dan collier

As I prepare to move abroad in July, to a locale not yet chosen, I have been rereading the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson is among the Old Masters that I reread for familiar wisdom, along with Lao Tzu and Hunter S. Thompson, but I last read RWE at length during the summer of 2001 as I prepared to move back to the US from Stockholm. The ease with which Emerson dismisses society’s judgements is inspiring as I hear the complaints politely rephrased as questions from people who are already happy or secure with their station and location in life. I admit I might not even realize if I found such a place, but I’ll definitely know when it is time to move on.

So here are some passages I found too good not to post:

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

Self-Reliance

In this kingdom of illusions we grope eagerly for stays and foundations. There is none but a strict and faithful dealing at home, and a severe barring out of all duplicity or illusion there. Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth. I look upon the simple and childish virtues of veracity and honesty as the root of all that is sublime in character. Speak as you think, be what you are, pay your debts of all kinds….

There is no chance, and no anarchy, in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere. The young mortal enters the hall of the firmament: there is he alone with them alone, they pouring on him benedictions and gifts, and beckoning him up to their thrones. On the instant, and incessantly, fall snow-storms of illusions. He fancies himself in a vast crowd which sways this way and that, and whose movement and doings he must obey: he fancies himself poor, orphaned, insignificant. The mad crowd drives hither and thither, now furiously commanding this thing to be done, now that. What is he that he should resist their will, and think or act for himself? Every moment, new changes, and new showers of deceptions, to baffle and distract him. And when, by and by, for an instant, the air clears, and the cloud lifts a little, there are the gods still sitting around him on their thrones, — they alone with him alone.

Illusions

But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;
That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.
Matthew 5:44-45

We can’t understand Jesus words because we have it so easy. Let’s take a minute to remember who he was talking to. Jesus was talking to a group of Jews under the iron fist of the Roman Empire. Many of these people had their sons and daughters, brothers and sisters slaughtered, killed, and murdered by the powers that be. Jesus is telling them to pray for those who persecute them? This message just took on a whole different level of depth. Jesus is calling us to love those who don’t deserve it, because we don’t deserve it.

The Plow

Interesting images. The organization behind the images, The Plow, seems to be a design agency for Christ. Of course, He may be more in need of a PR team. I don’t think the mainstream of US Christianity is ready to buy this product.

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.

Design for Asia Awards 2007 - Business Week has a photo set of the winning entries. I would have given it to the camera, about which they write “It evokes the days when cameras lasted a generation with its retro look and feel”.

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Chinese Kids Get Foreign Toys - Time magazine has an article on an interesting trend. In my house it has been a long standing battle against collecting more and more cheap Chinese plastic toys. We last bought a Chinese toy probably in early spring.

About a month ago, I googled Lego to find out where they are manufactured. Jaxon will soon be happy to learn they are made in Denmark and Czech Republic, and decorated in Denmark, Czech Republic, Mexico and the US.

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Race and IQ, cont. - More Malcom Gladwell on genetics and IQ. A good one page summary of the 4 page article I linked to.

Mobile Phone Photo Contest - Boston.com had a mobile phone photo contest. The winner is pretty good, but I think i liked Boston at night best. Here is the best photo I’ve taken on a mobile phone.

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Cagle Cartoons is an editorial cartoon syndicator. They represent cartoonists in the US and internationally, and they take the helpful step of labeling cartoons “Con” or “Lib” (making it easier to ignore the liberals because earnestness is not funny). Here is a decent Hillary Clinton cartoon. A British cartoonist sums up the dollar woes, and a Swede comments on the Russian elections.

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None of the Above - Malcolm Gladwell, the bi-racial author and writer for The New Yorker magazine, wrote an interesting article about genetics and IQ. The topic is back in the news with the recent disparaging and ironic comments about Africans by James Watson, co-discover of DNA. The immutable nature of IQ lost credibility with a recent study suggesting human evolution is speeding up.

I took an IQ test in 6th grade, I was 13 years old, and I found the results a couple years ago. I think it was WISC III, but it might have been WISC II. I did well, but after reading Gladwell’s article, I realize I might have done well on an outdated test. I remember the test clearly, but my overwhelming memory of the event was walking out of the almost two hour long test mentally exhausted and thinking “They think they know something about me from that?”.

Lawrence Lessig published a Disclosure Statement that is worth reading. I regularly hear professionals lecture on topics in which they have financial interests that they fail to disclose adequately or at all. Obviously, that is problematic. But Lessig asks another important question: is disclosure enough? Following his “Non-Corruption (NC) Principal”, his answer is no.

If you believe I am following my principle, then you can still believe I am biased because I’m a liberal, or wrong because I’m an idiot, or overly attentive because I’m easily flattered, or under-attentive because I punish people who behave badly. All that the NC principle promises is that I am not saying what I am saying because of money.

I wonder how Lessig handles his retirement savings. One would assume he owns broad based mutual funds that invest in every sector of the economy. If so, his statements about Google Books, for example, may directly impact Google share prices and indirectly effect his retirement savings.

In thinking about what my disclosure statement would say, I realize I’m more financially tied to projects which I’m involved in. My clients may pay my bills, but they don’t buy my voice. If I had to craft a disclosure statement today, I’m not sure how I would handle commenting on clients’ projects and my own commercial projects. Maybe disclosure is enough in my case. In the past and until further notice, comments on project in which I have a financial interest will have a simple disclosure of that fact.
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