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Category: culture

Office Coffee: A Leading Economic Indicator

Published October 22, 2008 by cgerrish

Office coffee machine

My office supplies coffee, tea and hot chocolate to its employees. There’s filtered cold water and hot water for the tea and chocolate. Coffee requires at bit more work. Someone has to make a pot of coffee which includes putting a filter into the machine and then loading 1 1/2 portions of ground coffee from pre-measured packages. Through experimentation and oral history, I have learned that 1 package of coffee is too weak, and 2 packages of coffee are too strong.

Office coffee is perpetually bad. There many reasons for this. Often the coffee will sit in the pot cooking away for hour after hour– the flavor boiled out of it. Even when cut with milk it’s barely drinkable, an acidic brown liquid. Good office coffee requires social cooperation of a fairly high level. Reasonably good raw materials must be provided. And then the key, there must be a willing group of people dedicated to making and then maintaining the freshness of the brew.

If you think about it, the social contract around the quality of good office coffee requires an effort equal to that of a business like Peets or Starbucks. A single person is unlikely to make that effort; social cooperation is necessary.

The quality of office coffee produced in this manner is a leading economic indicator. We’ll leave to the side for the moment the idea of subsidized office coffee. When the cost of social cooperation to yield a good cup of coffee is sufficiently below the cost of buying a good cup of java– people switch. Labor replaces capital. The better and fresher the office coffee, the worse the surrounding general economy. As the economy improves, the quality and freshness of office coffee will start to deteriorate, and alternatives will start to seem economically feasible. Capital replaces labor (the general replaces the specific).

In a good economy, there are those who will cling to office coffee as a matter of principle. But as the general quality of office coffee will tell you, this is an utopian ideal. Of course “office coffee” is just a variable, we could just as easily be talking about enterprise software.

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Permission To Go Live: Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright

Published October 6, 2008 by cgerrish

There are some recordings by Bob Dylan that I’ve played over and over again. Each time I play them they’re exactly the same. The quality of the sound differs, but the intention is that a recording offers an identical experience. I’ve listened to “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” so many times I’m able to reproduce a facsimile of it in my mind at will.

This morning during my Sunday morning trip to the newsstand, I picked up a copy of UNCUT magazine with Bob Dylan on the cover. I was interested in reading about the latest release in the Bootleg Series called “Tell Tale Signs.” There’s a quote at the top of the article that goes like this:

“Have I ever played any song
twice exactly the same?”

“No, Bob, No”

“See? I don’t do that.”

So while I have a fixed idea of what a particular Dylan song sounds like, Dylan doesn’t think of his songs– or any songs as working that way. He never takes the play out of playing a song. I read somewhere that he never listens to his recordings; the song he carries with him is way on down the road from that day it was mixed down to a master.

In a world of scarcity– there’s only room for one version of a song- the one that will make the record company money. That’s the old model. In a world of abundance, each time we revisit a song, it’s never the same. The trap of the digital is that it only makes identical copies. The freeing potential of the digital is that every version of every page of Wikipedia is available. We now have an economic framework that can support releasing every version. Buy a single instance, or access to all versions– access to the version control system.

This set of ideas can’t be contained in one area of culture or commerce.

Doc Searls writes about the new way that writing is produced:

Traditional journalism is static. Its basic units are the article, the story, the piece. The new journalism is live. It doesn’t have a basic unit any more than a river or a storm have a basic unit. It’s process, not product. Even these things we call posts, texts, tweets and wikis are less unitary than contributory. They add to a flow, which in turn adds to what we know.

Steve Gillmor writes about the way the companies communicate, through official static planned releases of information or with live conversations through the Network.

Real work gets done in these conversations, and typically this work is being performed in the “open� because the participants realize (and have been given “permission� to work at this live level) that they have little to fear from competition because their access to participation trumps others who by definition have to react after the fact. Not only has the value moved on to the next set of conversations, but the product of this work is now being marketed to the audience most likely to buy it.

In both culture and commerce we’re looking for permission to go live, to sing the song a different way every time. But we also need to hear the song differently every time and start a conversation about it. Now, not everyone will want to go down that road. When faced with Bob Dylan in concert, some will be angered by a song sung in a new way. And when we get to that crossroads— most likely you’ll go your way, and I’ll go mine.

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The Suspension of Time and Construction of the Double

Published October 5, 2008 by cgerrish

I recently saw San Francisco Opera’s production of Erich Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt. The title means ‘The Dead City’ and refers to the city of Bruges. Ostensibly the story is of a man who is obsessed with his dead wife to the point that it threatens his sanity. The production was excellent and is highly recommended.

The protagonist, Paul, moves to Bruges– but basically moves outside of time and space. Because of his loss, he employs his force of will to suspend the passage of time. He reverses time and keeps it idling in the moments of his idyll. Time stops and he constructs and altar to the past. But an altar and icons are not sufficient for a living relationship. A double must be produced to stand in for the lost one, to bring the past into the present.

Die Tote Stadt is often linked to Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo. In Hitch’s story a secret love is lost and recreated piece by piece. Time is suspended so that the hero, Scottie, can return to the path not taken and experience the love he repressed. He thinks he is a puppetmaster, but in this story of multiple levels, he’s also a puppet being controlled the the simple mechanism of his fear of heights.

One story, Die Tote Stadt, ends with the hero walking away from the dead city and returning to sanity and life. The other ends with the hero killing the object of his obsession through a misunderstanding of the story he occupies. Because Scottie has suspended the passage of time, to live in a story outside of time, he doesn’t perceive the story going on around him.

There are other examples of the construction of a double to fill an emptiness. In My Fair Lady, Henry Higgins constructs a lady suitable to be his companion. The construction of the double starts with an older man finding a younger woman with a physical resemblance. The young woman’s life and identity must be erased in favor of the object of his obsession. His story must replace hers, an event that can never truly happen.

It’s a powerful pattern often played out in both fiction and real life. Presidential candidate John McCain is deeply enmeshed in this drama. He has suspended time, retreated to the past, looks forward to a nostalgic future and has attempted to construct a double to stand by his side in a story unfolding outside of time. What McCain doesn’t seem to understand is that while he plays out his nostalgic dream, he is a character in a drama unfolding in real time. In a post-modern twist, Henry Higgins learns to speak Cockney slang so he can become the suitable consort of Eliza Doolittle. While his story will end soon, he has enabled her future. Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets…

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Exoskeleton of the Microformat: Within You, Without you

Published September 29, 2008 by cgerrish

Hand Exoskeleton

I often think of human-computer interaction (HCI) as the intersection of a language filled with ambiguity with a language purged of ambiguity. When we talk about the advance of the semantic web and microformats, I get this image of our language growing an exoskeleton. The code marking up our language attempts to disambiguate it, drain it of its natural state of overdetermination.

Dali

In his book, Muse in the Machine, Computerizing the Poetry of Human Thought, David Gelernter talks about how we think at various levels of focus. At high levels of focus we think most like a machine, we are goal directed and push ambiguity to the margins. We are solving problems and making connections within a highly reduced set of possibilities. At low levels of focus we think poetically, with dream imagery, making impossible connections. Any truly creative process involves both modes of thinking. As our language grows an exoskeleton, will we push our humanity and our poetry to the margins? Will we lose our sense of touch?

Meaning is perhaps both the illusion of a perfectly clear language combined with the deep ambiguity of life and truth. Language is both within you and without you.

We were talking – about the space between us all
And the people – who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion
Never glimpse the truth – then it’s far too late – when they pass away
And the time will come when you see we’re all one,and life flows on within you and without you
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