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Category: money

Oil and the Geography of Desire

Published June 22, 2008 by cgerrish

Exotic Fruit Poster

The annihilation of distance is a feature of our modern life. On the network, all locations are one click apart. Or rather, two clicks, because most transport is mediated by Google. In our daily lives, the products in local stores, and the food in the fridge has global sources. The cost of transportation, combined with lower production costs, has made geography a non-factor. 

What was once exotic is now available everywhere. In the United States we’ve achieved a kind of homogeneity of place that at first seems desirable, but soon becomes boring and expected. We no longer know the seasonality of our food, our local stores are replaced by national chain stores. Our set of choices is much larger, but it’s the same set available everywhere to everyone.

Geography and distance had become a hidden facet of the products we buy and the food we consume. The price of oil has surfaced this hidden facet. The exotic becomes exotic again; a grape is no longer just a grape, but it’s a grape from Chile. The quality of distance is reasserted, and distance has a price. Higher prices result in lower demand, and may create different economics around many things we’ve come to think of as local.

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The Searlsian Decade: Visualizing VRM

Published June 8, 2008 by cgerrish

Archimedes, the lever, the fulcrum, the world

Doc Searls is trying to find the fulcrum and the lever that will shift the basic network patterns, economics and power relations of advertising, marketing and B2C transactions. It’s your typical boil the ocean project. He calls it Project VRM.

VRM, or Vendor Relationship Management, is the reciprocal of CRM or Customer Relationship Management. It provides customers with tools for engaging with vendors in ways that work for both parties.

As the Network matures and we begin to understand the gestural possibilities at every device and virtual device endpoint of the Network, the tools that Doc seeks begin to materialize.

These proposals offer no quick and easy solution to the problems of peace. But they are essential tools. “Give me a fulcrum,” Archimedes is reported to have said, “and a place to stand—and I will move the world.” The tools I have suggested can be our fulcrum—it is here we take our stand—let us move the world down the road to peace.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) 
President of the United States (1961-1963) 
Campaign speech proposing the United States Peace Corps
San Francisco, California, USA
November 2, 1960
(As reported by The New York Times, November 3, 1960, page 32)

I’m remodeling my kitchen, so I’m in the market for a number of products: a sink, a faucet, lighting, appliances, drawer pulls, etc. I’d recently looked at a few of these items on Amazon, so the next time I stopped by, I was shown some similar items based on my previous browsing and click path data. I wondered aloud on Twitter whether or not Amazon could read my blog to add data to their propensity model. Michael Markman responded that they probably had enough data on me as it is. From my perspective, the difference is between a conscious gesture signaling interest and a harvested gesture that feeds a mechanized targeted messaging propensity model.

But the truth is, I’m not really interested in using my blog as a method to signal to vendors. But this thread reveals another piece of the puzzle, the value of a blog, and current authoring tools, is that they make it easy to create RSS feeds. What I’d like to do is construct an RSS feed of the kind of things I’m interested in for my kitchen remodel. Vendors could read that feed and respond with feeds of their own that I could wrap into a consolidated feed where I could rank, tag, filter, sort, and search the RSS items. The user contract with the vendor is: don’t offer me feeds that aren’t relevant to my interest/gesture feed or you will be labeled a spammer.

I’ve been thinking about the synchronization capabilities of Live Mesh, the idea of notebooks and pens, and what Evernote might be good for over the last few months. While I’ve seen some potential in Evernote, it didn’t really click with me as a user until yesterday. I was surfing around the Network looking at various sinks, flooring materials and faucets and needed a way to store my consideration set. The use case for Evernote finally emerged, I was able to select portions of web pages and copy them into a notebook on Evernote through a browser plugin. I can also use my my iPhone to take photographs in the wild and email them to a notebook. And because there’s an iPhone web client, I have access to my notebook where ever I am. Similar to plans for Live Mesh, there are already desktop Evernote clients for Mac, PC, Linux and some Phones. The desktop client extends my ability to manipulate, annotate, tag and search my notebook. The local notebook syncs to the copy in the cloud — and that copy can be made public as an RSS feed.

Relationship Button, VRM, Looking to buy

I have a number of notebooks on Evernote, I can choose to keep them private or make them public. One reason to make a notebook or a portion of a notebook public would be to create half of the VRM relationship envisioned by Doc Searls. The question is, is there a vendor somewhere on the network who would know how to respond to my RSS feed? And does Evernote, or will Live Mesh, give me the tools to work with the feeds vendors offer me?

Michel Foucault in his essay Theatrum philosophicum put forth the notion that one day we may identify the 20th century as Deleuzian. In particular Deleuze’s idea of the rhizome has taken root.  There’s a sense in which we are entering the Searlsian decade of the Network. Hugh McCloud noticed and noted it while talking to Steve Gillmor on the telephone. As we begin to understand more and more about the Network we always already occupy, revolutionary gestures like Project VRM will move into the strong currents of the zeitgeist.

