That's Capital

Start Somewhere, Anywhere

Read Middle-East historian Fouad Ajami and political columnist Thomas L. Friedman in the NYTimes. Also read Israeli historian Michael Oren in the WSJ. Then listen to Onpoint Radio's show with Palestinian analysts talking about the Hamas takeover of Gaza.

In the two NYTimes' columns, there is scathing indictment of Palestinian leadership. For both Ajami and Friedman, the practical usage of masks by military on both sides symbolizes the rot at the core of the problem. Men enhanced with their power, or lack of it - the two working together becoming vicious catharsis - especially as guns flood the region. And for both Ajami and Oren, the failure of the Palestinians is due to an incapability to build any stable governing structures.

Listen to Monday's Onpoint radio show and the voices are raw with pain. Hanan Ashrawi, independent member of the Palestinian Parliament and Sari Nusseibeh, President and professor of philosophy at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem talk with host Tom Ashbrook for a one hour. They sound like they've already been talking to him for ten hours. Totally exhausted. At least spiritually.

Nusseibeh, perhaps the bravest public figure living in the Middle East, is characteristically thoughtful. Ashrawi, who has no lack of courage but strikes me as predictably full of scorn, is typically furious at the Israelis. But the way they speak to each other is moving, showing a tenderness that made me think of two family members who have just watched their house burn. They have.

Once again, it all reminds me that the only Palestinian enemy equal to Israel is the assorted crew who publicly suggest they are their friends. Those who are so vehement about final justice that they'll devote all primary resources (from money to words) to propping up a romanticized mythos rather than think a bit about contributing to actual infrastructure. In an effort for "statehood," whether separate or bi-national, it's all talk. So cheap and yet so draining of resources.

Too little thinking among supporters of both Palestinians and Israelis consider smaller processes to buttress any ongoing co-existence between the two peoples. Today the JPost reported on an American-sponsored science project that was doing just that, but it's funding is now being cut. Really sad. 

If the British educators who recently initiated a boycott of Israeli universities didn't have their heads up their ass, they'd be thinking around creative processes to contribute something to Palestinian life, other than taking away something from their enemy. Michael Oren's column today made a great deal of sense to me, but I wish he'd give the same passion and intelligence to exploring the endless Israeli bureaucratic stranglehold his nation holds over so much Palestinian enterprise, from small businesses to farmers. Ajami is a hero of mine. My wishes for him is someone gave him a radio show, as he speaks to people with different viewpoints than his own thoughtfully and fully.

It's unlikely any of those things will happen. But as we mentioned in previous posts, perhaps there are designers and anthropologists who could think pro-actively. Not about saving Israel or the Palestinians as separate or common nations. Rather about sustainable processes, no matter how small, that give both sides ways to co-operate.

Personally, I trust markets to do that. Yes, impediments litter that geography like a dumping ground. But there's also millions of dollars and way too much time spent on weapons, whether the kind that shoot ammunition or words. Some day hopefully well-meaning parties on all sides will stop needing to be "right" and start being effective, the benchmark being that which fosters rather than subverts life.

Online or online selling, it's a digital market and mindset

A few days ago, the NYTimes' business section published a story with a headline "Online Sales Lose Steam." The basic thrust was that there was an ongoing sales decline "in major sectors like books, tickets and office supplies," as well as "diverse categories like health and beauty products, computer peripherals and pet supplies."

What the headline doesn't feature is the other side of the story: the huge online growth numbers of previous years, apparently 25 percent. Such numbers are difficult to sustain over time, especially with offline competition, forced to acknowledge the web as serious competition, finally responding pro-actively. The result are more resources allocated for retail brand experiences that so-called consumers welcome. Think anything from cool shopping experiences like Apple Stores to Walmart's embrace of "green products."

At the surface, enhanced real world shopping environments or Walmart's discovery of organics have little to do with digital technology. But if you think of the richer context, they are both manifestations of market pressures from the broader digitally inspired culture. That market and culture is coming together in particularly interesting ways in the growth of a larger category that I'll call "personal selling,"ways in which individuals  become retailers and brands.

This past June 5th, the Times had an excellent piece on the way the web has created a class of amateur photographers making a living off of their photographs online. According to the article, "thousands of semiprofessional photographers are now selling their shots through so-called microstock Web sites to customers around the world, pointing out that while "[T]raditional photographic stock companies charge several hundred to several thousand dollars per image... Microstock prices can be as low as 25 cents, and payments to photographers are even lower, often not much more than pennies per sale."

