That's Capital

Why certain companies make such great bozos

Want to see some major corporate twaddle? Check this out. It's the fake blog of a fake persona, along with fake profiles littering the web from Facebook to Twitter. All brought to you from the company headed by this guy.               

In case you'd rather keep reading than clicking for the reference points, what I'm referring to is an online Microsoft "campaign" that's nothing less than a sterling waste of dollars on drivel.

The Grand Guignol

If there's an artist who might understand how to capture the Israeli-Lebanon war it's French dramatist Antonin Artaud, known for his Theater of Cruelty, a company producing highly visual, wildly murderous stories, sometimes known as Grand Guignols. Dramas that were spectacularly bloody and horrific.

Artaud's work was rooted in the following ideas: most human beings are incapable of understanding the violence that drives us, but once we see it externalized, we can finally process it, then act with compassion and grace. Artaud viewed his Grand Guignols as a spiritual effort to bring the most horrific of our psychic fears to the surface.  Like ancient rituals of animal sacrifice, he thought such theater could reflect back to us our own vulnerabilities under a mysterious and sometimes terrifying God. 

I wonder if everyone involved with this war, from its civilian victims to willing soldiers to even those of us watching outside are all part of the actors in a piece of similarly bloody theater. Only instead of a God in the heavens, this theater piece seems to have us driven by absolutist bureaucracies in America, Israel and Iran, non-state terrorist actors and ideologies, and a general fear of a future that promised the erasing of more and more of the world's boundaries.

As an anthropologist told me when I talked to her about 9/11, the fear from terrorists weren’t started by that heinous act, only exacerbated. Rather our horror was growing organically with the rise of globalization. “People seem to like fences,” she said. “When they can’t see boundaries it is very frightening for many. Very frightening.”

That’s about the only story I can find that explains things. But then I’m probably as guilty as anyone of looking for easy narratives for a very complex story. Unfortunately, easy narratives are ruling the day, at a time when such stories are too often just inspiration to legitimate violence.

A few examples. This last Sunday (Aug. 05th) CNNs Media Matters host Howard Kurtz interviewed Thomas E. Ricks. One of America's most respected Pentagon journalists, Ricks is the author of Fiasco, a devastating account of the Bush Administration’s handling of the Iraq War.

Ricks claimed he’s heard two theories from American generals about Israel’s Lebanon campaign.

1. Israel's military is deliberately ignoring certain Hezbollah positions, allowing them to keep firing rockets. Why? So long as the rockets are flying into Israel, the IDF has an excuse to attack Lebanon.
2. Israel is targeting journalists, or giving them the sense they are, to frighten them.

Ricks has stature and seems like a no-nonsense guy. Is that reason enough that even though he offered no proof, names, or anything more substantial than a few sweeping accusations, the CNN host let them pass without an ounce of examination?  As the head of a program that explores media accuracy, Kurtz showed no capacity to embrace his responsibility.

At the least, he should have pointed out clearly, if accurate, Ricks’ statement would be enough to do what Hezbollah has failed to do, namely create mass hysteria in Israel. It would mean that this Israeli government isn't just lying to foreign journalists, but that it has asked its citizens to accept the possibility of its soldiers dying, as well as demanded that hundreds of thousands of Israelis spend the last month either in bomb shelters or leave their homes... all less motivated to protect its citizens than wage war.

When Ricks claims he heard this all from some anonymous generals, I doubt he's lying. I also think Ricks knows the difference between rumors, innuendo, and truth. Well, here he was spreading innuendo, with Kurtz playing uncritical facilitator. Given the gravitas of the situation, this makes both men as bad as liars, if not worse. Because without offering context or substance they were breezily tossing inflammatory charges towards an arena which is in a raging fire.

Listening to such careless accusations, Ricks and Kurtz seemed eager to group the Israeli citizenry and its government as a monolithic block. It reminded me of the miserably provincial Europeans who I’ve met overseas who lump Americans together as all enthusiastic followers of every single policy taken by our government. 

Sunday’s program made me think that we’re creeping to a similarly hyped-up period, one in which the media world is so lost in creating a clear narrative that they will grasp at anything, no matter how shallow, to come up with some analysis that momentarily sounds logical.

Earlier last week on NPR's To The Point, host Warren Olney interviewed political scientist Robert Pape. The interview followed an NYTime’s Op-Editorial Pape published that suggested that Israel can never defeat Hezbollah because it is a social movement akin, as he put it, to America's “Civil Rights movement.”

Pape’s inference was clear. Given the history of America’s Civil Rights movement, he was suggesting that if it’s a "social movement" it automatically has integrity, and thus certain success. Someone might want to remind Pape that the Klu Klux Klan was also a social movement. The fact that it had roots in a particular society did nothing to legitimate its existence or survival.

Pape has spent the last year selling a theory based on quantitative research on suicide bombers, the results published in a book that concludes that suicide bombing and terrorism only grow out of situations where people are occupied by aggressive powers. Though his Op-Ed piece didn't categorically state it, he inferred that if Israel would quit its violence against Lebanon, Hezbollah would leave Israel alone. While highly suggestive of solutions, Pape's essay had offered nothing to substantiate it.

On NPR, both he and Olney had a chance to explore or, as anthropologists say, “unpack” the theory. Instead Olney approached Pape with a brush as wide as the Hudson River. Basically, "give us what you think." So Pape simply gave boilerplate, namely such startling insights as the following: Hezbollah grew out of Israel's 1982 Lebanese invasion. That Hezbollah runs schools and hospitals. And that every day of the fighting, more and more non-fundamentalist Lebanese will become members of Hezbollah.

No argument from me. But anyone who has listened to the news about this violence for more than three minutes would have heard it all before.  You'd think Olney and Pape might want to explore deeper issues motivating Hezbollah. Given the way they have never proved themselves big friends of Lebanon's own huge Palestinian refugee population, their  attack on Israel at this point deserves thorough examination.

Here are some things Olney and Pape might have examined: perhaps Hezbollah was simply driven by a momentary political gain within Lebanon. Perhaps beyond Shaba Farms they are after more territory that are is part of Israel but which were open to question in the 1948 armistice. Perhaps the return of "all the prisoners"  (the specificity of exactly who they are a wee little fact of which no media outlet seems willing to question, but a phrase Arab scholars like Fawaz Gerges seem to repeat without question) was really about smaller scale political interests.

But Olney or Pape didn't seem interested. In an exchange that reminded me of one of those late night infomercials that pose as talk shows, Olney turned to Joel Greenburg, reporting for the Chicago Tribune from Israel, and asked whether Israel understands Hezbollah's depth as a social force in Southern Lebanon. Greenburg answered a quick "too often it gets lost." It was as if the three men were unconsciously or consciously conspiring to sell one big idea: Israel is led by people with absolutely no idea of what they are doing, and with little morality to guide them.

That same week, on PBS Television's News Hour, host Margaret Warner interviewed two "experts" about the view of "who is winning?" The first guest was Mark Perry, part of a British-American based group called Conflicts Forum, which "promotes dialogue between the West and Islamist groups like Hezbollah." The other guest was Gal Luft, executive director of the "Institute for the Analysis of global Security," and a former lieutenant colonel in the IDF.

Luft was most convincing about his inability to do anything except toe a party line. At least Perry was animated, his pent-up posture giving him the look of an angry coach paralyzed on the sidelines by hapless referees. According to him, Hezbollah has “made it clear they're ready for a ceasefire, but they need a trade to pull that off, and they want diplomacy.” As he put it, “they made it very clear to me -- we met with the leadership of Hezbollah over the last two-and-a-half years -- that they're ready to talk, and they're ready to do a political negotiation. I don't see what's wrong with that."

