dan collier

One great thing about traveling is having time to read books. Having given up newspapers in print form for the internet, I can’t imagine that books in the physical form will be so easily replaced. Travel is treat because for a rare day, I can put the computer away, turn the cell phone off, and be consumed by a book. The lack of hyperlinks in books results in a lengthy internalized discussion with the author that has no equal on the Net.

On the way home from Jackson Hole yesterday, I read The Cluetrain Manifesto. At that link, you can read it free online. Here is the Manifesto. The book is about how the internet is changing, perhaps returning, the market from mass-production/mass-consumption to conversations among equals. It is a book about the fuzzy side of business and marketing as much as an attempt to capture the ethos of the modern knowledge worker and relay that to megacorp management types. I think the excerpt below gives you a taste of the book, which I thought was good and of general interest beyond tech workers.

To find anything that isn’t overtly complicit with the Great Technology Sitcom, you have to dig down to the underbelly of the Web. You have to get past the sites with commercial pretensions that are slicing and dicing you, counting the legs and dividing by four, bringing in the sheep. You are being incorporated into their demographic surveys. And, predictably, the lowest common denominator is getting all the juice. You are being packaged for advertisers by some of the hippest hucksters on the planet.

Dig deeper. Down to the sites that never entertained the hope of Buck One. They owe nobody anything. Not advertisers, not VC producers, not you. Put your ear to those tracks and listen to what’s coming like a freight train. What you’ll hear is the sound of passion unhinged, people who have had it up to here with white-bread culture, hooking up to form the biggest goddam garage band the world has ever seen.

What are these underbelly sites about? What’s a rock concert about? How about creation, exploring a visceral and shared collective memory we’ve been brainwashed into believing never existed?

Conspiracy theory, my ass. Schools and teachers, the motor vehicle bureau, the IRS, the military, the line at the bank, the television set, the newspapers at the checkout stand, the news on your radio, the billboards along the highway, and now a hundred thousand cold-comfort Web sites. All are tuned to your brain at the deepest level and you have lined up for the coolest, latest-model implant. The carrier wave has been tuned at huge cost to deliver a single message: you are not free, you desire nothing but the products we produce, you have no world but the world we give you.

If you’re OK with this, then eat it up. There’s a bulimic’s dream-feast of killer kontent on the way. But if it already makes you want to puke, get angry. Write it, code it, paint it, play it - rattle the cage however you can. Stay hungry. Stay free. And believe it: win, lose, or draw, we’re here to stay. Armed only with imagination, we’re gonna rip the fucking lid off.

There’s your market.

The Cluetrain Manifesto, Chapter 1

In The White Goddess, Robert Graves writes about creating and sharing art as the only true form of prayer. I don’t have the book anymore and ironically I can’t quote it any better because corporate copyright concerns think they’ll sell more copies by keeping it out of Google Books, but it is, in a sense, the same sentiment as expressed above.

I was familiar with three of the four authors previously, and because of the tone of the book it should probably be mentioned that they were and are highly regarded in the high technology business world. Two are Fellows at Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. The Berkman People blog includes both their blogs, and is very good.

A final quote, from the final chapter:

Imagine a world in which the business of business was to imagine worlds people might actually want to live in someday.

I’m running out the door on my way to Jackson Hole, Wyoming for five days. If you have any ideas for what to do there, send me an email or leave a comment. Before I leave, I wanted to post the following link that I think everyone should read.

Ramak Fazel’s Amerika profiled in the New York Times - Ramak Fazel is an Iranian born, American raised US citizen that attempted to visit the capitol of all 50 states. Midway through his travels, he noticed he was on a watch list. Who keeps the list, why he was on it, and how one gets off are all unclear.

As someone that has enjoyed the freedom to sleep in a van in many WalMart parking lots in quite a few state capitols and even more remote stretches of American highway, I find the entire story of what is happening to Fazel to be very important. The question that prompted Fazel’s trip seems more uncertain than ever: What does it mean to be American?

While out for a drive this evening, a radio station played Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech from the March on Washington in 1963 in honor of his birthday today. The text is good but obviously King’s elocution and the crowd response add to the speech. Video is available on YouTube. I think it is worth listening to the whole 17 minute speech, but here are a couple great lines to peak your interest.

We have also come to his hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.

Barack Obama has been referring to the “urgency of now” lately. It is one of a dozen great phrases in this speech. At 45 years old, this speech highlights how far this nation has come, but also how much there is left to to do to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.

Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. I say to you today my friends - so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

After listening to this speech I’d like to be hopeful, but it seems unwise to refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt against such a preponderance of contrary evidence.

This blog is the first journal I have ever kept for fun. Beyond a place to note stuff I’ve been thinking about, it is a way of tracking ephemera from websites I liked to thoughts about my travels to current events. Below are some of the other online services that I’ve been using to fulfill that purpose recently.

Goodreads - I like the service and interface Goodreads provides. Generally, I think Amazon gets better reviews but I’m using Goodreads to track what I’ve read and what I want to read. I think this a is a cool visualization of the books I read in 2007.

Where I went in 2007 - Last year, I spent the night in 4 countries, 2 states, 1 federal district, 1 US territory, and 16 cities and towns. I like how easy Google Maps makes it to keep track.

Google Reader now lets me share articles that I find interesting. Google Reader is for managing RSS (really simple syndication) feeds, a way of tracking websites that update frequently. Over the last year, I’ve used it as much as email.

Lawrence Lessig has endorsed Barack Obama, and I think this post is an interesting analysis of the race.

Even if it is possible that an “experienced” politician could reform the system, the experience of HR “Lincoln Bedroom” Clinton is not likely to manifest that zeal for reform. She and her husband prospered from that system. Why would they ever work to dismantle it? She asks in her final 2-minute plea to Iowa: “Who is ready to be president and ready to start solving the big challenges we face on day one?” That’s not the question. The right question is this: “Who sees fixing the corruption that is government as the most important challenge we face on day one, and who is likely to have the will to do it?”

Lessig is not describing corruption in the bribe sense, but corruption in the economy of influence sense he described here. Lessig argues the most pressing issue facing the US Government is that “our government can’t understand basic facts when strong interests have an interest in its misunderstanding.”

I join Lessig in hoping Obama gets a chance, and can withstand the pressure if elected.

Update:I posted the wrong link at the top of this post. The correct one is there now, and here