It's like we all bit a circus lion, like the dog in the Don Marquis story... we're all public characters now, dealing with whatever slices of attention come our way through our presence online. Our data stacks up in the nooks and crannies of the 'net, and it never goes away. It was inevitable that systems like Rapleaf would appear, aggregating our data and looking for ways to monetize it. I once wrote a piece called, "Who are you, who owns you?" - in which I said, bravely, that "there should be no legal framework within which my data can be considered someone else's asset." The genie, actually a large drooling cooter, is out of the bottle... Link to ZDNet TechNews on Rapleaf

At Facebook, Bill Braasch has posted a great set of photos from the Summer of Love Reunion at New Speedway Meadows. I have my own interesting memories of a couple of failed attempts, in '67 and '68, to drive from Texas to SF and join the fun. In '67 I set out with $20, a gasoline credit card, and an old Mercury Comet and drove to Denver, then across the Rockies, deciding in Utah that twenty bucks wasn't going to do it (though I'd only spent $3 at that point). I drove back to Texas, and tried again the next year with my friend and literal fellow-traveler, Pinky Arnold. We made it to Flagstaff where we joined some old friends who were (barely) attending classes at Northern Arizona State, and had a great couple of weeks drinking beer and exploring Oak Creek Canyon before my brother talked me back to Texas for his wedding in Austin. I didn't make it all the way to SF until '72, and by then, the summer of love was more or less over. I recall standing in line for a big show at the Fillmore (the late Sylvester, Dan Hicks, and one of my favorites at the time, Stoneground) and being accosted by a few drug-addled street crawlers. Alas.

In my last post, I mentioned my drive to Denver, then toward San Francisco as far as Utah, in the summer of '67. I set out on this trip a day or two after I graduated from high school. My brother read the post, and reminded me of a little drama I encountered along the way, on June 5, 1967. I just happened to drive through Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico as members of the Alianza Federal de Mercedes took the courthouse by force. There was gunfire as I drove through town with my head down, pedal to the m etal. As I left town I passed a long stream of National Guardsmen. Pretty exciting. Coincidentally the Six-Day War started that same day; war news was background for my whole short trip.

Gary Gach's just done an interview with Brad Warner, a Soto Zen Buddhist who appreciates punk rock, "It Conquered the World." and Godzilla. I can totally relate. [Link]

But think the articles I do for the Suicide Girls is enjoyable 'cuz it's an audience that isn't self-identified as Buddhist. So it's kind of fun to write for that audience ... 'cuz they don't have any background at all. They're a really receptive audience. I get really good response from the people that read it. It's cool 'cuz i get to be the calm stable person, whereas if you put me in a group of Buddhists, I look like the crazy one, altho' I don't think I am, sometimes I think they're all nuts ... ... I shouldn't say or I can get in more trouble.

After that last post, about Brad Warner, I followed a link to his latest column at Suicide Girls, a consideration of Buddhist nonviolence inspired by a Stephen Batchelor piece called "Spaces in the Sky," which ends with this couple of paragraphs:

...each of us is to some extent implicated in contributing to the conditions from which these acts of violence arose. By tolerating the way our governments behave abroad, by making investments in the corporations that sustain the global economy, by consuming fossil fuels, we are complicit in the intricate web of relationships that sustains the world as it is. The sheer complexity, scale and speed of these interactions can make one feel utterly confused and powerless. The challenge is to respond to that confusion without lapsing into the oppositional rhetoric of "us" versus "them" or retreating to a mystical equanimity that trusts that everything is part of a divine plan or the working out of karmic consequences beyond our individual comprehension.

The attacks in New York and Washington burst my complacent Buddhist bubble. I found myself facing urgent and overwhelming questions for which the broad truths of Buddhism did not seem to provide an adequate response. Is an open society that tolerates dissent even possible without its being underwritten by violence? For if dissent were to take the form of violently seizing others' lives and property, with what resources would a nonviolent society respond? Is a sustainable human society therefore inescapably dependent on the threat of violence? And if so, is the Buddhist commitment to nonviolence but a noble aspiration whose goal can never be reached on this earth? Despite all their talk of love and compassion, do Buddhists have the capacity and resolve to imagine and realize a truly nonviolent world? Or is nirvana, after all, the only peace we can hope for?

Brad writes:

It is true that Buddhism seeks to end the need for the use of violence. However, we can’t jump to the conclusion that if we only just all disarmed everybody would be cool. The problem is to understand why we still need violence to underwrite freedom.

