Category: Uncategorized

There’s been a fair amount of attention paid to the Chicken Hawk phenomenon–People in the Bush administration who never saw combat but who think combat is a swell occupation for the sons and daughters of people they don’t know. My purpose tonight is not to jump on that obvious and easy target. They’re just jerks, that’s all.

Rather, I’m concerned with the notion of gravitas, a sense of significance that one projects through one’s bearing, not necessarily based on one’s deeds.

“Gravitas” is a term that appeared on the political scene when Dick Cheney was anointed as Bush’s running mate in 2000. This conclusion was generated by a blue ribbon committee charged with deciding who would be the best candidate for Vice President. Many of us have forgotten that Dick Cheney was the chairman of the blue ribbon committee that recommended Dick Cheney as the VP candidate.

If you were a novelist, you wouldn’t dare to make this stuff up…

Pundits nodded sagely, just 3 years ago (can it be that recent?), noting that it was brilliant for the Bush campaign to add the serious appearing, tight-lipped Halliburton CEO to the ticket. Good counterpoise to a Yale frat boy whose crowning political achievement had been to make Texas so business-oriented that its deficit approached $7,000,000,000 within 2 years of his departure. (Yeah. A 7 followed by 9 zeroes.) I guess you’ve gotta build a platform on at least the appearance of principle.

My three regular readers may recall that one catalyst of my Bush resentment is that he and I raised our hands and swore to uphold the Constitution and to show up as ordered and do what we’d be told, at the same New Haven USAF recruiting office. The record is pretty clear that Lieutenant Bush subsequently failed to report for duty after finagling an assignment from Texas to Alabama. The assignment coincided with his oh-so-vital participation in a congressional campaign now remembered only by the candidates. He must have been a pivotal player–he was later to demonstrate his management skills by trading Sammy Sosa from the Rangers to the Cubs. Swell.

The Gravitas Inversion

I don’t take a lot of things seriously. I don’t possess Gravitas, whatever-the-fuck that is. As I navigate through my reality, I find much to laugh at and little to take seriously, except the spectacle of public “servants” fattening themselves at the trough of the common wealth. A sense of irony was my take before I went to Viet Nam, but it was hard-wired by the time I got back. We were the first wave of pilots to return from “Nam” and be assigned to the Strategic Air Command. We immediately noticed that all of the Test Flight officers who hadn’t been in combat were poring over the flight manual looking for semicolons to stump the crew members on the next exam:

Describe the navigation lights on the wingtips of the KC-135 aircraft: are they colored bulbs with clear lenses or clear bulbs with colored lenses?

Why would a pilot care about such a detail? Meanwhile, we were scheduling our next visit to the Stag Bar to trick each other into buying drinks by playing “Dead Bug.” What were they gonna do? Send us to Viet Nam? Hah!

Dead Bug!

My premise this evening pretty much revolves around the important ritual that pilots call Dead Bug! There’s a wonderful Dead Bug sequence in The Great Santini. Rent it.

Here’s the ritual. You go fly a mission. You land and repair to the Stag Bar. You order a round. The glasses become empty.

This is serious, far more serious than the fact that you just landed with a hole in your airplane, streaming fuel, #2 engine out, no oil pressure on #1. That’s just part of the job. What’s at stake here is that SOMEONE BETTER BUY A FRICKIN’ ROUND!

The obvious solution is that a seemingly mature officer, devoted husband, father of 3 and Defender Of Our Freedom, cries out DEAD BUG! at the top of his lungs and immediately throws himself and his chair straight back onto the floor, wiggling his feet in the air. Last guy on the floor buys. It’s a reflex test. Baseball players and pilots value fast reflexes.

Here, the game is demonstrated on the flight line by the oh-so-serious “Wild Weasel” crew members of the 333TFS, Takhli RTAFB, Thailand, 1968. The Wild Weasels were guys who flew around North Viet Nam in F-105 “Thuds,” hoping someone would fire a Surface-to-Air-Missile at them. Now the way you defeat a SAM is to immediately dive right at it as fast as you can! If it whizzes past your canopy at a 1,000 knot closing rate, it’s a successful engagement. Then you fire your missile at the ground station that launched their missile. The F-105 was called the Thud because of the sound it made when it dropped out of the sky, which it always wanted to do since it was basically a brick with wings. Cool. 2 or 3 hours of this kind of fun and a guy could develop a thirst…

And shed every pretense that anything else matters as much as hanging it out over the edge every day.

I’m reminded of the disconnect between seriousness of mission and seriousness of demeanor because Doc introduced me to the legendary Drazen Pantic Wednesday night. Drazen is the guy who brought the Internet to Yugoslavia when Miloshevic was killing people who did things like that–truly dicey times. Drazen’s picture is misleading. It makes him appear somber but in person he smiles easily and often. No obvious gravitas. Just a joyful appreciation for the passing scene. My instant comment upon meeting Drazen was, “You’re much better looking in person!“

Where’s the Beef?

This disconnect between reality and demeanor seems to me universal. Rent a late forties movie and notice how guys behave after returning when their buddies didn’t. They’re joking around all the time! Now fast-forward to the demeanor of our administration’s warmongers. They’re Oh so Serious… So full of the weight of the world… Such vital things to ponder and decide and, regretfully, put someone else’s kid in harm’s way…

I’m not alone among veterans in this insight. I got an email from a guy who was there when we coaxed (fly would be an overstatement) our burning C-130 onto the tarmac at Tay Ninh on 25 June 1968.

He agreed with my conclusion that you’d never follow a manager into battle, and that the Bush administration is deep-sixing the values that made our country great.