At that point, I thought Warner would examine exactly of what Perry's sense of what Hezbollah's "political negotiation" consisted. She didn't. Why? Perry raised something that demanded answers. Like exactly what drives Hezbollah. Warner listened to Perry with a pained expression, as if frightened or embarrased to ask. I was hoping Luft might be inspired to inquire, himself. Instead the Israeli analyst sat there staring ahead like a man incapable of any discussion that didn't have a formulaic answer.

Honestly, if I sound upset only about Israel’s media image, it’s not just the image that worries me; it’s their entire military campaign. Honestly, Pape’s research strikes me as being about as “scientific” as a professional “Pepsi vs. Coke” marketing study; lots of data but, as the expression goes, “big whoop." Ricks seems smugly manipulative, as in, "I know what I know, and I don't have to tell you how I know but you have to believe me!" As for Perry, he seemed to have real information but, for whatever reason, not quite willing to share it. 

All that said, Israel’s air war against Lebanon strikes me as indefensible. Not only have they spent far too many weeks destroying the infrastructure and lives of their neighbors, but what the hell have they accomplished for themselves? The man designing the military strategy, Dan Halutz, is the same guy who once said, so long as Israel gets a “targeted terrorist” he slept soundly despite sending his men to drop bombs that kill innocent civilians. Watching him last year interviewed by Bob Simon on CBS 60 Minutes, I remember he laughed about the craziness of Palestinian suicide bombers. At the time, he came off to me as a very careless human being. Someone whose bigotry is sold as professional certainty.

As someone who cares about Israel, their  “strategy” seems to me to have a basis in nothing tangible, outside of a small country with an over-supply of air-power and human will showing how frightened it is of getting extinguished. All just seems like blind wrath.  From Hezbollah I expect nothing but the worst. As Israelis find Iranian Revolutionary Guards fighting next to them, Pape may prove correct about them as social movement. What he ignorantly fails to acknowledge is it’s a social movement with deeply violent and imperialistic ambitions.  A movement whose rhetoric, and  history, seem to make them willing to exterminate any rivals, regardless of whether they’re Israeli, Druze or even Shiite.

Regardless, the Israeli air war seems totally blind to Lebanese suffering. There will be an awful lot their leadership must answer in coming weeks and months. I would hope there was a professional press out there doing a better job of making them accountable.  Not by taking strident positions but by the slow, difficult work of looking at whatever is found to give clarity. The agonizing detail work that define the value of real world detectives. 

For now, in the urge “to get the story,” the media is too eager for seamless narratives to the detriment of creating any accuracy. While there’s been great coverage of the human costs of this war to both sides, on the military and political front, our media leadership is looking to put away the suspects before they even know what they have for evidence. Worse that they’re operating according to a paradigm that demands the most superficial aspect of “clarity.” Namely creating clear bumper sticker type thinking for sides to root for.

Talking with my That’s Capital colleague, Titus Levi, he pointed out the way pressures to “fill up a news hour” leads to frantic and shallow news-gathering. It’s a process that has a similarly uncontrollable momentum as a heroin addict addicted as much to ingesting himself with drugs as the effect. No longer feeling any real high, he is still willing to stick himself with infected needles, simply to maintain a psychic routine. Ultimately such folks don’t just hurt themselves. Their carelessness helps spread plagues. Like AIDS.

Finally, Israeli editors have done an awful lot of complaining about bias from the foreign press, but given that they keep their complaining hermetically sealed by restricting it to their own papers, it all sounds like whining. If they're monitoring the foreign media and have a problem with it, they should request air time. For me, the only trustworthy voice exploring what drives Hezbollah comes from Lebanon’s Daily Star, namely editor Michael Young. For some interesting viewpoints, read the links below.
Jonathan Field
August 9, 2006

Michael Young's piece in the Times - excellent

Matthias Küntzel - about Iran's Ahmadinejad, who apparently was interviewed by CBS' Michael Wallace who in publicity cheerfully reports that he "found him very intelligent." He may well be, but Kuntzel finds his type of intelligence suicidal on a massive scale.

Meron Benvenisti - an Israeli geographer and former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, scathing about modern Zionism

Amotz Asa-El - an examination of this war from a Jerusalem Post writer who seems honest and accurate

Avi Sagi and Yedidya Stern - a long but excellent portrait of why Israelis may travel the world, but they are rooted where they live... someone should send to leadership in Iran, Hezbollah, and the too often-myopic so-called supporters of Palestinian rights who so often view Israel's Jewish population as some temporary visitors to a foreign land.

Imad Shaku - a remarkable piece by a member of the Fatah Revolutionary Council

Robert Fulford - a more biting review of media coverage from a Canadian journalist. 

Muneer Karram - from an Israeli Arab who is a doctoral student in history

Riad Ali - from an Israeli Arab news commentator

Danny Rubenstein - another remarkable piece from a terrific Israeli reporter who here writes about better times between Zionists and Lebanese Shiites

Yitzhak Laor - Israeli analyst critical of what it sees as his country's over-reliance to military solutions to political problems

Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff - a piece showing a particular Israeli take on Nasrallah

The Thinking Lebanese - a Lebanese blog co-written by Faysal Itani who may be the bravest and disciplined man who ever showed up on a New Republic message board.

Annia Ciezadlo - a Beriut writer who shows up in The New Republic and may be the bravest reporter in Lebanon. Excellent piece about Nasrallah.

Radio Open Source - while a previous post of mine criticized some of their shows, they've been refreshingly open to exploring all sides. This program featured two novelists, one Israeli and another Palestinian. It was about the only media I've heard that has offered long term hope about co-existance.

Ari Shavit - another Israeli Radio Open Source has interviewed, someone worth reading

Bitter Lemons - a dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians. One of the producers, Yossi Alpher, is particularly good at examining Israeli politics.

Anything by Amir Oren and Aluf Benn in Haarutz or Barry Rubin in Jerusalem Post.

That's Capital Publisher Chosen As Top Member of American Business Leadership Council

TC News Desk
May 2, 2006
New York, NY

Jonathan Field, co-founder of That's Capital, says he was eating his breakfast when the phone rang. He thought it was his landlord.

"It's that time of the month when they normally figure it's time to start hounding me for last month's rent," Field recalled.

But it wasn't someone asking for rent money. They were asking Field for something much more important.

"All of a sudden, someone's telling me to hold the phone, as they had a speaker from Congress who wanted to talk to me. They even knew my first as well as last name. I was so surprised I dropped my bowl of oatmeal. Luckily I was pretty much done, anyway."

What happened next is hazy, according to Field, but nevertheless important. Because in the next 20 seconds Field found himself invited to dinner with President Bush, along with other carefully chosen members of this country's great business community, asked to head as a headliner to Washington D.C.

The point of this journey? To act as Honorary Chair of something official-sounding called The Business Advisors Council, a group supporting apparently much-needed tax cuts for business. This personal invite coming courtesy of Representative Thomas M. Reynolds, congressman of the New York's sterling 26th District and a member of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, according to his Honorable's very honorable web page," one of the most powerful in the House, with legislative authority over economic policy, trade, Social Security, welfare, and health care policy."

And indeed it is.  And so Field, never someone to turn down an offer to act as an Honorary Chair (or dishonorary Chair) so long as it includes a decent meal, says he felt a sense of urgency. Or maybe it was ecstasy. Whatever, because...

"You know, I lose a lot of sleep about That's Capital, wondering whether my audience is with me... or against me," Field said sadly. "Sometimes I even wonder if I have an audience, outside of my teenage nephew who I pay to correct my spelling and offer up tips on pop culture so I don't sound uncool. Suddenly, I was being recognized for the peerless... well, I wasn't sure. But they wanted me. Who was I to say no? You know."