We won’t stop violence by dressing up in paisley frocks and sticking daisies in the barrels of AK-47s. Such action is still motivated by ego. It is based on the idea that I, Mr. Buddhist Pacifist, am better than you, you nasty Republican warmonger. The very same force that makes violence an unavoidable part of human life is the one that tries, through a different kind of violence, to overcome violence. This is really what Buddha meant by saying that hatred is not overcome by hatred. We need to find a way to completely step out of our habitual modes of reaction in order to find the real solution to our very pressing problems.

The only way to do this is to truly understand who we are and to allow that understanding to spread gradually throughout the world. As Buddhists it may not be necessary for we, ourselves, to go out and participate in the violence perpetrated to protect our right to practice -- though there is certainly nothing at all wrong with being a practicing Buddhist and member of the military. But it also does not benefit our practice to stand in the way of the necessary steps being taken to uphold our right to practice.

I'm sure he's right. I've also been thinking how peaceful, ethical Americans have been brutalized by political bullies who've betrayed their trust. We have to protect ourselves right here at home, too.

We usually think of social networks as collections of people that are linked - each person is a node in the network, and some nodes are hubs, or nodes that have many links. A couple of years ago when I was thinking and talking about group relationship management, I realized that, in the context of a social network, a group could be seen as an entity similar to a person, in that it can also be a node, generally perceived as a hub (because it has many connections, defined for a group as memberships). So you could define an entity called "node" that could be an individual or a group. This is something Silona Bonewald wanted to include in the technology for the League of Technical Voters. I was just talking to Skip Baney about this concept and how it might relate to "identity 2.0". Identity thinkers and doers are trying to create a framework for identity management to facilitate data storage in one place and to allow an individual greater ownership and control of her personal data - similar to the W3C's P3P approach. An "entity-based social network," as Silona called it, could facilitate the creation of individual and group bundles of network-relevant data that could live outside any particular social network system, but could plug into any, if the standards were acknowledged and incorporated. I think this would have value, and probably should have been part of the Internet's architecture earlier on. It's harder to overcome legacy fragmentation at this point. One interesting related project: Headcase Manufacturing, where my former FringeWare partner, genius coder Paco Nathan, is working with my pal Mark Meadows to create autonomous avatars. As I understand it, the idea is to create a single avatar that can operate in multiple virtual worlds. If you're interested, it looks like they'll be beta testing soon...

When I was young I thought about consciousness and the various ways people present reality to themselves and others. I studied literature because I was interested in perception - not so much in stories, but in the way characters were presented and scenes were described. I thought I wanted to write fiction but realized I wasn't much of a storyteller. Though I could write well, I wasn't into plot, the construction of conflict and resolution. I wanted to show people as they are (so I started writing nonfiction instead). Spinning forward, my later career has focused on social networking, communication, and community-building, all stemming from my fascination with the social construction of reality.

The New York Times has a great article called "Sleight of Mind," about a recent gathering of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness in Las Vegas. The subject of discussion: how show biz magic leverages perceptual constraints to hack our assumptions about reality. They talked about things like qualia, "the raw, subjective sense we have of colors, sounds, tastes, touches and smells."

The crunch of the crostini, the slitheriness of the penne alla vodka — a question preoccupying philosophers is where these personal experiences fit within a purely physical theory of the mind.

That's the mystery: if we're just meat, where does that poetry come from? How can we imagine something like "spirit," if we're really just a bag of chemicals simmering at 98.6 degrees fahrenheit? Being conscious of consciousness takes you to the heart of the mystery.

Toward the end of the article, the author runs into philosopher Daniel Dennett.

If the hardware and software could be made sophisticated enough, there would be no functional difference, Dr. Dennett suggested, between a human oenophile and the machine. So where inside the circuitry are the ineffable qualia?

Retreating to a bar at the Imperial Palace, we talked about a different mystery he had been pondering: the role words play inside the brain. Learn a bit of wine speak — "ripe black plums with an accent of earthy leather" — and you are suddenly equipped with anchors to pin down your fleeting gustatory impressions. Words, he suggested, are "like sheepdogs herding ideas."

As he sipped his drink he tried out another metaphor, involving a gold panning technique he had learned about in New Zealand. Lead and gold are similar in density. If you salt the slurry with buck shot and swirl the pan around, the dark pellets will track the elusive flecks of gold.

With a grab bag of devices accumulated over the eons, the brain pulls off the ultimate conjuring act: the subjective sense of I.

