I was looking for a poem, or some piece of writing that would express the essence of this weekend– the new era of our Union. The inauguration of a new day. I spent a lot of time reading Walt Whitman, but in the end, a song from The Band’s second album kept running through my head. The song is called ‘When You Awake.’
Robbie Robertson describes it this way: “It’s a story about someone who passes something on to you, and you pass it on to someone else. But it’s something you take to heart and carry with you your whole life.” There’s a sense of awakening, remembering the roots of our revolutionary experiment, connecting to the progress of our souls.
When You Awake Manuel/Robertson– Vocals: Danko
Ollie told me I’m a fool.
So I walked on down the road a mile,
Went to the house that brings a smile
Sat upon my grandpa’s knee,
And what do you think he said to me?
(Chorus:)
When You Awake you will remember ev’rything,
You will be hangin’ on a string from your…
When you believe, You will relieve the only soul
That you were born with to grow old and never know
Ollie showed me the fork in the road.
You can take to the left or go straight to the right,
Use your days and save your nights,
Be careful where you step, and watch wha-cha eat,
Sleep with the light on and you got it beat.
(Repeat Chorus)
Ollie warned me it’s a mean old world,
The street don’t greet ya, yes, it’s true;
But what am I supposed to do:
Read the writing on the wall,
I heard itwhen I was very small.
(Repeat Chorus)
Wash my hand in lye water, I got a date with the
captains daughter. You can go and tell your brother.
We sure gonna love one another,
Oh! You may be right and ya might be wrong,
I ain’t gonna worry all day long.
Snow’s gonna come and the frost gonna bite,
My old car froze up last night.
Ain’t no reason to hang your head
I could wake up in the mornin’ dead.
Oh! And if I thought it would do any good,
I’d stand on the rock where Moses stood.
Dominic Jones of the Investor Relations Blog sent me a link to ProxyDemocracy.org this morning. We’ve recently seen the power the of the vote in our Presidential elections. We marvel at the power of the community as we vote with our attention and gestures to surface the wisdom of crowds in social media applications. There’s another form of suffrage that is within our reach, but largely ignored. Shareholders have a say in how public corporations are run. One share of stock in a public company gives you a vote.
ProxyDemocracy.org explains it this way:
A company’s stockholders have the legal right to decide important decisions at the companies they own: they elect directors, review aspects of executive compensation, and weigh in on shareholder proposals addressing a variety environmental, social, and governance issues. History has shown that shareholders can use their voting power to create value — both economic and social — at the companies they own.
Whether you invest in mutual funds or individual stocks, you have a say in how things are run. While the recent market crash may have caused you to curse Wall Street and wish a pox on all their houses– if you’d like a say in how our financial institutions are run, a single share of stock gives you the right to vote.
If you’re already a shareholder, are you accepting disenfranchisement? The voting process as it’s currently implemented is a form a voter suppression. Once again, ProxyDemocracy.org:
In practice, it can be hard for investors to exercise their rights and have their voices heard. One important obstacle is information. Shareholders often have a hard time keeping track of when the companies in their portfolio are meeting and what the ballot items mean. Mutual fund owners, whose funds vote on their behalf at the companies in the fund portfolio, rarely know how their funds are voting and thus have no way to be sure that their interests are being represented.
Imagine, for instance, that you’d like a say in the future of the auto manufacturers in Detroit. Perhaps you’d like to have a say in how health insurance and HMOs are run. Now you can certainly vote by choosing to spend or not spend your hard-earned dollars on the products of these corporations. You can stand on a soap box on a street corner and shout at the passing crowd. Or you can buy a single share of stock and express your opinion as a shareholder. Now imagine the power of the swarm, of Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook.
ProxyDemocracy provides tools to help investors overcome these informational hurdles and use their voting power to produce positive changes in the companies they own. We help shareholders vote their shares by publicizing the intended votes of institutional investors with a track record of shareholder engagement. We help mutual fund investors understand the voting records of leading funds, making it possible for them to purchase funds that represent their interests and pressure those that don’t.