Field remembers a sense of shock and, yup, awe at being singled out, one among millions of New Yorkers (and podcasters, too), to sit on an exclusive panel of American business leaders joining Congressman Reynolds and President Bush charting the course of the economy, and hopefully, a nice fluffy desert. 

At the end of the Congressman's recorded announcement, a live speaker came on to the phone.

"Sooooo... as part of this package, we'd like to invite you to donate a figure between $300 to $500 to this cause," the speaker said.

"I better get a really fluffy desert for those amounts," Field says he told the guy. "Right downstairs from me, steps away, there's a Krispy Kreme, a Ben & Jerry's, AND a Papaya King Hot Dog joint. Fancy award ceremonies are fine but if you're gonna make me fly real miles as well as pay real dollars, you better put on a real good spread. You know?"

"We know," said the speaker. "So if you pay the full $500 dollars today, not only do you get a big fluffy desert, but you get a roast beef dinner and we send you home with your own personal gavel. With signatures of the Congressman or the President. All this for fighting the spread of high taxes."

"Five hundred bucks. Hmmm. Dinner and a gavel," Field said, trying to calibrate. "But tell me, do I get to choose which signature I get, the President or the Congressman, and, secondly, is it an authentic signature?" Field asked.

"Can you just stop with the detailed questions and think of the issues," the speaker said defensively.

"Every single issue in my life always comes with at least five questions," Field answered equally defensively. "Five just to start. Just ask all of my former girlfriends."

"We didn't call you about your love life," the speaker snapped back.

"What's that got to do with the price of mud?" snapped back Field.

"Because if everyone asked President Bush or Representative Reynolds to personally sign these gavels, don't you think it might give these great leaders carpal tunnel and other syndromes?" the speaker declared triumphantly.

Suddenly Field remembers feeling the slight sense he was being scammed, but also a simultaneous thrill that he might be able to put the House speaker on the defensive.

"Tell me something, if you would. What exactly is the exact number of winners and gavels being given out here?" Field says he said, fighting his confused emotion of attack and defend, and vice-versa. "Numbers would help my decision."

"My computer screen for those numbers is temporarily down, but the important thing is you have been chosen as a leader, and for our leaders we have promised signatures that always look authentic. All of our past winners have agreed that they do, I assure you," the speaker said, probably mistaking ambivalence for doubt in the respondent's voice.

"Really?" Field half asked, half said, an odd telemarketing logic now leading him to buy into his dutiful role as a respondent, doubt taking a nose dive into helpless shame for any instinct to even imagine question marks, nevermind full questions.

"Give me your credit card number immediately," said the speaker, according to Field, "and I will personally guarantee that the good Congressman will give his up-most commitment to getting a personal signature on your personal gavel."

At that firm promise, That's Capital's publisher Field finally (and shamelessly) agreed, giving up this month's rent to join others at the White House. Now if only his credit card hadn't expired just this past weekend, for which he does feel a wee bit embarrassed.

All that said, Field says he is relieved that one of New York's great politicians with the stature of sitting on a government body that commands the future of taxation of our great country is finally looking out for taxpayers, current as well as future.

"Not only is this visionary guy not just looking to cut taxes," Field told us. "He's actually spending the public's budget on something worthwhile. Telemarketing campaigns. And they say Republicans are antagonistic to real science. Hah, I say. Hah!"

Asked to explain what he meant, and the tone of his "hah!," Field uttered another "hah."

"Efficiencies. Market efficiencies. Hire marketers to lead a telemarketing campaigns to raise money by calling America's top business leadership, along with anyone else in the phone book, to get their credit card dollars, and then he earns big buy-in for big buck donations from these big buck CEOs and other big vision leaders with a promise of a three course, five dollar roast beef dinner and a two dollar gavel. Just do the math. I mean if that's not an example of smart Republicans doing government, I can't wait to see what they think of next. How about a Labor Day telethon to raise morale for the Iraqis and money to buy American soldiers their own vests? How about that, mister fix the handicapped, Jerry Lewis!"

Field says his only regret is that he won't make it to the dinner for the fluffy desert. On the other hand, he's delighted to have been chosen by Congressman Thomas M. Reynold's in such a brilliantly effective delineation of who's who in leading American business to raise funding to... cut funding.

If you want to ask why Congressman Reynold's hasn't invited you for your own award dinner, call or write him here.

Field believes there's at least a 200 percent chance that Reynolds will be delighted to get your credit card number, too. Hopefully yours won't have been expired.

And in between getting to talk to Congressman Reynolds, check out the bravest political commentator since Jon Stewart, speaking on America's best reality television channel, C-Span.  Namely Stephen Colbert at the White House Press Dinner. Blog sites like Crooks and Liars, as well as web zines like Salon have done an excellent job at both offering it up, and pointing out how gutsy it was.

Watch it and then think about Reynold's dialing for dollars. Confirms my sense that the clowns running Washington are a lot less funny but much more insidious than any comics on television, even such violent novelist Bozos like Bill "bust 'em up" O'Reilly.

For a quick download, go to Crooks and Liars.

Or... Video Dog - Salon.com.

Bits of a Puzzle - Part V

A friend of mine called last week. He hadn’t been in touch for a bit. Apparently, he had fallen in love with a woman he only sees on weekends. He's in New York. She's in Chicago. When he's not with her, all he does is think about her.

“It’s amazing how powerful a hold she has,” he told me. “I’m out having beer with friends and all I can do is wonder what she’s doing when I’m not around. I catch a scent of a perfume that reminds me of her and I’m completely undone.”

A magazine sales guy whose one marriage ended quickly almost 15 years ago, he’s fairly sophisticated but also fairly cynical. Now he is walking around considering that phrases like “true love” might not be hype.

“When she’s here, we stay in bed, like it seems for hours," he said. "But it’s not the sex. It’s something bigger. I hate to use this word but it’s “deep” but then she goes back to Chicago and doesn’t call and I feel like a… like a woman. It makes me want to hit someone. Or hide underneath the bed. This is insane.”

In poet’s terms, my friend has momentarily gone mad. In evolutionary psychology’s terms, he is experiencing limerance. A state of being which mixes sexual and emotional longing, it’s what makes being around obsessed lovers so annoying.

When not in each other’s arms, they’re “neither here nor there.”  Visible to the eyes, such lovers are emotionally unavailable outside their “couplet.” Not simply blind to all around them, they actually demand an exhausting type of attention – intense periodic acknowledgments about the heights of their state of being. Or, equally annoying, the lows.

According to evolutionary psychologists, limerance is composed of equal measures of pain and pleasure – the balance creating a sense of the sublime. The pleasure is the promise of feeling as if you are merging with another being, becoming one. The pain is the dread of rejection, humiliation not just in another’s eyes but those of the community. The merging is not quite there, and perpetually in threat of coming to completion.

It’s an intoxicating brew, and anyone within its orbit will either feel a sense of transcendence or as if they’d fallen into a black hole. Regardless, in both cases there’s a sense of losing agency. The gods of passion guide you.

It's as if romance has a life of its own. And though we don't admit it, that's often that what makes it so thrilling. Whether you’re a participant or simply concerned friend, entering limerance gives the sense of being in thrall to powers beyond individual control. 

After repeated reminders to my friend that he lives a charmed life, and that if it doesn’t work out that he was fine before he met this woman, I ended up hanging up on him during a long harangue from him that “nobody understands.” I felt bad but limerance is a game space where if you’re not a player, don’t step into the ring.

The way to “get a grip” over limerance? Send them emails. Buy flowers. Or tough it out... go to the gym and sweat it out. As with all difficult or powerful human emotions, people control it through creating rituals. Behaviors that can give shape to shapeless feelings. Limerance, like any strong emotion, has spawned its own markets around particular rituals, from reading love stories to romantic get-aways.