Another C-130 Pilot, John Robb, seems to agree. My conclusion is that if you never put you r ass on the line, you’d better look as serious and self-important as you can. But if you’re dealing with serious matters, including making ends meet in the kleptocracy John Robb describes, it helps to keep it light and keep smiling. John was landing C-130s by starlight in 1995, trying to keep Miloshevic from killing Drazen. Good show!

Da More I Steal, Demeanor I Look

It goes without saying that rich people who would rather control the country than serve her don’t really deserve our vote, no matter how grave and determined their demeanor.

12:22:39 AM    

That would be Howard Dean’s list. You oughtta be. Not because he’s a Democrat or willing to be outspoken or a physician who understands exactly how you’re gonna be screwed when you or your family actually need medical care, or because he runs a state where the governor actually governs and which is prosperous without exploiting resources, while Texas is bankrupt despite its huge resource base and fouled environment, dead-last among all states.

As for media consolidation, here’s a clue from yesterday:

But never mind all that. You need to support Dean because he has said the most important thing that any candidate has ever said:

“I’m not unwilling to change positions based on facts,
  but I am unwilling to change positions based on polls.”

The reason his point is important is that we’ve never had a fact-based politician and if you read or write a blog or software code, you’re committed to the outrageous notion that facts matter. For many people, facts don’t matter. The process of discovering, testing, discarding and describing facts is such a mystery to many that they’re not willing to trust it. Most of us, and certainly most people in power, are interested only in what increases our influence, which is rarely factual.

So here’s a person who governs without the right to print money, who says he’s willing to listen to facts and make fact-checking a campaign issue. The other thing he’s doing is using the Internet as the center of his campaign strategy, ramrodded by his Internet-obsessed Campaign Manager, Joe Trippi:

When it comes to the Internet, no detail is too small for Trippi. Some campaign managers devote their energies to working the elite press or courting union leaders or wooing donors. But Trippi seems to spend an inordinate amount of his time checking Meetup numbers, posting to liberal blogs, sending text messages to supporters who have signed up for the Dean wireless network, and otherwise devising ways to use the Internet to build what Trippi envisions as “the largest grassroots organization in the history of this party.”

His team is so focused on leveraging the Net that they may win in 2004 because they have ways of getting out the vote of disaffected centrists. They’ll also use the Net to sow discontent among the authentic conservatives who have seen their civil rights purged by a big-spending, little guy-hating big-gummint administration that promised all the right things and did all the wrong things, from the viewpoint of authentic (pre-1990) conservatives. You know about authentic conservatives, don’t you? They’re as committed to the Constitution as the ACLU.

My logic is escapable but probable: Appropriate use of the Internet is the inside track to the 2004 election, and Dean’s team is the only one that knows what the track looks like. Appropriate use of the Internet isn’t fake emails or PR but is the use of meetup.com and blogs and Knowledge Management to organize consensus around people’s inclination to support a candidate who makes sense, not noise.

For about 24 hours I’ve been urging Doc Searls to get all over this. There are still nine candidates for the Democratic nomination, eight of whom are congress critters who have supported most of the measures that have gutted civil rights and fair use of published materials. Dean will wipe up the floor with them, but can’t yet be sure of it, so he and his growing team are probably willing to listen to the blogging world and to consider a blog-based administration.

Here’s my recommendation:

1. Someone arranges a meeting with, at least, Dr. Lessig, Doc Searls, Dr. Dean, and Joe Trippi. The agenda is simple:
   1. Will you go to the mat to return fair use of published works to the people?
   2. Will you sponsor a blog-based, blog-responsive administration?
   3. Will you promote a fact-based judiciary?
2. If those answers are public, unequivocal and satisfactory, Searls, Lessig and other Net thought leaders should pull out the stops and get behind Dean, our last best hope for an administration knowing that managerial capitalism is about to consume the seed corn that makes capitalism possible. The nutrients they’re snorting up are the major food groups of the American miracle:
   1. A free and informed electorate
   2. The freedom to oppose the majority opinion (which usually isn’t)
   3. Freedom of speech, and, implicitly, freedom from single-agenda broadcasting
   4. Freedom from unreasonable seizure and, implicitly, limits on fair use of purcahsed media

Listen for the Blog Horn

Dean is the first candidate to treat relatively unknown bloggers as a critical opinion-making constituency. “We understand the blogging community and have been active in it,” says Trippi. “A lot more people are seeing us on the blogs and other sites every day than on TV at this point in the campaign.”

…Last week, Dean even gave his first exclusive interview to a blogger, a rather well-done exchange via e-mail by the anonymous author of the blog LiberalOasis. The Dean campaign itself has an official blog that includes dispatches from the road, and Trippi also posts regularly to Dean2004.blogspot.com, an unofficial Dean blog that has become a hub of Internet organizing for the campaign.*

Like most emerging media, blogging tends to contemplate its own navel. But it’s probable the navel’s attached to something worth attending to. Blogging inspired the social software meme and is wrapping Knowledge Management around itself. By the time Super Tuesday hits, we’ll probably have a way to aggregate bloggers’ opinions and roll them up into a coherent sense of grass roots sentiment in ways never before possible. My gut tells me Technorati could tally up our common sense of reality by identifying political key words and associating them with positive vs. negative adjectives and adverbs.

So we shouldn’t support Dean just because he reads and uses blogs. Rather, we should get behind any candidate who:

1. Has a mind
2. Speaks it clearly and well
3. Proves it by blogging for the record, in a human voice

Blogger interest is just a start. The work part of this possibility is for bloggers and aficionados to engage friends, neighbors and fellow workers by proving that there’s a there there: someone who deserves our support because he’s actually committed to responding to facts, including proofs that most of we the people have a more than wee interest in doing smart things.