Like Republican tax policies which theoretically cut rates and incent investment to spur economic growth which in the end lead to higher rates of tax-income, the web's long tail market physics mean less is more. Lower  costs for something like photographs means more people can buy them, leading to a richer market of supply and demand, especially for small entrepreneurs. Some of the amateur photographers in the Times article were regularly bringing in $1000 dollars a month.

But there's a deeper digital phenomenon spurring entrepreneurial activity among individuals, encouraging them to act and think like businesses. For the best examples of this go any day to Techcrunch, perhaps the best source of coverage of online technology, business and communities. Last week, for instance, they covered the way a recent entrant to the search business, Mahalo Greenhouse, is  offering payment to users willing to help build good search results.

While Maholo's payment scheme is not something for which anyone should quit their day job, and could be dismissed as a small potatoes move to exploit the so-called user-generated content revolution, as we all know from the over 100 million users of places like Myspace, digital technology makes it much easier to form social networks. Form communities. Aggregate markets.

This spring, perhaps the best run of these networks, Facebook announced that they would open the community to outside developers. Basically, that move means that any brand can start courting millions of Facebook members (a hive of individuals in one-to-one and one-to-many relationships) to become personal retailers.

The word so-called multi-level marketing schemes may turn out to be less a scheme than an accepted everyday practice, with more people than less starting to look for things that they actually like to sell. We've already seen this with online economies growing around Second Life. Facebook could exponentially increase that dynamic.

For the last 30 years, the public persona of the salesman was about as romantic as Willy Loman or the guys who sold us cars. Today's personal selling is more akin to Girl Scout cookies, using one's social persona to attain value.  In coming weeks, That's Capital will return to exploring this process. It strikes us as weird, exciting, a bit spooky, but ultimately inevitable and important.

Designing Life

Today Josh Porter of Bokardo brought us to an interesting group called Design Can Change. The basic premise is that designers should be leveraged around social action as much as around tools and systems. Back in September, we had written about such needs, our focus on redesigning political interaction. This organization's mission focuses less around "politics" to something a bit broader, the environment. That said, it's great to hear some people are actually putting good ideas into action. 

Obviously, as the European "Greens" manifested, environmental issues are intrinsically political. But it is much easier to build a broad based coalition around the environment these days than anything that raises the dirtied word of politics. At the same time, it's too bad that designers, along with anthropologists, are not being heard or leveraged in the Middle East. In fact, it's tragic.

Between Iraqis. Between Israelis and Palestinians. Between Lebanese. The imagination and intellectual energy exists on all sides. But what we see in these areas is that the bulk of imagination and thinking is devoted to mutual destruction.  Some people think bigotry and violence grows out of ignorance. I say it grows out of a sense that one can be vanquished. We may not all consciously think about death, but it's always there lurking beneath the surface. When it comes to the  imaginative forefront, desperation sets in.

How can designers contribute to ways that provide for survival? Psychic, spiritual and emotional as well as physical. Especially in these areas. Thinking about anthropologists, can insights into cultures of different parties work together to create ways to... work together. It is pollyanna to think peace can be everlasting. But it is ludicrous to think what is happening in Baghdad and Gaza are inevitable.

More to follow

Goodbye, hello

The shaky notes started sounding with the beginning of the end. Lousy sentence. But matched in spades by the lousy finale to an often brilliant television show, The Sopranos. Sunday night was the last we supposedly will see of big Tony Soprano. Based on its creator's attitude toward the last episode/s and the audience... and its producing partner's attitude, HBO, good f''n riddance.

Like that funkily pungent theatrical expression, it went off like a wet fart. Starting with a cheap joke of a collage that featured various HBO stars syncopating tears of admiration, we spent the next hour being jerked one way or another until the ending scene, making the entire thing one long harmonic dirge featuring Tony and his brooding chorus, The Sopranos. They were ushered out of our lives sitting in a diner of a type many of us seek regularly on both a comfort and ironic level. Eating onion rings, there they were, a family, our family, about to be shot or just stuck inside a hermetic brutal bubble of their own making where together they half-heartedly conspire to avoid facing truth about the corrosive, deeply self-subverting lives they have created. It reduced the entire show from great entertainment to something like a bad teenage acid trip where one's pimples morph into anything from flowers to atom bombs, but in the end all you're left is an overwhelming sense of emptiness. And terror at the absence of love.

