes the rich pay on stock dividends than to keep the government in the black. When Social Security and Medicare start to founder — right about when people currently in their 40s start to retire — we’ll know who to thank. Unless, of course, someone who follows Bush in the White House has the backbone to raise taxes and undo Bush’s current mayhem — just as Bush’s father and Clinton had to undo Reagan’s.

Cloudy channel

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My radio listening habits tend toward college stations and public radio — what the Replacements celebrated as “Left of the Dial.” So my awareness of the continued degradation of the commercial part of the spectrum has been provided mainly by the dogged investigative work of Salon’s Eric Boehlert, whose exposes of the Clear Channel monopoly have justly earned him a passel of awards.

Today’s New York Times brings a new twist on Clear Channel-ism: David Gallagher reports on the remarkable process by which this radio mega-conglomerate has assembled a DJ from database parts. Basically, they’ve taken the recorded voice of Carson Daly, chopped it into little snippets and used those soundbites to re-assemble pseudo-local broadcasts — so that listeners in, say, Atlanta hear a localized “top 40” broadcast, with Daly introducing each song in the particular order that applies to that market, yet Daly never actually said those words in that order.

It’s hard to know whether to applaud the ingenuity required to create such a DJ-bot, or barf at the complete triumph of corporate homogenization that it represents. I think the gagging in my throat tells me which reaction predominates for me.