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Gesture Bank Robbed: Clues Point to an Inside Job

Published April 20, 2008 by cgerrish

Bank Vault

It’s just been reported that the Gesture Bank was robbed, and officials tell us that everything is gone. The complicated security measures, the armed guards, the thick metal walls, the alarms, the hidden cameras and the lasers were all overcome in this daring daylight robbery. Some form of military-grade explosives were used in the dramatic breach of this highly-secure vault. Local law enforcement officials, however, speculate the perpetrators were amateurs, “when we arrived on the scene, there were gestures everywhere. Man, they were scattered from hell to breakfast. It doesn’t look like they actually got away with much.”

Portable Eye Tracking

Thousands of ordinary Americans had deposited their hard-earned gestures into accounts using the portable attention recording equipment supplied by the bank. The promise of fungible gestures growing tax-free in their accounts fueled dreams of early retirement and a life of leisure for many.

Clockwork orange

In recent years, the Gesture Bank had faced controversy with its compulsory attention collection proposals. A number of politicians and advertising executives believed that achieving critical mass in the gesture market was a necessary step in transitioning to the new economy. Deposit growth was falling short of projections and some felt stronger measures were required for the safety and security of our nation.

Gesture experts have been puzzled by evidence at the crime scene, it appears all the gestures that have been recovered have been uniformly sliced into 140 character strings of hypertext. The recovery has been very difficult as the gestures seem to be re-absorbed into the the network through the web, IM and SMS. The gestures that have been traced inside the network seem to have formed into a continuous stream of 140 character units; investigators provided this visualization for the media.

Gesture Bank officials are concerned that it will be impossible to identify all these gestures and connect them back up to the people who originally made them. “What people don’t seem to understand is that without a bank and accounts, there’s no way to know who made what gesture.”

Some believe that the Gesture Bank robbery was an inside job, that the unidentified suspect wasn’t working alone. There’s a growing political movement that believes gestures should not be kept in vaults, that gestures should be out in the world and circulating among the people. Highly-placed sources within the bank have reported that this new political idea was spreading like a virus at the highest levels of the organization. One member of the Board of Directors hasn’t been seen around the plush executive suite in many months. Some felt that he signaled his intentions when left this image pasted to the door of his office as a final gesture.

You don’t need a weather man

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Times have changed, and space has changed too

Published April 15, 2008 by cgerrish

Sottsass Typewriter

I’ve been thinking of the dis-intermediation of printing. The disruption of the book, the magazine and the newspaper are in the headlines. A change is upon us, the valuation of things and the physics of the economy are irreversibly new. The big companies that employ thousands are the ones we think of most. The ones with the most reach, the powerhouses, the giants, the ones with the furthest to fall seem the most tragic. It’s a trans-valuation of all values.

But my mind wanders to the little literary magazine, the publishing project done for the love of it. These little magazines always seem to lose money and struggle on year after year. There’s an industry of writer’s workshops across the country that coach and prod writers to fill the pages of the little literary magazines. The interesting thing about these little magazines is that it still takes a lot of money and infrastructure to publish them. Desktop publishing brought the price down, but there’s still the editing, design, printing and distribution.

We now have a publishing medium that allows direct distribution of text over the network. Blogging software has become the new typewriter, and publishing is as easy as Tim Berners-Lee originally imagined it would be. The little literary magazine serves the purpose of a filter, it finds the best writing. But the cost of the filter is not much more than the cost of producing the printed matter. Is the writing about the tradition of ink on paper, or is it about the art of putting one word after the other?

The other thread this tangles up with is Hugh Macleod’s idea of the global microbrand. Hugh writes and draws cartoons from a small town in Texas called Alpine. It’s just up the road from Marfa, Texas, the place where sculptor Donald Judd established an outpost for modern art and minimalism in 1971. Times have changed, and space has changed too. Used to be that Marfa was a long distance from New York City, now it’s just a click away.

Of course for the UNIX operating system, 1971 was the beginning of time. It probably also marked the date when distance began to shrink at a visible rate.

Audiences for the little literary magazine, or Hugh Macleod’s cartoons, no longer need to be locals. They don’t have to live in Alpine, they can see it all through the network. It’s a gathering of tribes from across the globe, not tribes based on proximity or kinship, but on a common social object. We like Hugh’s sense of humor, or the taste of an editor who assembles a collection of short stories. We form a bond.

The highest value in the swirl of texts, images and sounds that roar by us minute by minute, second by second on the network is the good editor, the curator, the finely-tuned filter. Philip Roth, in an introduction to a collection of eastern European writing during the cold war, made an insightful comment: when nothing is allowed, everything is significant; when everything is allowed, nothing is significant. When we can see everything, where do we choose to rest our eyes?

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