The Central Plank in the Platform

But let’s not get blindly behind this guy unless the centerpiece of his campaign is fact-based policy-making in a blog-based and blog-responsive administration. Then we may see a role for technologists in politics at least equal to Big Oil and Big Media.

3:32:37 PM    

Why the hell is it so hard to get people to put a little muscle behind things which are obviously needed and more obviously lacking? What you and I are missing is access to the right expert at the right moment.

Allen Searls finally got fed up Friday and fell off the wagon of cool detachment to share his frustration — that it’s so hard to stir up excitement for something that’s so obviously needed. Since Allen and I are passionate about the same thing, I feel his pain, as WC used to say. Allen says it better than I ever have (don’t smart people piss you off?). What we need, he knows, is a way of . . .

. . . using the web to find actual people in the world at large that you can talk to right now, about whatever you’re specifically searching for. There’s nothing like that yet. Nothing. People aren’t searchable. They’re the most important resource in the world, and they’re not searchable, they’re scattered to the wind. There’s no “people” tab at Google (and “groups” isn’t the idea at all). That person you want to talk to right now (and that wants to hear from you right now) that needle in the haystack of 6 billion, is out there, I promise, but you’ll never find them, because the magnet you need to do so doesn’t exist. I want to build it.

Actually, Allen has already built it. It’s called GlobeAlive. ‘GA’ isn’t perfect, but it’s the only web app I’ve seen that lists experts and provides an instant way to get to them. Believe it or not, Allen commissioned his own chat engine to link GlobeAlive seekers with GlobeAlive experts. Now that GlobeAlive has demonstrated its functionality, Allen has been seeking to upgrade it to version 2.0, by integrating it with the Jabber protocol and the several other improvements that GA 1.0 has demonstrated. Allen’s challenge is that he needs venture financing to build on his angel investment over the last three years.

Yesterday afternoon I encouraged Allen to hang in there and to draw consolation from the fact that his idea is just too good to be appeal to investors. If Tim Berners-Lee had looked for financing in 1990 rather than just inventing HTML, he’d still be putting investor packages together. The old saying goes that no one will steal your really good idea because they won’t understand it. My corollary is that not only won’t they steal it, they won’t fund it.

Allen goes on,

“I’m sitting in front of my computer thinking (and I’m not the first) “somewhere out there, right now, in the world at large, is the person I need, available right now– with the answer I need, the expertise I need, the inspiration, the conversation, the product/service, and yes, perhaps, the companionship or camaraderie I need, that I’m not going to find in a document… someone that would be more than happy to talk to me right now, if I could just tap into the searchable database of all the world’s available people, right here from my computer, or cell phone— what a better world that would be!” But I can’t. Forget it. There’s nothing like that. Nothing! And no one’s listening to me. Yes, I’ve built a beta site, but I don’t have the ad money, the programming resources, the connections, to draw and keep the critical-mass crowds necessary to make this thing work, even though I see the intense excitement it generates in our beta users when it does.”

Nor is there any shortage of people who want to field others’ requests:

“And on the other side, we need to remember that about half the population feels undiscovered (or at least not sufficiently discovered). Many people feel that too few people are looking for them to hear what they have to say, what they have to sell, what they specifically specialize in, what makes them valuable. Most people would feel stupid advertising themselves , and yet know damn well they are the foremost expert on something (such as our Seinfeld-episode expert at GlobeAlive), and they probably are, but besides their immediate network, the rest of the world doesn’t recognize them as such, even though the rest of the world needs them, they can’t fill that hole, because they simply can’t be found, at least not as easily as a web page on Google.”

Ah, the innovator’s dilemma. Nobody misses what they’ve never experienced, like a battered wife who can’t imagine leaving the relationship. To imagine a better future, we need a vision:

“The bottom line is that when we restrict our interactions to people we already know or the people that happen to be in the chat room or community we join, it’s like restricting our information-gathering to the books in our personal libraries at home, it’s a mathematical certainty that we’re selling ourselves utterly short. The island mentality is the root of this problem. There’s an infinitely better way of going about our interpersonal interactions. It would change the web by making it live ; it would change the economy by making it personal ; it would change the world by making it smaller ; and it would change you and I… by helping us meet.”

Read the whole piece. It will make you think.

Running out of Sugar in a Beet Field

I have a default action when I run into the absurdity of grand potential limited by unimaginative capital. I haul out my tattered copy of Tom Robbins’ Skinny Legs and All and re-read the best single paragraph ever written on economics:

During periods of so-called economic depression, societies suffer for want of all manner of essential goods, yet investigation almost invariably discloses that there are plenty of goods available. Plenty of coal in the ground, corn in the fields, wool on the sheep. What is missing is not materials but an abstract unit of measurement called ‘money.’ It is akin to a starving woman with a sweet tooth lamenting that she can’t bake a cake because she doesn’t have any ounces. She has butter, flour, eggs, milk, and sugar, she just doesn’t have any ounces, any pinches, any pints.(Skinny Legs and All, 1990)

Robbins is saying that we capitalists aren’t living up to our end of the bargain. (Yeah. We. Whoever has the time, bandwidth and inclination to read, write or discuss web logs, we’re part of the grand capitalist experiment. Even we foot soldiers in the trenches are part of the capitalist campaign).

In exchange for control of most people’s labor and brainpower, capitalism is supposed to find, develop and deploy talent, brains and energy and organize them in such a way that productivity and hope and prosperity increase in a crescendo of innovation and shared advancement of mankind and abundance reaching into every nook and cranny of humanity.