"Stage magicians know that a collection of cheap tricks will often suffice to produce 'magic,' " Dr. Dennett has written, "and so does Mother Nature, the ultimate gadgeteer."

BBC News says, based on a new report from Pew Research Center, that "a news agenda formulated by citizens would be radically different from that put together by journalists." Suspicions confirmed for those of us who are swimming in it:

Seven out of ten of the stories selected by the user-driven sites came from blogs or non-news websites with only 5% of stories overlapping with the ten most widely-covered stories in the mainstream media.

"Users gravitated towards more eclectic stories. There was a sense that users sifting through a lot of raw information; rumour, gossip, propaganda and the news were all throw into the mix," said Tom Rosenstiel, one of the authors of the report.

The study also suggests that readers (here in techville, we call 'em users) want to know a little about a lot of things, rather than going deep. If there's bad news, it's that readers were more interested in stories about consumer products and companies (iPhone, Nintendo) than in public affairs (Iraq, immigration).

I looked for this study at the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, but I didn't find it. I did findf an August 9 report that says the "Internet news audience" is "highly critical of news organizations."

More broadly, the new survey underscores the fundamental change in basic attitudes about the news media that has occurred since the mid-1980s. In the initial Times Mirror polling on the press in 1985, the public faulted news organizations for many of its practices: most people said that news organizations "try to cover up their mistakes," while pluralities said they "don't care about the people they report on," and were politically biased.

But in the past decade, these criticisms have come to encompass broader indictments of the accuracy of news reporting, news organizations' impact on democracy and, to some degree, their morality. In 1985, most Americans (55%) said news organizations get the facts straight. Since the late 1990s, consistent majorities – including 53% in the current survey – have expressed the belief that news stories are often inaccurate. As a consequence, the believability ratings for individual news organizations are lower today than they were in the 1980s and 1990s. (See "Online Papers Modestly Boost Newspaper Readership," July 30, 2006.)

[Link to the BBC article]

SCO's made a business of litigation, and it hasn't worked. The company's filed chapter 11. (Thanks, Sandy!)

Page 4 of the SCO Group's Voluntary Petition tells us that the assets are $14,800,000 and the debts are $7,500,000. That's not counting the debt the Utah court ruled Novell is owed, amount to be determined at the now postponed trial. And a note says those are approximate values, based on "the Company's consolidated and unaudited balance sheets as of July 31, 2007". Here's the most recent 10Q from April for comparison. And this is interesting. There are 21,782,164 shares of common stock, owned by only 402 holders. That explains a lot. Here's the name of any person who directly or indirectly owns, controls, or holds, with power to vote, 5% or more of the voting securities of debtor: Cede & Co. and Ralph Yarro.

SCO Operations, Inc., in the Corporate Ownership Statement, says that the debtor, SCO Operations, Inc., "discloses that The SCO Group, Inc. owns 100% of the Debtor's equity interests." I remember now that when S2 signed a contract with SCO, it was with SCO Operations, described as "a Delaware corporation and a subsidiary of The SCO Group, Inc.". And I do see on the form that they list estimated assets at $1,000,000.001 to $100 million. Not too precise. And estimated liabilities are the same.

The slow to clue business world is discovering what some of us already knew very well, that older people are online – in fact, "the number of Internet users who are older than 55 is roughly the same as those who are aged 18 to 34, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, a market research firm." I've had discussions in the past with net.biz "experts" who were adamant in their belief that older people aren't and won't be common in cyberspace – the argument being that they just can't figure out the technology, usually based on anecdotal evidence. It might be harder to adopt for folks who didn't grow up with the tech. It wasn't a problem for me, but I'm, er, unusual. But did you really think that, with so much happening online, that the grannies wouldn't go there? [Link]

...venture capitalists and entrepreneurs have been slow to embrace the interests of older Internet users, said Susan Ayers Walker, a freelance technology journalist for AARP and founder of SmartSilvers Alliance, which offers consultant services to businesses looking to connect with older consumers.

She said that Silicon Valley investors have seen themselves as eternally youthful, and identified with ever-new gadgets. But they are starting to accept their age — and to invest in it.

“They’ve all got high blood pressure,” she said. “They’re starting to understand their age group — they’re living it.”