Humans create rituals, in general, to create order from chaos. Think of a family’s Sunday meal, where everyone sits together to break bread. That meal is the flag that family flies to say, “this dinner together is who we are,” even if the rest of the week they rush around as if they barely know each other.

Rituals are particularly fertile in areas like romance, where conditions are apt to change at any moment, leaving a lot of vulnerability in its wake. Markets depend on ritual behavior, feeding needs that are constant yet always susceptible to the threat of unstable forces (i.e. energy supplies, hurricanes, war, etc.).

Indeed, markets serve rituals. They exist to create stability in an unstable world, whether around food, education, whatever. Commerce allows us to survive, not simply in the short run for day to day supplies, but psychically, delivering us the emotional security that there are others who share our needs and can help us serve them.

Money is the DNA of commerce, providing the symbols of stability. But at core, money itself is a bit like romance, something that is in perpetual and uncontrollable formation. Mark Taylor, who we interviewed here at That’s Capital, writes in his book Confidence Games that money is, itself, liminal, a state of being “betwixt and between.”

If that seems abstract, consider the whirl of emotions around getting a monetary gift, the lovely imagined possibilities it inspires along with the accompanying tensions of wanting to maximize its value.

Money may seem fixed in coin or paper, but within it swim a set of “in between” forces whose shapelessness (and perpetual movement) give them a power that will influence all those who come in to contact. Like romance, it too seems to have a life of its own. Which again, like romance, makes it attractive and dangerous.

The liminal space around money is geography that resounds with contradictions.  There's a perpetual sense that money can either deliver cause for dread… or cheer. Booyah! Whether winning or losing, a small object like a coin or a bill has so much power over the course of our lives. An object whose value can go up or down, the logic not always clear.

Facilitating commerce, money allows us to transcend limitations of time and space, literally and figuratively. It both symbolizes (reflects back to us) and generates (storing it for later use) different types of value – moral, social and physical. As much as we want these values to be permanent, they are by their nature temporary. Always in flux.  Reflecting a world that is similarly unstable.

As all relationships are a constant series of overt or less overt negotiations, even while we use money to create stability, its stability is constantly undercut by the ongoing negotiation within these relationships, a bit like the value of flowers within romance. Think of week old roses looming there after a lover's quarrel. The stability that money creates is always temporary. Its direction can always turn.

Taylor’s Confidence Games is named for the trickster aspects of money and commerce. But reading the book you don’t get the sense that Taylor feels betrayed by money. Rather, for him the delusions of stability that money feeds may nurture fundamental spiritual as well as physical needs.

A currency’s value hides forces that are as powerful as they are abstract. Within solid-looking paper bills flow forces that are eternally liquid and often impossible to understand, mirroring the mystery of life.

It's not only that we can't always understand things such as why or when it's going to rain; neither can we fathom all the reasons people do things that impact us. As in romance, where we are rarely clear about why we are in love or why someone loves us, the forces that determine monetary value are often terrifyingly incomprehensible.

While humans may fear such mystery, we also probably cherish a vessel like money to contain it. Money captures the mystery which we don't want to acknowledge as basic to life. And yet it also exists, to some extent, to remind us of that mystery. It's a safe space to consider creative forces that impact us and almost seem to have their own intelligence.

Capturing those forces, money generates responses that are  in a dance of constant opposition. First, again like romance, money demands enormous faith. A trust in the permanence of its existence. A suspension of disbelief, precisely because its operating in a place that suggest rules even as it subverts them. 

But second, as in any area of liminality, money also breeds lots of obsessive thought. Thinking (like this post), which sometimes lead to profound intellectual breakthroughs (can't promise that here, but think of figures from Calvin to Karl Marx), that give us new takes on life and how we should live it.   

Okay, let’s back up. My last post explored the way recent social and economic changes are reflected in entertainment shifts, specifically the ritual of "going to the movies" has been eclipsed by playing games, at least so far as revenues and involvement.

The game space is far from liminal. In fact, it’s rule and structure bound. Actually, so are movies. But the difference between the two suggests something to do with limerance and the liminal, as well as our present and future.

Movies focus on emotional catharsis. The pleasure is about watching a hero move towards forming some new psychic or emotional state. Heroes transform fixed situations (places, people, things), and in the process are transformed and elevated themselves.

The pleasure of games has little to do with the emotional catharsis of watching someone else’s journey. The joy is found in the pleasure and obsession of identifying patterns, leveraging them, and creating new ones. And unlike the movie space, where the stories are seamless and big, the game space is about perpetually short-term engagements. 

To win means a momentary transformation. Nobody wins forever. And this is where the liminal emerges as a cloudy presence. Games demand a sense of liminality, because they focus so much on rules. By telling us what we need to do, they suggest a lack of rules (or changing rules) outside their boundaries. 

Here's a thought. The popularity of games may reflect a deep philosophic shift within our culture. Namely this: the millennial world has moved beyond beliefs in the absolute reality posed by most religions. The rise of religious fundamentalism, itself, acknowledges a terror of this shift, a desire for a return to stable values. Which probably were never all that stable.

But humans can't live without values. Meaning is what makes us human. For the past century, modernism and faith in scientific progress propelled the development of government institutions, but also the organization of business (things like brands). Then very briefly, and to a much lesser extent, post-modernism emerged, a sense that reality is inherently corrupt because all meaning is tightly controlled by those in power.   

Gaming reflects a world-view that is simultaneously less trusting in ultimate answers but also less gloomy about their absence. The gaming attitude suggests that life is best lived by provisional truths. And lived within a reality that, like games, take place in shaped spaces. These spaces may periodically change, but participants within the space can agree upon provisional rules to change them.

And it’s here that games share similar qualities with romance and money, at least around the “liminal.” Because, while humans may act as if they have control in these spheres, there’s an  unspoken acceptance that these spaces will morph.

Unlike a movie world, where we sign off with an ominipotent “the end” (as if God has signaled it) a game world is a series of humanly-shaped rules and spaces. The rules may seem fixed, but we can change them, play differently, or we can always move on.

Encouraging immersive as opposed to voyeuristic experiences, games assume an experience is only provisionally real. Outside of the territory of the game’s space, its rules are irrelevant. You either stay in one game space, enter others, or accept chaos. 

Not surprisingly, games are a place where faith is almost as important as skill, at least in those where “lady luck” has a hand.  As opposed to a movie era where stability focused on the promise of something eternal (like a job that lasted one’s life, or a community that stood strong), what it takes to win is frequently shaky. Difficult to decipher.

At the same time, games are more accepting of failure. If you lose, you go on to another game. Recently, a column by Maureen Dowd satirized Harvard students flocking to classes about happiness. But in a game world, happiness is a critical value. Because if you’re not happy on the journey, the destination promises no ultimate reward. The joy is brief, taking up time than it took to get there.

This post, like the previous four others, is part of a longer examination of infrastructure, exploring how things like national transportation systems or business organizations like brands are impacted by technological and social shifts. Ultimately, I’m looking at how we live impacts… how we live.

Well, honestly, I’m both near the end and far from it. Before I reconnect this back let me return to exploring the liminal aspects of money and commerce, or the patterns of which they're composed and, in turn, inspire.

History, in Taylor’s book Confidence Games, is an ongoing tango between man, money and commerce, the process binding us inextricably (and eternally) to a set of higher powers – whether “the gods,” “God,” or in modern times, things like “market forces” or “corporate capitalism.”

Taylor’s focus is on how we, at various points in history, have found ways to navigate our role in the dance. It follows how, in such navigation, we created powerful belief systems reflected in religion, art, and science. He looks at everything from Calvin’s liberation of bourgeoisie merchants to conduct business while remaining true to God, to modern arts’ impact on Wall Street. 