Oops, got a little ahead of myself there. It’s easy to forget there’s no “supposed to” in economics. There’s only a “just is.” It’s not written anywhere that people who’ve figured out how to control and deploy capital have any obligation to use it for the common good. It’s not even written that they must forego, like, 1% of their economic possibilities to trigger, l
ike, a 100% improvement in the common good. It’s not even accepted among capitalists that there’s a common good at all.

So what’s keeping Allen’s GlobeAlive from wiring us together better than conventional mechanisms? Some say that it’s hard to know for sure who we really are.

DIY DigID

One problem Allen runs into is the assumption that we’re years away from the robust reputation-enabled digital ID infrastructure that GlobeAlive seems to need to connect real people with real experts. If it happens sooner, there’s a tiny chance that Xpertweb’s modest proposal could solve the DigID shortage, at least for its half-dozen or so users.

Think of it as Do-it-Yourself DigID. It’s based on the key Xpertweb feature that arranges for both parties in a transaction/conversation/inquiry to have their own web site with cooperative scripting and a data file we cleverly call myid.xml. It lives at a predictable URL and contains all the personal info you might conceivably want to share with other parties, including Fname, Lname, address1, address2, city, province, postcode, xwid, etc. Revolutionary stuff, eh?

There’s also a provision for optional datatypes, any of which may be encrypted using the XML encryption standard. You choose which datatypes to fill in or other datatypes you may specify. Your Visa card number might be one, for putting money, and your PayPal email account might be one, for getting money. Those payment-based ‘put’ and ‘get’ actions conform to the widely adopted MTTP protocol—Money Talks Truly Powerfully.

So how can two Xpertweb sites with their cooperative scripts validate these people and their transactions? Five steps:

1. A person identifies a good or service from a proven expert, enters her Xpertweb site’s URL and clicks the submit button.
2. The expert’s site doesn’t know who entered the URL, so it sets a cookie on the visitor’s browser with the expert’s unique Xpertweb ID, the visitor’s IP number and the exact time the visitor clicked the submit button and sends the buyer to the URI purported to belong to the visitor.
3. The buyer’s site challenges the visitor for a private name and password.
4. If the visitor passes the identity challenge, the site creates a new task file, named by combining the expert’s ID, the buyer’s ID and the Unix epoch – the number of seconds between 1/1/1970 and the second the submit button was clicked. The file will contain a few basic data relating to the transaction.
5. The authenticated buyer is sent back to the expert’s site, where the seller’s script can see that the file has been created on the buyer’s site, initiated from the known IP number within a reasonably short period after the first buyer action, confirming that this is the person as represented. Then the transaction can proceed.

There you have it, homespun DigID. No complex standards, no centralized servers, just a couple of similarly equipped web sites that can tell if a current visitor is the owner of a site they claim to own. Sure it’s a lightweight protocol, designed for villagers authenticating each other for a few transactions per week. If someone wants to do something more complicated, they can, but they’ll have no procedural advantage over a plain vanilla Xpertweb site.

And that’s how I hope the Xpertweb tools can help GlobeAlive go beyond the beta stage and serve its members as Allen has foreseen. If Xpertweb or something even better can help Allen realize the vision he has for all of us, then there’s no limit to how many people can serve each other and make money doing so.

1001 Arabian Rights

Khaled Al-Maeena, editor in chief of Arab News, spoke in Salon last week regarding the future of the Arab world:

“On the whole if you ask any young person what he wants, he wants to be computer-savvy, he wants the Internet, he wants to work. We do not want to be mere bystanders. We want to be travelers on the road of life, on the road of progress.”

Let’s not underestimate the potential for all of us to be useful to each other and to deal in ways that bring out the “supposed to” in us. That’s a business plan to get behind.

12:24:20 AM    

I received some questions from Shannon Clark regarding some of the Xpertweb Issues.

When you refer to “Xpertweb transaction protocols” what is this? (yes, this is a “simple” question.) Is there a specific source for this protocol to look at?

A series of sample forms may be seen starting at http://www.xpertweb.com/process/.

The “Xpertweb Protocols” provide transaction forms for use by non-tech people to record a transaction’s history on the web, using their own web site as a peer to other participants’ web sites.

To that end, each participant is set up with their site, by which they manage forms for buying (receiving a benefit) and selling (imparting a benefit). Most importantly, each transaction is graded by the participants. When the task is done, a completion report/invoice is generated by the seller’s script, REQUIRING a grade (01-99%) from the buyer, plus a written comment. Money is not required, but If the task specifies a payment, the buyer is required to transmit funds to the seller immediately, in an amount which may be discounted by the buyer’s grade. A grade of 85-100% generates a full price transaction. A 50-85% grade pays 50-85% of the contract price. A grade below 50% dismisses the effort as worthless.

The risk is always to the seller. The seller’s only protection is that a customer’s grading history is known before accepting an assignment. It’s like walking into a restaurant with your tipping record on your forehead. Mitch Ratcliffe described the “Caveat Venditor” principle a couple of months ago.

All grades and comments are recorded at both participants’ sites, so no ratings can be hidden. All data is saved as plain XML data in the web directory, so it is discoverable by spiders or purpose-built scripts.

Perhaps related to this, what is the intention behind the “transaction protocols” – do you plan on having separate “Xpertweb servers” vs. “Xpertweb clients”?

An Xpertweb “server” is just a web directory with a certain structure, like this. Each participant has their own directory, as depicted. This “server” has its own code for saving data in 3 file types:

1. the owner’s digital ID
2. a product or service description offered by the owner
3. a History of each transaction (including the rating that Xpertweb is all about).