Meaningful piece by SusanG at DailyKos about Thomas Dodd's letters home, written while he was serving as a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials. This is especially timely:

"What a disordered period of history we live in," he writes in one letter. In another, "Wars bring changes—lasting changes for the worse. I know of nothing good from war. All that silly talk about the advance of science and such leaves me cold. Give me peace and retarded science." And as the evidence is compiled, he remarks, "It is a terrible page in the history of the human race." Frustrated at the questioning, day after day, he writes wearily to his wife: "Well—the same old song. It would be relieving to hear one of them admit some blame for something. They blame everything on the dead or missing."

The passages like the latter go to the heart of why his son and family felt it was time the world saw these letters. Chris Dodd explicitly draws the connection in his opening explanatory chapters between the Bush administration’s disregard for rule of law and current treatment of prisoners, and the monumental undertaking of his father’s generation to set up an international framework that would honor civilization over barbarity, and balance the understandable desire for vengeance with the painstaking weight of moral authority. "Of course we must give these defendants a fair hearing—a most fair hearing," he tells his wife, "otherwise this whole effort is a farce. No decent lawyer feels otherwise." Reading this, it’s impossible not to grieve for what has been lost for America under Gonzales and Bush.

Indeed, as his son points out:

On the morning of December 13, 1945, my father presented to the court an argument that has an eerie connection to the present. He charged the Nazis, among many other heinous crimes, with "the apprehension of victims and their confinement without trial, often without charges, generally with no indication of the length of their detention."

A Texas family is suing Virgin Mobile and Creative Commons because a photo of their 16-eyar-old daughter was taken from Flickr and used in a a Virgin Mobile ad campaign. The pic had a Creative Commons license allowing commercial use with attribution, but neither the photographer nor Virgin Mobile got a model release from the girl. The photographer might have some liability here, too, for using a license that permits commercial use, without getting the release. sesh00 on Flickr posted the Virgin Mobile ad; there's an interesting long thread of conversation attached to that photo, starting with the girl's comment: "hey that's me! no joke. i think i'm being insulted...can you tell me where this was taken."

Dan Rather's speaking out about his firing over the George Bush/National Guard memo. He's convinced that the memo was real, and that Bush was really getting special treatment during his National Guard days (if not AWOL). In case you forgot, anecdotal and other evidence suggesting that Bush had simply ditched his National Guard service and got away with it was widely discussed through his first term and migh've been a threat to his 2004 campaign. At the time of the dust-up over the memo,
Some thought that the memo, if a provable fake, might be Karl Rove's way of putting the story to rest: leak a bogus memo that could successfully be disputed, and by making a convincing argument that the memo was a fake, imply that the story's not true. That might've been a stretch (Occam's Razor etc.), and Rather's still convinced that the memo was genuine.

"I've learned a good deal since that time," said Rather. "It's reported that Sumner Redstone [president of Viacom] ... was described as being enraged that the news division, this story, had cost Viacom and CBS in Washington, and he wanted Dan Rather and everybody connected with it out."

"They sacrificed support for independent journalism for corporate financial gain, and in so doing, I think they undermined a lot at CBS News," he said.

Rather said he still believes the 60 Minutes report was correct. "[CBS] sacrificed support for independent journalism for corporate financial gain," he stated, "and in so doing I think they undermined a lot at CBS News."

"Nobody to this day has shown that these documents were fraudulent," continued Rather, referring to the disputed memos featured in the 60 Minutes story. "Nobody has proved that they were fraudulent, much less a forgery. ... The truth of this story stands up to this day." Rather added that he believed somebody with subpoena power could get to the bottom of the matter pretty quickly.

Check out the first chapter of Jonathan Chait's new book, The Big Con, about the hijacking of the Republican party and the U.S. economy by a gang of far-right "supply-siders" in league with the richest Americans.

There is something distinctly cultlike about their thinking. Their canon is presumptively infallible, and any apparent failure must instead be seen as an impetus to recommit themselves to doctrinal purity. Last spring, in an example typical of this thinking, the Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel diagnosed the Republican Party's ailments thusly: "The base is in the dumps, disenchanted with a party that has lost sight of its economic moorings." The solution? Tax cuts, and lots of them. Strassel ran through how all the leading Republican presidential candidates had pledged their fealty to the governing supply-side faith. Each of them promised to make permanent all of Bush's tax cuts, but of course this was a given. The competition was between which candidate would promise even deeper cuts in upper-bracket rates.

As a diagnosis of what ails the Republicans today, this was, of course, insane. Bush signed a major tax cut each of the first six years of his presidency. Whatever the GOP's political liabilities may be, an insufficient commitment to tax-cutting is obviously not among them. To propose that the road to victory lies in recommitting the party to even more upper-bracket tax cuts requires a detachment from reality that would have been the envy of the Manson gang. But this is the sort of thinking that now predominates in conservative and Republican circles, and the obeisance of all the leading GOP presidential hopefuls shows just how deeply it has sunk in.