Okay, enough dramatic license on the criticism. More interesting is the way we fans have made it a fetish object of inquiry, this show with its throw away plots and characters. Two shows before the end and Tony's dryly operatic psychoanalysis is cut short. Insult to injury, we're forced to buy the cheap trick of his therapist deciding after all this time that she was just facilitating a vicious mobster's narcissistic pathology. Why does she decide this? Does it come in any dramatically cohesive way? No, it is driven by a dinner table of academics where their squeaks of enlightened grandstanding seem  to get underneath her suddenly way-too-sensitive-skin. How can the passionate but steely doctor get dashed to bits by a tsunami of Upper West Side self-rightousness, all within one half-baked dinner discussion? Based on everything we knew previously, she couldn't, making it totally unfugin believable!

Such a heavy hand was evident repeatedly this season, and yet those of us who watched, did it with the urgent devotion of a hapless faithful. To be fair to the producers and writers, what made it difficult was the periodic brilliance, primarily in certain scenes. Tableaus which were sometimes breathtaking. Tony Soprano, on an outside Miami balcony, watching with a mix of spite and sorrow as Paulie Walnuts, his primary henchman, sits on an edge of a hotel bed, passing the night alone watching television, his spastic laugh loud and empty. Or Tony framed up in a single bed in a dank narrow little house, probably a lot like the claustrophobic quarters where he grew up under a wrathful mother, reduced to waiting it out as his rival hunts him down.

If you read conversations about the series online like those on Slate, the details with which grown men now trade memories like boys with baseball cards,  you might be able to locate the reverie which drives economics. And if that sounds like my own cheap way to connect a television show back to this podcast-transformed-into-a-blog, well, I plead guilty of lack of time. So much time that it's been months since me or Titus have contributed interview or post.

The ending of the Sopranos may seem like a portentous or maybe pretentious time to reinvigorate our own focus on the economies behind culture and vice-versa. So be it. The Sopranos was about many things. Masculinity. Expectations of and from women. America. Family. Violence. And money. The way all of these fit together. Sex was a backdrop to it all, but sexuality in the most puritanical rather than purient way. A packaged lozenge to sooth a hacking cough. But underneath it all lived a sense of restlessness and desperation around allocation of resources. The terror that, at any moment, one's entirety of resources would/could disappear. The show gave us the sense that humanity was not about joy, or even getting along. It was about pure survival, whether material or psychic.

The two genders had their periodic moments to forget about such survival. Carmela in her shopping or cooking. Tony over his bar-b-que or, and here is where he demanded respect, in his moments of consciousness. That he wrestled with himself, trying to stretch open his eyes, tiny in proportion to his girth... he could be moving. Draw compassion and even a bit of awe. A man who lived in the shadows and knew it. Forced to acknowledge the immorality of his hunt, he also could claim that, given his background and tribal responsibilities, there were no satisfying alternatives.

Recently in an interview with Peter Lunenfeld, who is as savvy about the mechanics of branding as he is about their manipulations, but someone way too smart to simply dismiss consumer culture as unnecessary, I asked him what he thought was an alternative. If we all stopped buying things that we didn't need for ultimate utility, what would make this engine called "our economy" keep ticking? He admitted that he didn't know. His problem was that too often brands promise to fulfill but only beacon us to purchase more and more. And yet he's come to believe it's easier to critique than to create, or in his words, "manifest."

"That’s why I try to avoid critique and to manifest. It’s profoundly satisfying to be a hater but I want to be a  lover, to manifest something worthwhile."

Perhaps the existential fascination with Tony Soprano is that many of us feel a bit like his kindred spirit. Albeit to less bitter or at least violent degrees, like him we wonder about alternatives to our own hunting. And like him, we lack the time or, to put it bluntly, resources, to do much more than wonder. Unlike Tony Soprano, our ends thankfully are our own. We don't have to allow others to  cut our questioning off in the name that underneath it all we're all just killers. But like television dramas, but even more so, our lives run in fits and starts. And yet they're also improvisations. Emergent rather than fixed. Surprise as possible as tedium, clarity coming in waves rather than a steady tide, but nevertheless, there for the wrestling. As are our markets, in formation every moment, every day, every action. Our families, ourselves, it's not over till it's over. If it ever goes permanently black, so be it. Not to haggle over for the living.

Jonathan Field
June 12, 2007
With a happy birthday today to my father, who wrestled with me alot when I was growing up, but and had the guts to really wrestle with himself as he grew older, becoming sweeter, wiser, a man whose only conspiracy was to enjoy, and convince his family to do the same... thank you.