Each person may have as many Xpertweb personas as desired, and may use the tools for any or none or all of their transactions.

I ask this because my understanding of Xpertweb would leave me to believe that currently it is intended as a centralized platform via which work gets done – more specifically, a party contracts with another party to perform some unit of work, related to each part may be one (or more?) “mentors” who assist in the management of the project and in the performance of the work and may share in the fees. Fees paid are arranged to be paid on the basis of an acceptance measure, with a pre-set rate for less than perfection. Over time the past history of mentors and mentees will build up providing a documented system of “proof” of how well (or not) different parties have performed work in the past. First, is my above one (long) paragraph summary of Xpertweb even close? If not, how not?

Very close. If I’d read it first, my above answers could have been shorter, but I’ll leave them…..;-)

There is NO centralized service. Xpertweb is an agreement, really. There’s no curtain and no wizard. The only repository of knowledge and standards is each user’s series of mentors.

The idea is to build a guild-like virtual organization with no leaders but with a respect for experience and quality work.

What does it “mean” to “Use Xpertweb to conduct a transaction?”

It refers to the use of the forms starting here. Those forms require that both users have an Xpertweb site, so, implicitly, each has a mentor who set up their site and is available to support them. That’s on the principle that new software benefits from a human guide.

XPERTWEB IS MEANT FOR TRADESPEOPLE MORE THAN FOR ENGINEERS.

That’s because there are so many more tradespeople than engineers.

Why 5 Mentors, for one question that puzzles me.

One reason is to encourage a guild mentality – a non-capitalistic approach.
Another is to appeal to people’s ambition – a decidedly capitalistic approach.

From late January :

Should Xpertweb’s Designed Economy offer Hierarchical Rewards?

This is the central design question. Probably the self-generating reputation index is enough of a benefit to attract new users. But the system asks a lot of users – more than any commercial system would: you must have your own web site. You need to upload your starter kit via FTP. Where will you get a starter kit? If it’s only available from a central site, that site is a business that must charge for its service and, if the service is well received, will increase the price as it becomes a necessity.

No, there must be a mentor for each new user. Any user must be equipped to be a mentor. That means that the skill set for any user is broad. A mentor will be needed to set up every new user. Why would someone do all this? The immediate attraction is to get paid something by several generations of new users, hopefully a lot of them. The more subtle payoff is a sense of community, IF the users relate to each other as carriers of a shared, successful meme.

The reason for 5 mentors is to invoke the greed principle. 4 is not enough to generate a LOT of fees, and 6 is so over-the-top as to be outrageous. 5 generates quite a lot, but just short of obscene. Here’s a graphic, where very dot is a persona and each is the center of a ring like the larger one, connected much as dendrites connect neurons. These rings are concentric, like the relationships among bloggers and the LinkedIn model:

Mentor Fees

Mentoring is a service like any other. Each mentor is graded 01-99% by each 1st-level “mentee”. Low grades from them will automatically discount the fees paid by all the other users paying fees. In addition, each person may deny any fee for any reason, though there should be a reason.

It’s presumed that fees are a motivator. If you don’t pay fees, why should you receive any?

I stress this because mentor fees are the Xpertweb lightning rod. The fees exist because most people like money WAY more than ideas, and Xpertweb is designed to appeal to most people. For a sanity check, ask your spouse if it’s preferable for you to be involved with Xpertweb with or without the fee structure.

Offsetting that is the fact that Xpertweb is only an agreement, handed down, guild-like through a series of mentors. See this entry for other similarities to Searls’ &a
mp; Wieinberger’s World of Ends clarification engine.

The Xpertweb agreement may be modified, and those modifications are currently being discussed. Some mentors may not want to receive fees. Others may want to have all fees sent to designated charities, or parents, or political funds, etc. There is no rigid model, but the model does include the possibility of receiving enough fees to pay for an expensive college. That is not such a bad thing.

Presently our best and brightest are lured to the Wall Streets and corporate suites to become unwitting pawns in the intermediation between people’s talent and the buyers of that talent. Xpertweb proposes to be an alternate path for people whose future includes prosperity.

1:44:11 AM    

Hi Alan,

Thanks for reminding us that we’ve hired a President whom we’d not hire to organize the supply closet. Here’s my $.02:

If you earnestly believe these facts are unimpeachable, turn this document into something effective in the minds of people who didn’t vote in 2000 or who are inclined to vote for him again. At least that gets you past the current pattern of progressives talking to each other and affecting no other opinions.

To be useful, this document needs focus and substantiation. If this were a blog, I’d want it to appeal to someone who isn’t convinced of these facts or their import. I’d feel compelled to provide links to mainstream media and include some graphs and charts. It should be shorter and punchier, with a link to a more complete web page with deeper documentation and more mainstream media links. Lose the links to Hyperreal.org and http://www.votetoimpeach.org/. They only convince the convinced.

This is worth editing and putting on a web site. The facts must be so true and the wording so tight that they’re indisputable. Then you need to find a rich progressive to underwrite a challenge: $10,000 to anyone who can prove these facts wrong ($100,000 would be better).

Then you need to retain an auditing firm to audit any claims that these facts are wrong. If someone claims there’s an error, let them put up $1,000 against the $100,000 reward (I like that number better). Turn it into a media circus, if you can find a medium that wants a circus. Find an Edward R. Murrow to take this and run with it.

That alone will not change as many minds as you would think, since Dubya’s appeal is not based on facts but feelings. The people who blame all their problems on the gummint were in a kind of personal hell during the 90s. They felt then as you do now. They honestly believe that the government does nothing useful and should be reduced to the vanishing point (except for the military, which should get 1/3 of the GDP, since killing heathens is something worth living for).