Following up my earlier post about the law suit that involves Creative Commons: here's a clarification of my thinking after a conversation with someone who knows the territory pretty well.

The situation: Virgin Mobile's ad agency created a promotion that used Flickr images with Creative Commons licenses that allowed commercial use with attribution. The family of a sixteen year old girl appearing in one of the images is suing Virgin Mobile because they didnt' get a model release allowing the use of her image. The family is suing Virgin Mobile and Creative Commons. In my earlier post, I said that the photographer may also have some liability.

What I think now, acknowledging that I'm not a lawyer and this is just the speculation of a fairly well-informed layman, influenced somewhat by discussion with another knowledgeable person who is also not an attorney:

Virgin Mobile, or whoever was creating the campaign for them, should have known that a model release was necessary.

The suggestion that the photographer might have some liability here was based on an assumption I heard discussed in one of the threads about the issue, where someone speculated that he would be included in the suit because he offered the photo fro commercial use (i.e. used a license that allowed commercial use) without obtaining a release. However all he did was articulate a license relative to his rights as the photographer, pertaining to the use of his copyright image. This doesn't imply that commercial use of the image might not involve other rights, i.e. the model's. that should be addressed by an entity using the image in a commercial context. It seems to me that it's not the photographer's responsibility to ensure that the release is in place unless he's the one making commercial use of the image.

I'm also pretty sure Creative Commons would have no liability. I think CC was included in the suit based on a misunderstanding – I saw language suggesting an assumption that "Creative Commons licensed the image." This is incorrect: the author of the work, in this case the photographer, licenses the image. Creative Commons just offers a kind of boilerplate for various "share" licenses, it has no direct involvement in the licensing of any specific content.

We'll have better answers when we see what happens in court, but I wanted to post a clarification because I think my earlier post could cause some confusion (if anyone took it seriously, probably unlikely since, as I said, I am not a lawyer!).

A couple of weeks ago I posted about group relationship management, "entity-based social networks," identity 2.x, p3p etc - thoughts about decoupling data about you and your social network from specific applications so that you an control it and use it across the web. OpenID was a start, a way for you to store your identity in one place and authenticate against that, as opposed to creating a new identity for each application. OpenID is a great step but not very robust.

Meanwhile Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook has been talking about the "social graph," which is "the network of connections and relationships between people on the service." So the social graph is the bundle of who you are/who you know data some of us had talked about making portable; now a couple of major players, Google and Six Apart, are going to move in that direction. This is significant; it takes us so much closer to the Web 2.whatever sense of web-as-social-operating-system. (Good news for my new company, Social Web Associates; it gives us more to work with in helping our clients establish and extend web presence).

Brad Fitzpatrick, formerly at Six Apart and currently at Google, published a problem statement that's a good summary of what's up:

There are an increasing number of new "social applications" as well as traditional application which either require the "social graph" or that could provide better value to users by utilizing information in the social graph. What I mean by "social graph" is a the global mapping of everybody and how they're related, as Wikipedia describes and I talk about in more detail later. Unfortunately, there doesn't exist a single social graph (or even multiple which interoperate) that's comprehensive and decentralized. Rather, there exists hundreds of disperse social graphs, most of dubious quality and many of them walled gardens.

Currently if you're a new site that needs the social graph (e.g. dopplr.com) to provide one fun & useful feature (e.g. where are your friends traveling and when?), then you face a much bigger problem then just implementing your main feature. You also have to have usernames, passwords (or hopefully you use OpenID instead), a way to invite friends, add/remove friends, and the list goes on. So generally you have to ask for email addresses too, requiring you to send out address verification emails, etc. Then lost username/password emails. etc, etc. If I had to declare the problem statement succinctly, it'd be: People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site., but also: Developing "Social Applications" is too much work.

Facebook's answer seems to be that the world should just all be Facebook apps. While Facebook is an amazing platform and has some amazing technology, there's a lot of hesitation in the developer / "Web 2.0" community about being slaves to Facebook, dependent on their continued goodwill, availability, future owners, not changing the rules, etc. That hesitation I think is well-founded. A centralized "owner" of the social graph is bad for the Internet. I'm not saying anybody should ban Facebook, though! Far from it. It's a great product, and I love it, but the graph needs to exist outside of Facebook. MySpace also has a lot of good data, but not all of it. Likewise LiveJournal, Digg, Twitter, Zooomr, Pownce, Friendster, Plaxo, the list goes on. More important is that any one of these sites shouldn't own it; nobody/everybody should. It should just exist.