The book points to the way commerce and money, and by extension technology, have always played an enormous part in evolving belief systems, for science as well as religion. In fact, reading this book, you get the sense that the most important belief systems are as frequently generated as tested within the sphere of commerce, money and technology.

In Taylor’s view, they create arenas that have historically been viewed as simultaneously liberating and dangerous.  Tracing the emergence of markets, he points out that they were initially viewed not so much as neutral as special spaces, arenas to be approached with a sense of awe.

Set off at the edges of towns, they were accorded their own particular sets of rules and regulations. Market participants were required to express vows or prayers on entrance, and they were centers of ritual, both serious and festive.

Today markets and commerce have their own rituals vows and mystery. Think of trying to figure out real estate prices. Or the stock market. Money, as Taylor suggests, is becoming ever more ethereal or abstract.

Look at Wall Street, where so-called “traders” make a living “playing” stocks and derivatives based on anything from biotechnology companies making no profit to taking hedges on weather patterns like hurricanes.

In millennial America it would be more accurate than flippant to say that the only difference between an illegal and legal bookie is the different authorities who tax them, the former paying up to other mobsters and the latter to the IRS.

And regardless of which authority to whom you bow, the rules of transparency are cover for processes that are deeply opaque. Where once we depended upon the gods for guidance, today we have digital technology, capable of crunching numbers but also perpetually evaluating future scenarios. 

Regardless, both the gods and our computers require the filtering of human mediation in whom we desperately want accountability but on whom we more usually simply ascribe faith.  Equally important, as with romance and money, digital technology is itself in constant emergence. Like them, it has a generative power that suggests possessing a life force of its own.

At the moment when we think we have the ability to customize our lives through the seeming ability to personalize everything from how we shop to how we work (our constellation of "bytes), digital technology only reinforces our perception that there are forces much bigger us with whom we must co-exist.

The sense of mystery continues to surround us. Because the technology upon which we depend is  doing great things, but we don't know how it does them. And even if you don't believe in evolution, as long as you use anything digital you live in a world that is evolving before your eyes.

Since infrastructure is the human effort to build stable systems, and our current technology as well as our belief systems are not just subject to liminal conditions, but reinforce them, well... pray there are no hurricanes in your neighborhood. Big government, a sector many of us once depended upon to save us, may be as much a relic of the 20th century as the movies. Or just irrelevant.

Rather than looking for leaders to lead us, it may be smarter to find collectives creating rituals that serve things in which you believe. From religious or political groups to your local book club to folks who play poker or Everquest. It won't solve the big problems like education or energy policy, but it may offer access to like-minded parties with whom to face shaky times.

And then again, can networks of mophing collectives really confront things like depletions of oil or global warming?  More to come. 

END OF FORMAL POST
by Jonathan Field

A few more notes: Thinking about rituals, movies from the beginning were immediately ritualistic. You went to a theater. You were part of a crowd. The ritual included a range of broader things (buying popcorn) to things that were personalized (sitting in a certain part of the theater, getting there for the previews, avoiding the previews, etc.). In times when we watch more movies via DVD, the mass ritual is disappearing. The game space has its own rituals, but because there are many more types of games, they are less easy to identify the patterns en masse.

For books on emergence, read Steven Johnson’s book by that name, or John H. Hollands'.  More immediately, think of the way Amazon makes recommendations based upon past sales. This is bottom-up technology, constantly taking in algorithms to calibrate the way incremental movements will end up creating a new structure or pattern. A universe of real-time data is interesting, and very valuable to business or political organizations. But as individuals, without interface mediation, it's awfully difficult for humans to make sense of. Steven Johnson's book on the importance of interface design today is something anybody interested in business or politics should read. It's brilliant.

Finally, my phrase "provisional reality," and its importance were inspired by conversations with my brother-in-law Philip Simmons, who fought Lou Gehrig's disease for nine years before he died in 2002, beating odds that said he'd be dead within two. He also managed to write three books in that time, one of them - Learning to Fall - managed to win some critical acclaim. His book Deep Surfaces, which I believe is out of print, is worth grabbing if you ever find it.

Bits of a Puzzle - Part IV

Two tales.

Story one

Once upon a time (back in 1950), Las Vegas, Nevada had a population of 24,624. Fifty years later, it was getting nearly 600,000 visitors alone each year. Between the city and the surrounding valley, its current population is approximately 1.5 million, expected to double within ten years.

Founded as a central railroad stop in 1905, Las Vegas has been a gambling mecca ever since. Nevada was the first state in America to legalize casino gambling, and the last to officially outlaw it in 1910. Three weeks later, according to reports, the gambling simply moved underground.

Then in 1931, under the urging of an influential but reportedly temperate rancher, the Nevada legislature reopened up legalized gambling to generate tax revenues to pay for local schools.

From there? Hellooo natty mobster Bugsy Siegel. Followed for the next five decades by a parade like The Rat Pack, Liberace, world class chefs and finally, the global titans of low brow/high brow pop, Cirque-du-Soleil.

Today, ladies and gentlemen, the emerald city is a travel hub, its McCarran International Airport averaging 980 flights a day, ranked between the 8th and 9th busiest passenger sites in the world airport. Woosh!

This once sleepy desert oasis is now America’s fastest growing city. Reports from four years ago showed between 5,000-7,000 people moving there each month. Sunday evenings there are traffic jams that run between the strip all the way to the sister suburb of…. Los Angeles.

Given that my previous post started to explore Las Vegas taking over Hollywood’s aura as the iconic symbol of modern times, perhaps I’m stretching things. Okay then...

        Story two

• 2004: Combined earnings from American casinos, lotteries, and horse tracks -- $72.87 billion (from Not Just For Losers, by John V, LastWall Street Journal, Oct. 5th 2005)
• 2005: Global video and computer game revenues: over 29 billion dollars
• 2005: 43% online gaming growth, $2 billion, expect to triple by 2011
• 2005: Hollywood theater box office revenues fell by 6 percent from $10.2 billion in 2004 to $8.9 billion last year, attendance dropping by 9 percent.
• The End.

What's the moral of the two stories? This: the period of crowds finding meaning together at the movies is gone. The collective is moving to the sphere of games, whether at places like Vegas, on the web, or jumping between the net and the tube.

Just as film provided a backdrop and affirmation for life in the last 100 years, gaming will do it for us moving forward. This view, itself, is a distillation of a few patterns of thought, chief among them a terrific book by game designer Ralph Koster called A Theory of Fun.

In the book, Koster separates games from stories.

• Games tend to be experiential teaching. Stories teach vicariously.
• Games are good at objectification. Stores are good at empathy.
• Games tend to quantize, reduce, and classify. Stories tend to blur, deepen, and make subtle distinctions.
• Games are external-they are about people’s actions. Stories (good ones, anyway) are internal – they are about people’s emotions and thoughts.

For Koster, “Fun is the act of mastering a problem mentally.” And games are how we get there.

From his perspective, games are, let’s say, “not for keeps.” While you do play to win, it’s not the winning of hard consequence that interests him. It’s the fun of learning the patterns and mastering them. He's not quite talking about Las Vegas.

On the other hand, he's talking about play of genuine intensity. As far as I know, there's not yet a 12-Step Program for lovers of World of Warcraft, but these entertainments are more than engaging -  they are overwhelmingly immersive.

In fact, there’s an entire economy growing out of online games, people selling their own virtual properties and creations on ebay. That suggests that whether or not they're of the empathic quality Koster assigns to fiction, people are creating virtual stories that translate into real world monetary value.