People who support Bush are getting the government they deserve. They don’t want to pay attention to government and details and policy and diplomacy and all the rest. They want someone who expresses anger at the things that piss all of us off. They want someone who convinces them that he is honorable and that he’ll take care of the bad guys and will make the world stop being so complicated and dangerous. These are not stupid people, but they believe there’s a stern but fair and honest father out there somewhere who will take care of us and never dip into the petty cash drawer. And they believe they’ve found him.

Oh yeah, they also believe there’s a criminal behind every tree and that we need to lock them up and throw away the key. Criminal includes every insecure teenager wearing a head rag and walkin’ the Pimp Roll in the mall.

---

On Tuesday, May 13, 2003, at 03:52 AM, Alan Peevers wrote:

This lovely and impressive resume (sent to me by my brother) really illustrates why we can’t go back to sleep. I think Bush is worse for the world than any other president in US history. Anyone have any news or opportunities to defeat him in ’04?
 
Peace,
Alan

George W. Bush Resume

Past work experience:

• Ran for congress and lost.
• Produced a Hollywood slasher B movie.
• Bought an oil company, but couldn’t find any oil in Texas, company went bankrupt shortly after I sold all my stock.
• Bought the Texas Rangers baseball team in a sweetheart deal that took land using tax-payer money.
  Biggest move: Traded Sammy Sosa to the Chicago White Sox.
• With fathers help (and his name) was elected Governor of Texas.

Accomplishments as Governor of Texas:

• Changed pollution laws for power and oil companies and made Texas the most polluted state in the Union. Replaced Los Angeles with Houston as the most smog ridden city in America.
• Cut taxes and bankrupted the Texas government to the tune of billions in borrowed money.
• Set record for most executions by any Governor in American history.
• Became president after losing the popular vote by over 500,000 votes, with the help of my father’s appointments to the Supreme Court.

Accomplishments as president:

• Attacked and took over two countries.
• Spent the surplus and bankrupted the treasury.
• Shattered record for biggest annual deficit in history.
• Set economic record for most private bankruptcies filed in any 12 month period.
• Set all-time record for biggest drop in the history of the stock market.
• First president in decades to execute a federal prisoner.
• First president in US history to enter office with a criminal record.
• First year in office set the all-time record for most days on vacation by any president in US history.
• After taking the entire month of August off for vacation, presided over the worst security failure in US history.
• Set the record for most campaign fund-raising trips than any other president in US history.
• In my first two years in office over 2 million Americans lost their job.
• Cut unemployment benefits for more out of work Americans than any president in US history.
• Set the all-time record for most foreclosures in a 12 month period.
• Appointed more convicted criminals to administration positions than any president in US history.
• Set the record for the least amount of press conferences than any president since the advent of television.
• Signed more laws and executive orders amending the Constitution than any president in US history.
• Presided over the biggest energy crises in US history and refused to intervene when corruption was revealed.
• Presided over the highest gasoline prices in US history and refused to use the national reserves as past presidents have.
• Cut healthcare benefits for war veterans.
• Set the all-time record for most people worldwide to simultaneously take to the streets to protest me (15 million people), shattering the record for protest against any person in the history of mankind.
• Dissolved more international treaties than any president in US history.
• My presidency is the most secretive and un-accountable of any in US history.
• Members of my cabinet are the richest of any administration in US history (the ‘poorest’ multi-millionaire, Condoleeza Rice has an Chevron oil tanker named after her).
• First president in US history to have all 50 states of the Union simultaneously go bankrupt.
• Presided over the biggest corporate stock market fraud of any market in any country in the history of the world.
• First president in US history to order a US attack and military occupation of a sovereign nation.
• Created the largest government department bureaucracy in the history of the United States.
• Set the all-time record for biggest annual budget spending increases, more than any president in US history.
• First president in US history to have the United Nations remove the US from the human rights commission.
• First president in US history to have the United Nations remove the US from the elections monitoring board.
• Removed more checks and balances, and have the least amount of congressional oversight than any
  presidential administration in US history.
• Rendered the entire United Nations irrelevant.
• Withdrew from the World Court of Law.
• Refused to allow inspectors access to US prisoners of war and by default no longer abide by the Geneva Conventions.
• First president in US history to refuse United Nations election inspectors (during the 2002 US elections).
• All-time US (and world) record holder for most corporate campaign donations.
• My biggest life-time campaign contributor presided over one of the largest corporate bankruptcy frauds in world history (Kenneth Lay, former CEO of Enron Corporation).
• Spent more money on polls and focus groups than any president in US history.
• First president in US history to unilaterally attack a sovereign nation against the will of the United Nations and the world community.
• First president to run and hide when the US came under attack (and then lied saying the enemy had the code to Air Force 1).
• First US president to establish a secret shadow government.
• Took the biggest world sympathy for the US after 911, and in less than a year made the US the most resented country in the world (possibly the biggest diplomatic failure in US and world history).
• With a policy of ‘dis-engagement’ created the most hostile Israeli-Palestine relations in at least 30 years.
• Fist US president in history to have a majority of the people of Europe (71%) view my presidency as the biggest threat to world peace and stability.
• First US president in history to have the people of South Korea more threatened by the US than their immediate neighbor, North Korea.
• Changed US policy to allow convicted criminals to be awarded government contracts.
• Set all-time record for number of administration appointees who violated US law by not selling huge investments in corporations bidding for government contracts.
• Failed to fulfill my pledge to get Osama Bin Laden ‘dead or alive’.
• Failed to capture the anthrax killer who tried to murder the leaders of our country at the United States Capitol building. After 18 months I have no leads and zero suspects.
• In the 18 months following the 911 attacks I have successfully prevented any public investigation into the biggest security failure in the history of the United States.
• Removed more freedoms and civil liberties for Americans than any other president in US history.
• In a little over two years created the most divided country in decades, possibly the most divided the US has ever been since the civil war.
• Entered office with the strongest economy in US history and in less than two years turned every single economic category heading straight down. Records and References:
• At least one conviction for drunk driving in Maine (Texas driving record has been erased and is not available).
• AWOL from National Guard and Deserted the military during a time of war.
• Refused to take drug test or even answer any questions about drug use.
• All records of my tenure as governor of Texas have been spirited away to my fathers library, sealed in secrecy and un-available for public view.
• All records of any SEC investigations into my insider trading or bankrupt companies are sealed in secrecy and un-available for public view.
• All minutes of meetings for any public corporation I served on the board are sealed in secrecy and un-available for public view.
• Any records or minutes from meetings I (or my VP) attended regarding public energy policy are sealed in secrecy and un-available for public review.