We’ve seen the power of bottom-up democracy, but it’s not only in our government that this approach can be effective. Big corporations and institutional investors will a happily vote for you, and they will vote their own interests.
Clay Shirky talks about the power of organizing without organizations, about the cognitive surplus that we have in abundance today. The tools at our disposal and our expectations have radically changed. Shiky tells this story:
I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”
Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.
Being a shareholder in a public corporation has been a one-way transaction. The tools to make it a highly visible two-way transaction are now ready to hand. They’re here now. And as you think about the investments you’ve made for your retirement, you should be asking yourself, “where’s the mouse?”
I’ve finally worked my way through last Sunday’s newspapers in time for this Sunday’s to fill up the in-basket. Of particular note was Peter Aspden’s column in the Weekend Financial Times. He picks up on a number of themes that have been surfacing in recent conversations. Aspden observes that culture and economies run in cycles, and that a down economy may signal a return of a more pungent cultural scene.
In a high economy, capital replaces labor in the machinery of cultural production. Works are primarily created as commercial ventures; they have a business plan, an expected return on investment, and a polished level of disconnected technical professionalism.
Aspden identifies the trends he’ll be looking for in the new year:
Cultural Promiscuity (global silk-road type connectivity and mashups)
Pungent Pop Culture, a return to seriousness
Profundity and complexity welcomed once again
The return of Art Cinema (and a farewell to cinematic infantilism)
Art Galleries returning to the sterner business of moving hearts and minds
In a down economy, labor replaces capital in the cultural work product. The industrial pop culture complex will turn to high glamor / high gloss products as they did during the great depression. It’s a formula that depends on owning the means of production, large concentrated audiences, low prices and controlled distribution.
Price of Movie Tickets
1940 $0.24
1939 $0.23
1936 $0.25
1935 $0.24
1934 $0.23
1929 $0.35
1924 $0.25
1910 $0.07
As means of production has gone digital, and the distribution networks have gone open, the old formulas are harder to pull off. The studios will have to depend on more and more on special effects and simulated realities to generate the requisite buzz– machines replacing humans. The return to a pungent culture is a cyclical event– the classic example for me was Jerzy Grotowski’s Poor Theater.
Theater should not, because it could not, compete against the overwhelming spectacle of film and should instead focus on the very root of the act of theater: actors in front of spectators.
However this move to the digital appears to be a more foundational change, the very axis of the cycle has been radically shifted. While the high end can go ever higher, the field of play has been opened for a new generation of artists. High and low have lost their polar relationship; real connection can happen across the Network through multiple endpoints. The cost of producing high quality digital output continues to go down, while the talent required to produce high quality digital output remains ever the same.
While a film on a large screen in a movie theater isn’t the same as watching on an iPhone or a laptop; nor is a film the same a grand opera at its best. New media will breed new forms– new methods of reading and writing. As the technology falls away in favor of the performance, perhaps we’ll see some of Aspden’s predictions come true. It could be as simple as a camera, some light, three people dancing and some narration– A Band of Outsiders.
I missed most of it because it was on too late. School nights, you know. But on Friday nights, I could stay up late and watch The Dick Cavett Show. For me, it’s the canonical example of the talk show.
There were only three television networks back then, and no way to time shift. While popular culture didn’t have the diversity we experience today, there was a tremendous concentration of audience. The limited number of outlets meant there was some obligation to represent the variety of our culture. Cavett faced the impossible task of going up against Carson for 90 minutes five nights a week. His audience was around 3.4 million to Carson’s 7.7 million. These shows were large hubs, connectors, big distributors of cultural information.
When the new currents of the rock culture made an appearance on mainstream television, more than show biz chat was communicated. The strangeness is palpable, and you can see the bold strokes of something new emerging.
And while we think of the coverage of our culture unfolding in real time: in 1969, the day after the three day concert called Woodstock, Cavett had a number of the musicians on his show. I’m trying to imagine if there could be an equivalent today. Stephen Stills still had mud on his jeans.