To me, Koster's thoughts about gaming extend beyond the game space. Because just as Hollywood movies shaped attitudes about life for much of the last 100 years, my sense is that something between a digital and gaming aesthetic will do the same for future decades.

What's that mean? Not to get all college professor on you, but the significance can be partially spotted looking at this post's structure, specifically how I set things up. First, in meandering bits about Las Vegas. Second, an outline of factoids about gambling versus movie revenues.

Both were stories, but the narratives were laid out differently. The first was lazily poetic. The second was bulleted “just the facts, you infer the rest.”

And that’s part of what I’m attempting with this entire "puzzle" about the connections between shared myths, entertainment, and a nation's economic infrastructure.

It’s more than we’re moving to an era where gaming has over-taken 20th century narrative as escape. It’s that our identity, indeed how we look at the world, will be increasingly come to fruition less via seamless movies for the mass and more through highly designed (and because of that... controlled) arenas engineered to allow varying levels of free form play.

More, the material with which we will play will increasingly be bits and bytes of data from which we yield patterns and morph them into new patterns. Component parts to build structures and then rebuild new structures.

And unlike social space where movie myths dominate, in which most action focuses on the journeys of individuals among groups, in a gaming sphere, the individual is just another component of the game. Unless they or their team wins. And that is a nuanced but important difference from, say, a movie hero (or anti-hero) who finds moral grace by becoming part of the larger group. Games are both more intense and colder.

To put it less abstractly, the world of a lone John Wayne saving the settlers is gone, but the world of celebrity poker is here to stay, at least for the near future. Equally important, we are going to find our own place at the table, with at least a dollar’s chance of being celebrities ourselves.  Or just believing that we are.

That’s not to say Hollywood and all the hoopla around movies are going away.

The television network's are confronting real threats from user-generated video online, the mass of it short form story telling. Offline, IMAX is a theater experience where the crowds have grown in the last year. But as entrancing as both genres can be, IMAX and online video shorts are also far different types of story telling.  Not quite about taking deep empathic journeys with a bunch of unknown (and known) characters.

Take the two most enduring recent shows on the small screen of television: Survivor and American Idol. Each, in its particular way, are simultaneously voyeuristic and participatory games. Constructed arenas of character-testing acting as laboratories for us to not simply imagine but aspire to. A theater of choreographed spontaneity, the pleasure here is making patterns and identifying new forms those patterns can take, whether of a visual, aural, and ultimately moral form.

Fiction-based television hits like 24 are fueled less by seamless stories than the kinetic energy of pattern making. Plot-wise, it's not that much more complicated than an ancient television hit like General Hospital. Map out 24 and you have is a highly produced soap opera with triple espresso juxtaposition of visual cuts, foaming with double frappacino thriller froth.

But it's multiple layers of data points are crack cocaine for the eyes, ears, and blood pressure, a roller coaster kick of keeping ahead of the rocket-fast bouncing ball. And the real hook is asynchronistic perspective of every moment. Few of us will ever live such adrenaline-soaked lives as the world portrayed here, but given the nature of our multi-tasked universe, emotionally many of us feel as if we already do.

Magazines like Real Simple and other popular design create a digital aesthetic, which pushes us to both constantly consume while we also constantly edit. Identify components that are of value, edit out elements we don't want. It's the mindset of nomads versus farmers. More on that in future posts. For now, just look at the genesis of reality television, the most recent, Unanimous, which is basically Survivor minus pith-helmet stage set, a poker game with mind games as the chips. 

Or compare the aesthetics of yesterday’s Who Wants to Be a Millionaire with Deal or No Deal. The former now almost seems quaint. Gone today are the questions that gauge intelligence. Gone is the player having the saving grace from a single phone call with a designated real world friend.  

The only frame for Deal, No Deal offers is the host, the silhouette of a shadowy banker, and the fetishistic-looking titanium-like suitcases offered by the skimpily dressed babes on stage. The total of these elements makes the show's yappy chorus “No Deal” a non-sequitor, given it suggests taking the money and going home, but here yelled out happily as the players dive deeper into the morass.   

“Just the facts,” surrounded by live-wire electric currents of different artifacts associated with money. Or, as novelist James Buchan once brilliantly put it, Frozen Desire.

Identify and exploit patterns, you win. Get things right, you unfreeze and liberate the value.

These shows... indeed these gaming spheres, are still about narrative. Because beyond the short term thrill of spectacle, narrative is the primal DNA to capture a crowd's attention. At core, information is only turned into knowledge through stories, whether in the form of film noir or lengthy bureaucratic reports. We create meaning by telling stories about "the facts." And as scientists like Karl Popper saw it, socially-accepted stories define how we even identify what we see as facts.

Digital technology generates new forms of story telling and story gathering, just as the printing press once changed how people looked in the world and, by extension, lived in it. Today's digital culture is a world of pattern making around component elements. To whittle things to a minimum of exposition - the focus on asking the audience to get in the act and... parse!

What interests me now is how component thinking and "pattern making" fits in the dizzyingly complex world of how we work and meet collective needs.   

Which for me, make Koster’s ideas about fun and games relevant to anyone in business, politics or the social sciences. Because just as tiger cubs are cute as heck wrestling around, such playing trains them to grow up to be dangerous predators. Well, games are emerging as arenas of collective approach to how we live - learning, so to speak, how to hunt. Or farm. Or how, as Nintendo seems to want to do, how to keep brains active as we age.

As Koster's genuinely delightful book makes clear, they do offer the possibility of "fun." More, they offer a vision of life, what it is and can be. In that, they provide us a world of parts or components, where winners are successful to the degree they identify new shapes for them to work, creating or designing their own infrastructure and world.

Learning how to put those components together is how we play. The game space is simply practice for more serious play.

What's it got to do with the original subject I set up in the beginning post for this ever-longer puzzle: the connections between a sense of disintegrating authority amid disintegrating infrastructure?

This: infrastructure and authority are up for grabs because so many of the components that once shaped them... and once kept hidden, are now transparent. Sometimes figuratively and sometimes literally, for sale.

Whether at places like Radio Shack, which offer hardware and software that are as sophisticated as some of the best stuff in the American military, or online at MIT's learning space, where this fabled university will make all of its courses available for the public... free. And that reinforces the gaming mentality.

There are as many negatives as positives. Want to see the impact of quick parsing of information? Outsourcing jobs that don't command as much money overseas, in the process creating havoc among communities.

In this millennial world of game play, we don’t have time to sit back and just watch. Our stories will play essential parts of the experience. They'll just be shorter, frequently collectively created, and also frequently collectively deconstructed and/or deposed, without much focus on consequence for individual components. And maybe for the individual.

End of story. But just for now.

by Jonathan Field

Bits of a Puzzle - Part II

Hollywood. In your imagination, what is it? What happens there? The making of television? Movies? Video games? Music? Who walks its streets? Strivers from all over coming to make a name? Or is it just a mass of smog tinted boulevards crowded with passing cars but few people?   

It's hard to say. But through much of the 20th century, the phrase "Hollywood" projected an over-riding image. It was "the dream factory." A place producing cinematic stories devoured by all the modern world.

Those stories had their own specific arenas. The movie theater.

Initially, the experience of moving pictures on a huge screen in a dark room was so powerful that shots of a moving train could lead audience members to faint. By the time "the talkies" emerged, mass swooning over "going to the show" made film entertainment America's fourth largest industry.

A related thought.

For the last 100 years, Hollywood delivered seamless fictions for the plebians and elites, alike.  Heroes, heroines, and bit players whose cinematic journeys and antics provided coda to live by. Navigation for living happier or better or more meaningful lives.

If what they delivered was seamless and fiction, the emergence of the industry was more like a series of real world bumps and turns. Hollywood, previously a rural landscape populated by retirees and apricot farmers, became a haven for movie making only because of crews escaping the vigilant eyes of an East Coast monopoly looking to control the price of film. 