For personal references please speak to my father or James Baker (they can be reached at their offices of the Carlyle Group, profiteering handsomely from recent and current U.S. military activities.)

7:04:57 AM    

We have genes for usefulness.
                              — Lewis Thomas, Lives of a Cell

My world changed when I read Thomas Lewis’ Lives of a Cell. It’s a collection of essays by a world-class physician, researcher and administrator (Director of the Sloan-Kettering Memorial Cancer Research Center in New York). One summer night, driving through rural Connecticut, he was struck by how the fertile earth seemed to him like a living cell, exchanging nutrients and energy, cooperating in an orgy of chaos and order.

“Service is the rent we pay for living. It is the very purpose of life and not something you do in your spare time.

Education is for improving the lives of others and leaving your community and world better than you found it.”
                            — Marion Wright Edelman, Children’s Defense Fund

There’s a theme here, about service after success and based upon that success. I was trained that the ultimate privilege is to be so successful that you had the means and mentality to serve the community, one way or another. Those who so served therefore distinguished themselves from those who either could not or would not serve the community.

In that way they distinguished themselves from less successful people, who lacked the outer or inner wealth to serve others’ needs. Another way one might distinguish oneself would be to not cheat or lie. When receiving incorrect change in your favor, one had two choices: correct the error or pocket the tiny windfall which declared you to be someone in such poor shape that the pittance mattered to you.

Loyalty Downward

Aaron Feuerstein is in the news again this spring. Mr Feuerstein is the owner of Malden Mills in Lawrence Massachussets, founded by his family in 1906. The last time you heard of him was in 1995, when the mill suffered a disastrous fire, yet he kept the payroll going and fired no one. That would be extraordinary enough, but it’s downright miraculous when you discover that Malden Mills is one of the last textile mills in America. This is an almost impossible business under the best of circumstances.

Malden Mills’ insurance covered only 75% of the rebuilding costs, so Malden filed for bankruptcy protection in 2001. Its creditors include GE Capital, SunAmerica and some private investors. Are we surprised that the creditors fought the reorganization every step of the way?

Let the Lady Speak

I can’t improve on the sentiments expressed by Marion Wright Edelman on her quotations page. Read her wisdom. Is there anything each of us can do, today, to make the world a little better. Not just social software or revising the world economy, but something here and now.

We have genes for usefulness.

11:32:53 PM    

Burning Answers

Doc Searls hung out here last week: we laughed a lot, did tech and swapped stories. He attended the Burning Questions conference presented by the Harvard Business Review and organized by Halley. She and a bunch of other bloggers were at Katz’ Deli Thursday night.

(To answer the most burning question at the conference, I confirmed that Halley did stop by a Fifth Avenue boutique for some sexy underwear for her NYC survival kit. That’s the kind of undercover work this blog will undertake to bring you the back story you deserve to know.)

It was an interesting week. Doc signed up to work with me and my co-consultant, Transition Networks, to develop a massively luxurious web application. “Massively luxurious” is what happens when a luxury brand successfully sells into the “mass market” of people who are almost invisibly prosperous, living simply but insisting on top quality for some purchases. Noted recently,

“We don’t want to haggle over commodities but we’re experts in prestige and the tools of our trade and we want the good life at great prices. You’ll find us over at CostCo, loading paper towels into our Mercedes. Next we’ll stop at CompUSA, grooving to our iPod while stocking up on commodity CD blanks to Rip Mix Burn on our tricked-out iMac. Back home, we’ll order cut-rate printer cartridges from inks4art.com since CostCo and CompUSA only stock the Epson parts.”

Whether it’s a Mont Blanc pen in your pocket, Steuben crystal on your mantle or a Rolex on your wrist, you probably indulge in a luxury item once in a while. When you do, while you may wish you could pay less, price won’t keep you from the purchase. Price often justifies the purchase, a fact that supply-demand curves don’t explain very well.

Transitions. Networks. Luxury.

Transition Network‘s CEO Mary Olson and Creative Director Randal Hunting brought Steuben Glass into the web age with the kind of success story many have given up on. After two months developing an innovative web strategy with Steuben management, they implemented, rolled out and established a new web site over the next two years. Their deliberate work resulted in a site that generates 68% of Steuben’s new business, revenues up about a third and web activity up 90%. Not bad for an investment equivalent to a retail store, and requiring just 3 people to operate. Most importantly, it’s halted a decline in their customer census, attracting for the first time the children and grandchildren of their aging customer base.