Image: Brad Fitzpatrick's "social graph" sketch.

Google and privacy (or Google vs. privacy) has come up in my conversations quite a bit lately... the more Google sinks its teeth into the global social information sandwich, the more I hear concerns that the company will somehow sometime misuse its massive databases and algorithmic expertise. The Wall Street Journal discussed the Google vs. Privacy domain with Cory Doctorow, who ficitionalized the growing paranoia in his recent story "Scroogled." Cory talks about the "real tension about, on the one hand, being good to people, but on the other hand, acquiring as much information about them as they can, under the rubric that it allows them to be better to people."

And it does, a lot of the time. There are lots of ways in which Google knowing more about you makes Google better for you. But without much regard to what's happening in the world around us, in an era in which the national security apparatus has turned into a kind of lumbering, savage, giant toddler, it behooves us to not leave things within arm's reach that it might stick in its mouth. And that includes things like my search history. And I'd prefer that Google not be storing a lot of that stuff, especially today, especially after Patriot [Act] and so on. They're inviting abuse, I think, by doing that. The steps you don't save can't be subpoenaed. And by saving them, Google is inviting a subpoena.

So Google's always had this kind of "We will collect all your information, and it will belong to us, and you won't be able to take it away, but it's OK because we'll only do good things for you" attitude, and that's a bit of a problem.

[Link to the WSJ article]

Photo: Cory Doctorow, 2004, by Jon L.

With Randy Jewart from Austin Green Art, I interviewed Paul Hawken and Bill McKibben for Worldchanging. Their latest books (Blesed Unrest and Deep Economy) are IMO the best recent writings about sustainability, and their nonprofit organizations (Wiser EarthNatural Capital Institute, which has created Wiser Earth, and Step It Up) are working effectively to facilitate sustainability. [Link] We talked about transforming the way people think – since the article was published, I had a conversation with one of my Solar Austin colleagues, who'd read the article and said he thought real changes would be driven by policy. I don't think that policy changes readily, though, unless we transform our thinking, especially our economic thinking... starting here in the U.S., which is still a leader and could probably pick up some lost credibility by taking the lead in moving to a sustainability economy.

More on Dan Rather: he's filed a $70 million wrongful dismissal suit against CBS, and "intent on vindicating his reputation, capable of financing an expensive legal challenge, and armed with the power of subpoena, Rather will charge his attorneys to interrogate news executives and perhaps administration officials under oath on a secret and sordid chapter of the Bush presidency." [Link]

Rather could have simply allowed the statute of limitations to run out, lived off his millions, and faded away. But the incident ate at him. On one level, the Bush National Guard story is about Bush and the National Guard. On another, of course, it is about Rather's reputation. But on yet another it is about CBS's overwhelming desire to please the Bush White House and censor itself. The White House campaign against Rather has been so successful that many in the national press corps behave as though in mouthing its talking points they are demonstrating their own independent thought.

I'm discovering online info about old, out of print "golden age" comic books, including whole issues scanned from rare copies and posted as jpgs. While looking for old favorites, I found Cover Browser, which has a bazillion covers, including quite a few for the comics I was looking for, the American Comics Group's Adventures Into the Unknown and Forbidden Worlds. Magazine covers including Fantasy and Science Fiction, Mad Magazine, Fate, and The New Yorker.

My latest Worldchanging column is an interview with Doug Rushkoff. [Link]

So I go and talk at lots of companies, and try to help them figure out whether there's anyone on their staff who is connected to the industry that the company is a part of. And then, to look at how to make that person or persons more central to what the company says about itself.

All the rest of it – this Blink/LizardBrain/CultureOfPropaganda nonsense is just a way for sold-out intellectuals to sell books to cynical marketers. It's all based on the faulty observation that human beings make all of their choices in the same reptilian fashion. Just because a person's brain may light up in certain way when the see a blue Pepsi can doesn't mean that they'll make important life choices that way – or even trivial choices at the grocery store.

The kind of marketing you're talking about is an effort to fill in where advertising has failed. And while it doesn't really work to sell particular products, it does have a major and deleterious effect on our society. The underlying communication still gets through. And that communication is: you are not worthy, you are in need, you need to buy something to fill that hole in your soul. Mommy doesn't love you, but the corporation does.