Today's film studios are outraged by bootleggers of DVDs. The early movie titans only created the industry by using bootleg film stock. In the beginning, it was an awfully shaky business.

Until the industry exploded in the 1920s, Hollywood actors were confined to boarding house and midnight curfews, watched over by owners intent on keeping the sleepy Hollywood Hills... sleepy. The Spanish Flu epidemic of 1917 almost killed this nascent business, people terrified of public gatherings.   

Some background on the culture which would embrace the movies and spread it far beyond our shores.

Since the Civil War, America had seen cycles of boom and bust. Around the railroads and expansion westward. Around waves of Catholic and Jewish immigrants from Europe. Around industrialization, which drew other waves of migration from the nation's rural heartland to the cities. In the process generating economic vitality and all that goes with growth... dislocation, medical problems, and crime.  In the background, the United States was a center for the emergence of science (including Darwin's theory of evolution) creating tensions with prevailing notions of religion and its proper social role.

Note: Some social scientists point to American ideals of romance as a 19th century creation. Their take - Protestant evangelists saw marriage as an institution that could address rips in the social fabric of our once-agricultural nation. Rituals around courtship, leading up to "living happily ever after," became part of a conscious process to counteract the chaos that seemed to be erupting all around.

Particularly threatened by what Old World European tribalism, this influential (and in their own way, progressive) sector of Christian America viewed finding God as connected to finding a single idealized partner. The end result: procreation, family... becoming part of the larger community and, by extension, nation. A country where perpetual change has always been part of its intrinsic character, in ways that were both charmed and cursed.

The movie business was not in the hands of such Christians, but it was driven by its own evangelists. A core group of urban-oriented immigrants who, more than making money, seemed inspired by the chance  to create an alternative cosmology to the ragged Jewish ghettos from which they'd come.  Not to mention, create a universe divorced of any overt connections to the ethnicity and religion of their roots.

Take the story of a man like Samuel Goldwyn, someone half the bulk of my last post's hero, Tony Soprano, only with three times his ferocity. Legend has it Goldwyn walked from the slums of Warsaw to the ports of London to catch a cross-Atlantic ship. Then, wary of immigration laws in the United States, he jumped off the boat in Newfoundland, walking the rest of the way to New York.

A penniless but energetic immigrant, he didn't get into the movies because they were an easy business. Before Goldwyn, there was no movie "biz." He was a relentless force in the creation of the industry, itself. He was a man obsessed.

If you got in his way, you'd find a fight. And he found a lot of people to fight with. According to his own daughter, he was a cold hearted brute. But he was enormously passionate in his search for creating worlds of fictional human beings who would deliver audiences emotional and moral fireworks. 

Goldwyn epitomized Hollywood's Jewish moguls, out to produce a set of fundamental narratives around a mythic American identity. An identity most everyone - believers in religion, atheism, or even communists, would come to adore. Mythic in proportion and also because this identity was less accurate of anything in existance than the yearnings of anyone seek transcendence. 

The DNA of many of these myths tended to be a powerful patriarchical figure, someone who prized the sanctity of family and community, but if their individuality was  ever threatened, would end up riding off in to the sunset alone. Of course, not before saving others from the bad guys.

In between, there were also women of fiery independence and communities of colorful characters who acted as a chorus or comic foils.

Hollywood's stories were kinetic poetry as well as tall tales. They offered a magic and a grittiness. They delivered the sacred and the profane.  The industry that produced them, with its own characters, techniques, and technology, pollinated collective rituals around courtship, aging, and death.

And where religion (or even politics) were often centered on singular authorities leading tight-knit congregations, film moved the collective to the neutral space of a movie house. The movies were  fiction. But their stories tapped into something that struck audiences as basic to modern life, namely  the spirit of independence for which so many people longed.

Not that the movies were free of a belief system. Belief in "a system" is what myths provide. It's that the system Hollywood offered was so seamless and engaging. Partly because of the spectacle of technology. But also because these spectacular stories were, at heart, open to interpretation. 

On visceral as well as intellectual levels, 20th century film embodied the radical notion of two of democracy's core values: individual choice and individual responsibility. As a whole, the stories identified ideals of authority within figures who stood up for maintaining free will.

Equally important, the theater itself provided a regular place to get those stories. It wasn't just cinematic spectacle for individuals. Hollywood gave individuals the delight of enjoying their stories as members of a crowd. 

Movie houses were owned privately. But they were also totally public, as in the end, it was the audience who commanded their seats. You could say that it was a tabernacle 30 years in the making, its congregants the urban swarm who had been steadily been growing the cities through the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The movie theaters became palaces. They promised eternal truths and air conditioning. Sometimes double features for a pittance. A private/public sphere where friends and strangers could gather.  In the anonymity of the dark, the mass would collectively share a story and, to some extent, a similar perspective.

Whether the end result was laughter, crying, or just awe. Authority was liberated from the clear sight lines of a lecturing religious or political figure. Rather they seemed to rest in democratic polis of the story and the audience and the theater.

For my interest here, what is most significant is the way the movie house became a place to create a sense of authority and public order. An arena that gave anyone in the audience a sense of access to the power of the sum total of all the parts within our messy world.

The theater was a self-contained interface, offering a package that was seamless. A place where people didn't "have to" suspend disbelief. Rather, it was a sacred space where suspending disbelief was an element of pleasure. More on that in later posts.

Right now, let's just say the artifice was part and parcel of the show. Along with the popcorn, part of the ritual. You "bought the story," literally and figuratively. Everyone knew it was “just actors.” They knew such stories took millions of dollars to produce. And the public made aristocrats of their stars, knowing that all of them were "just like us" but also just like Martians.

For all the artifice, when the right balance of effective plot, dialog, and sound tracks echoed in the darkened theater, people were profoundly moved.  In turn, a "bad movie" was not so much about showing artifice but seeming phony.  “Hard to believe.” A good movie was “honest” or “truthful.”

Within the movie screen, we saw reflections of our own lives, completed by the promise of either comic or tragic ends.

In the last few years Las Vegas may have replaced Hollywood as an American totem. Granted, to some extent the comparison is "apples and oranges." Hollywood's infrastructure was built to produce movies. Las Vegas was built to produce tourism. Or something between "suckers" and happy families out for a good time. Regardless, both Hollywood and Las Vegas have a role in the global imagination. Iconic places that represent this nation's own essence as geography for escape and transformation.

Hollywood's image is fractured. It's hard to know its composition. Who gives it resonance... where is the magic of celebrity: among the lawyers and MBAs who now run studios, or Paris Hilton and reality television stars?

By the late 1990s, movie revenues had been eclipsed by games. Las Vegas may not ever hold the magic as Hollywood once did, but it's created an aura. And a definition: a place where you don't just watch the action but are the action.

It's late. My brain is working slower than I can type. Or maybe vice versa. Let me get to the point. For the next few years, I doubt movies will deliver the same power as games. Movies are a relic of a more stable, industrial world. It's not that they were perfect, or we have lost our innocence.

Rather it's something else. Around the descendence of collective myths, and the ascendance of games over narrative in commanding mass attention. Identifying patterns amid chaos rather than enjoying stories that make sense of chaos for us.

It's all part of a larger social instinct around dealing with less stable infrastructure. Which changes not just entertainment but how we live and produce. As well as how we market what we produce. More to come.

by Jonathan Field

Bits of a Puzzle -- Part I

Last night was the first episode of this season’s The Sopranos.  Lacking cable, I ended up watching it at a nearby pub, finding the spot through a search on Craigslist.org. Along with 20-30 other strangers, we gathered for pizza and beer and enjoyed the show.