Transition Networks has been similarly successful for other clients:

21 Club
Corning Museum of Glass
Oxygen Media
Luxury Marketing Council
Joseph Jurson
Saber Partners
Henry Welt
Steuben

These companies know better than any others that their customers are customers, not consumers. When you make that distinction, Doc is the guru you want on your team, and not just because his Google link count is 88,100 (Steuben’s at 14,100). He and Dave Weinberger nailed customers’ decline into consumer hell in Cluetrain:

“So the customers who once looked you in the eye while hefting your wares in the market were transformed into consumers. In the words of industry analyst Jerry Michalski, a consumer was no more than ‘a gullet whose only purpose in life is to gulp products and crap cash.’ Power swung so decisively to the supply side that “market” became a verb: something you do to customers.”

The Clue Trainers, of course, specified just how absurd that model is, and Googling “consumer customer” at searls.com supports the prediction that the web would reform the consumer poop collectors. But we’re still a long way from the kind of intimacy the web can enable–CRM done right, as Mary describes it. Since Xpertweb is really a reputation/intimacy protocol, I find this kind of work fabulous, dahling, as they say in the world of fashion.

The mass/luxe market is as boutique as you can get with a corporate web site. Rather than launch with a blitz attempting to capture as many eyeballs and clickthroughs as possible, the luxury site must reinforce the quality of the “brand” rather than dilute it. For example, Mary’s and my client is the irrepressible Michael George Florist, who is the florist of choice for New York’s fashion industry, media, celebs and notables. When Calvin Klein opened his store, Michael’s arrangement of 400 calla lilies stopped jaded New Yorkers in their tracks. People clustered at the door to gawk. Calvin, kibbutzing the activity with Michael, says, “Michael, people are coming in because of the lilies.” Michael was skeptical, but later realizes it’s true.

Convergence Marketing

Mary Olson and I have been noticing a kind of cosmic convergence around the mass/luxe meme, but today’s intersections are a little over-the-top. Maybe Doc’s message and this blog are channeling each other due to sleep deprivation. We got 2 hours sleep before his 4am wakeup (blog dinner gossip and Xpertweb musings while Doc forced his NYC photo album down the throat of his balky server).

It doesn’t stop there. Mary calls ten minutes later as I’m forwarding Doc’s email to her. Apparently the mass/luxe meme is getting some real traction, with documentation coming by courier. To understand the traction, we need to consider the market segmentation practices that have dominated marketing over the last 35 years or so. Just as computers morphed from mainframe to minis to PCs to phones, Marketing theory evolved from a single mass market through multiple demographic market segments and now, we’re certain, to sets of luxury preferences within individual demographics and often across them.

How’s that for a disturbing, self-parodying graphic? This is the image that Harcourt Brace uses to attract marketing students to its textbooks on market segmentation. The message seems to be to “carve up the people so we can serve them better.”

It echoes the 18-year-old Marine in Viet Nam who said “We had to level the hamlet in order to save it.” I guess it takes a child to raze a village.

Harcourt Brace cites traditional market segments like Mature Age Groups, Young Age Groups, Hispanics and Upscale Customers. The idea is that you should address each segment as a homogenous mass, which is only a slight refinement of the 1950s doctrine that you aim the same message at the entire market. Slight, because it’s probable that each of those segments now has a higher population than the reach of all television advertising in the mid 50s.

Mass/luxe web strategies, as practiced by Transition Networks, is surgical by comparison to the blunt instruments of conventional marketing. At Steuben, Mary mined executives’ personal contact lists to offer compelling opportunities to known humans in whom the executives had a continuing investment. The database was pristine so the approach to its members also had to be. It worked beyond all expectations. From this base, concentric circles of acquaintanceship and intimacy leveraged both the brand and the relationships, rather than simply diluting the brand. The relationships engage clients, really, beyond even customers, and far removed from mere consumers. Not only are they the
brand’s clients, they know they are its clients, a fact from which they draw tangible pleasure.

The relationship is communal, and in that sense it’s like the community that grows up around a school or church. Fund raisers for a private school will never fire a stakeholder, and neither will a luxury brand. The institution and its members draw mutual strength from each other where lesser brands contend with their customers in the lose-lose tension of value versus price. Such companies constantly abandon customers in the naive assumption they can recruit replacements at will. In truth, if a new depositor is worth a toaster to a bank, a long-term depositor is worth a microwave oven.

You are What you Drive

Years ago, a Car and Driver article summed up the mass/luxe model: “BMW drivers are bold and enthusiastic because BMWs are bold, enthusiastic cars.” It perfectly captures what we know instinctively: A luxury item helps define its owners, whom less subtle marketers would arbitrarily assign to a traditional “market segment.” The taste and special interests of these brands’ customers transcends arbitrary designations.

Customers are those for whom vendors must customize their products and, indeed, their behavior in the market. Everyone benefits from a luxury brand: high profit margins give the vendor the luxury of behaving generously; customers have the luxury of considering quality and not price; craftsmen enjoy the luxury of high-quality design and materials and the time for careful execution. A sales representative is often the client’s peer in taste, fashion sense, education and sophistication. Their sensibilities reinforce each other.

All have the luxury of behaving as most of us wish we could. The acquired good is merely a token of a deeper truth, a kind of Platonic ideal: The real luxury lies in the behaviors and attitudes afforded by the margins attached to luxury goods and services. In that special sense, luxury purchases are the most affordable of all.

The move of luxury brand owners onto the web suggests we may see the finest expression of the evolution from consumer to customer to client and beyond. That most human of conditions grows out of the special calculus of a luxury brand’s adoption of the web’s potential:

known quality + adequate margins + a community ethic = customer intimacy

That’s an intimacy that even the Cluetrain authors might not have thought possible.

6:19:48 PM