A few things about the event stood out. First, how so much of the dramatic tension within The Sopranos involves juggling resource scarcity, and the collective search for clear lines of authority around who gets to manage those resources. Just take the following highlights...

Tony’s only pleasure - indulging a love of high priced sushi. The obsessions of one mobster to lose weight. The pathetic pleas of another mobster seeking Tony’s blessing to forgo crime and buy real estate and retirement in Florida. Carmela’s initial joy at Tony buying her a Porsche, looking devastated when a friend shows her up with a Corvette. Even Tony getting shot by his deranged uncle for whom he’s caring, this after he raged at his sister when she objected to his need to baby the aging crime boss, not wanting to throw the old man in a facility for “assisted living.”

Whether it’s fighting for more time or free space, everyone in the show acts like they're on rations. But it's a psychic rather than objective can of nutrients that they seek. Nobody starves from lack of food, shelter or even sex. Rather, what unites them all is their desperate longing for a sense of order. When it comes to meaning, it’s an emaciated bunch. And they’re all on a ferocious path to satiate its absence, looking to objects like cars and new houses as signs that they've found it.

The other thing that struck me about the evening was the experience of watching the show at this pub party, a sort of crime loving flash mob. In addition to the Sopronos, there was a photographer and reporter from Newsday getting our stories. And between being photographed and drinking, the crowd shared quick introductions, flirting, laughter and “oohs" and "ahhs" at the violent end. Then we went home, most of us remaining strangers. Interesting but far from cheery.

If you think I’m here to rant about modern life’s loneliness or lack of meaning, well, I’m not. Having grown up in New York City, I can’t yearn for an idealized past when neighbors enjoyed “real community.” Yes, 25 years ago more doors were open to me, but I was a child. Single adults tend to be more isolated creatures. And if you want to read about alienation in American cities go back to Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie.

Human beings are complex creatures with complex needs. That's nothing new. The immigrant waves that moved across oceans 100 years ago were as inspired by spiritual as physical needs, as were the original founders of America. History is a stew of people searching for such varied nourishment.

What does fascinate me today is how the process of creating shared meaning has evolved over the last 25 years, and the role of digital technology in creating ways to navigate the search for order. And how that shows up in the way we build infrastructure and interface. Before I lose any readers with verbiage, let me throw out an abstract idea with specific implications.

The search for meaning is a search for completeness. A purity of spirit if not substance. The religious have God (or "the gods"). The science-minded have seek an objectively defined natural order. Both seek narratives that are ultimately seamless. Complete.

I doubt that search will ever dissipate. I do think that we are experiencing a turbulence today where seamlessness is elusive, whether it’s in the content of the stories we tell - like tales of mob bosses who seek the blessing of shrinks -  or how we take-in those stories – like in the complex weave of arenas that may as often include isolated viewing via cable-on-demand or in a bar with a room full of strangers momentarily acting as neighbors.

What’s that have to do with economics and markets? Well, this may seem like an excuse, but while I’ve tried, I’ve found it impossible to offer a seamless answer. I end up writing wordy paragraphs that are pieces of a puzzle which may have a multitude of shapes.  Instead what I’m going to do is spend the next few days throwing out ideas about story telling, seamlessness, and the connection to business and government. Hopefully you will find enough pieces that fit together to your liking. More tomorrow.

by Jonathan Field

I WANT MY PBS!

After the last post, I realized we just offered the audience a lot of praise for July '64, but it's not something they can now go watch. Given the digital distribution nature of today's world, the inability to see this terrific film is... well, ridiculous. On every level. First, because it offers no value sitting on a shelf somewhere. Second, because it's so much better than 99% offered on our 500 channel universe. Third because the documentary, itself, is the best of an emerging digital genre that combines cinematic simplicity (the story is generated less by images than the voices of people who lived the tale) with equal measures of smart juxtoposition (archival footage) and smart editing.

Most frustrating is the internet offers the distribution platforms to get this seen. Atom Films & iFilm, for instance have been around since the dial-up dark ages. But here's what makes the inability to see it as interesting as it is irritating. Check out Revver.com, a site where video producers from around the globe can upload their content... and earn revenues. Given how seamless the designers have made Revver for producers of content to show it as well as for audiences to see it, now the site just needs better material. For my taste, a lot is American's Funniest Home Video-reject caliber, about as compelling as credits for an infomertial. With worse production values.

On the other hand, the basic framework of Revver is brilliant. It offers three things critical to evolve digital distribution: easy streaming, tagging (see Delicious) and a marketing model (in this case, ads that are automatically coded and patched-in by the site, itself, to play at the end of each video). It has the promise of providing content-users and content producers a highly useable interface to trade their work.

And that's what makes it interesting. Think about the possibilities of a genuinely networked world. Not the network model of giant media conglomerates. But a constantly evolving networks of users who find each other and pollinate, nurture, and share content. In such a world, aggregators (the middle-men) actually become even more important. Sites like Revver may be doing a second-rate job of attracting great content, but they've done a terrific job of building platforms for producers and audiences to share that content. And while we don't need a monopoly of media outlets who will decide what is best for the audience (as the record industry tried to suggest was their role while fighting Napster), brands who recognize their market value as a combination of brokers and interface designers are critical.

Which is where brand organizations like PBS have a place, a resonant brand being exactly that - brokers and interface creators. PBS, as one great media brand, already has the content. They also have the other important piece. Audience. Think about it. Twenty years ago, MTV became a brand by tapping into a collective ritual. Music videos. Such media became associated with a generation. Youth. Well, that doesn't preclude other generations, or at least sub-cultures within it, from having their own rituals around media.

In the last five years, PBS has seemed to be on a hyper-aggressive marketing kick to galvanize a Baby Boomer following. The process isn't always heartening. From my perspective, it has produced its own portfolio of noxiousness: namely deadly dull programs like Antique Road Show, too many forums featuring positive thinking gurus or concerts featuring ancient Pat Boone boy groups and their off-rhythm fans whooping it up in the aisles, and a Friday night lineup that almost gives the periodic dead air (or pixels) on sites like Revver a good name.

Indugle me a rant. For someone who loved Bill Moyers, can the sincerity of liberals be as off-putting as the sincerity of the right? Yes! Just watch the sad remains of Now in a post-Bill Moyers era, followed by the  Journal Editorial Panel - a group of stiff necked pontificators like Paul Gigot and Dororthy Rabinowitz basically doing a botoxed vanilla version of "that's what I'm talking about" concerning the dangers of liberals. Actually, it looks like Paul and Dotty are headed out to other pastures (God bless Rupert Murdoch - he's usually a fox but not this time around - as these guys will only bore his slice-bloody-and-dice audience). Now if only David Brancaccio would only do something surprising for impatient clods like me - ex. get a buzz cut, take up smoking cigarettes on-air, or just get angry.

Anyway, between non-ficture features like Nova, Frontline or Independent Lens, and a bunch of superb British dramas, PBS really offers must-see television that's broadly relevant, proudly adult, and (other than our taxes and donations) free. Why shouldn't that content have a place on the web?  Money? If the tech-smart but content-deficient folks at Revver can create a business model, why can't PBS?

Jonathan Field

PS: For another video site, try Devil Ducky. Whether you want smart or saucy, the work is usually compelling. On the other hand, unlike Revver's amateur-auteur flavor, Devil Ducky basically takes the best of the ad and television shorts world and puts it online. It's not the user-generated content promised by the web. And the truth is, Revver has a few promising gems.  Some of it sweet, other wonderfully silly, what struck me was the editor's picks were frequently no worse or better than the audience's top rated choices. Maybe Revver could hire someone from their audience to curate content.  Or someone, yikes, from public television!