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.

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.

What Do You Speak? Where Are You From? To What Do You Belong?

For my money, the best reality television the past few weeks was on C-SPAN.  Namely, coverage of the immigration issues erupting all of a sudden. America's donor free/commercial free network has been much better than other television media in following the surprisingly robust rallies that seemed to erupt spontaneously across the nation.

Two weeks ago, 500,000 people marched in Los Angeles. Two weeks later, another 500,000 showed up to march in Dallas. Yesterday hundreds of thousands showed up for rallies in Washington DC, Seattle and New York, slowing down a range of industries depending on low paid labor across the nation.

The crowds have been overwhelming Latino, and in yesterday’s Washington D.C. event, the speakers were always bi-lingual. Sometimes English came first, other times second. But when Senator Ted Kennedy got up to speak, his Spanish translator was drowned out by crowds cheering without any need for the translation.

And when a nine-year old girl was featured on the podium to lead everyone in a “Pledge of Allegiance,” with all the American flags raised, it could have been a particularly emotional Fourth of July. But a weird one. Because even while they were holding up this nation's flag, there was a palpable connection to other countries.

A friend of mine in Seattle accidentally came upon her city’s rally, and told me how she found herself “thrilled,” more from the energy of the crowds as from the cause.

“I just start to think we’re all so apathetic and then you see this,” she told me. “I am not quite clear what we should do about open borders but the feeling in the crowd was great.”

C-SPAN doesn’t analyze news so much as show its formation. And so far I’ve yet to see much media analysis of the momentum of these crowds and insights about what, beyond the obvious, it might mean. It deserves more attention, specifically about mobilization in America today.

To me there was something clearly absent from the rallies: the voices of immigrants from outside of Latin America. Today I checked The New York Times for coverage, and found a front page photograph of a political rally full of folks who were clearly Asian. Then I read the caption and realized it was shot at an anti-government demonstration in Thailand.

While Mexicans dominate immigrant populations in the United States (approximately 49 percent of America’s 11 million “illegals”), where were the masses of non-Latino immigrants, whether originally from South America or South Asia?

In Minnesota, for example, the fastest growing group of foreign born are not from any Latin American country. They’re from Africa. In California, Spanish may be the second largest spoken language, but Mandarin, Korean and Farsi have their own substantial number of speakers.

But in the last few days, these rallies have been primarily Latino. Washington D.C. has over 70,000 Ethiopians. What would have happened had the speeches been in English and Amharic? How might that have impacted the cause? What does it suggest about the cause that Spanish is so overwhelming its language?

More about that in the near future. This post will focus less on the “cause” than how it’s been waged. I have spent the last six posts wrestling with issues around developing infrastructure, specifically how collectives of people can commit to something together, and how other parts of their lives (their rituals) play a part in that process. 

The entire immigrant issue is a great reflection of the limits and opportunities of mass action. And also how, in our modern world, identity gets played out among a public collective. The ability of Latin Americans to organize so quickly seems so relevant - especially the activism from a particular demographic among them, the Mexicans.

In the last 15 years, Mexicans have been building populations in states ranging from North Carolina to Wisconsin to New York. But except in border states like Texas and California, up till now they were awfully quiet politically and socially. These past two weeks they have emerged with an intensity which demonstrates equal measures of longing and ambition. That emergant-type energy has implications for all of us.

Think of the crowds. Half a million people at a time. These were folks for whom a day off means losing critical wages.  Demonstrating for them was no lark. I guess you could say that these rallies are proof that fear can be a great force to galvanize action. But I bet fear also prevented a lot of African, Chinese, and South Asians from joining the protests.

In fact, the pride with which people spoke their native Spanish suggested that while feeling vulnerable, these are not a group who feel marginalized to the shadows. Or, more accurately, perhaps they had suddenly caught the full extent of their potential power.

What did they have that helped them? Three things seemed apparent. First, they had the memories of where they came from, expressed in the passion and pleasure with which they chanted together in Spanish. Secondly, they had affiliation with a church, Catholic or born-again Christian.

Finally, they hold the threads of a emerging sense of what they want. Not the entire fabric. Rather, they have a vision in the making. Something about opportunity and home which is expressed in the form of a green card. Together, these shared institutions of language, church and legal document gave them the generative DNA of meaning, ritual, and place.

Collective meaning is the first step in creating infrastructure. It allows the building of trust, which in turn lead to rituals centered around place. These two pieces, ritual and place, then work together to reaffirm meaning and trust. And perhaps the tensions around yearning, the act of working towards something, then takes on a creative force of its own.

The immigrants who came to Washington may not have organized previously, but their lives lend themselves to organically building a cultural infrastructure which is transforming into a political force. They gather for work together, they room together, they spend a lot of time together.

They also have a model to base themselves on. It's called the Christian Right. Whether or not you're a fan, that is a group who have turned cultural concerns into a political infrastructure that's been amazingly resilient. For the last two decades, they have been brilliantly leveraging place and ritual. It is a lack of place and ritual that eludes liberals. Outside of visiting Starbucks, what do they have? Not much.

In New York, for instance, the middle class move to private schools (when they can afford it) has robbed the city of its most potent advocates for better public education. Against the war in Iraq?  Well, the military is primarily composed of a population of Southern and Mid-Western white recruits.  As the brilliant (and ignorantly criticized) Robert D. Kaplan writes, they are forming an unacknowledged caste.

Because of a decreasing lack of regular attachments in the public sphere, moderates, liberals and even elites in this country, however “well educated” are effectively voiceless politically. Every four years many of us start arguing who will make a better president, but between elections that process is dead.

It's not multiple identities that weaken political action. It's lack of regular, conscious and, very important, public ways to partake in those identities. And to wrestle with them.

For the last few weeks, I have been writing about a gaming mentality that has impacted this country, and perhaps the world. I wonder whether living in game spaces can lead people to question power and then impact it. Perhaps these immigrants are proving you can.

Certainly people play in games. But part of that play is "trying on" identities. Then they adopt pieces of them or they move on. Sometimes such a process can remind us where our most resonant sympathies live.

Look at sport. As a friend told me about visiting East Germany before the destruction of the wall, outside any local soccer games you would always see at least half a dozen tanks. Soldiers would follow the departing crowd till it would disperse. For good reason.

British soccer crowds, fueled by class-based aggression and too much beer, can be furiously destructive at home and abroad. Fired up, they are an identity in drunken emergence, expressing themselves with careless abandon.

For a haunting example of another type of crowd in emergence, remember the figure whose lone actions nearly caused a revolution in China. Nicknamed Tankman in Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government have spent the last 20 years doing their best to vanquish his memory. Give a group of people a place sense to learn (or be reminded of) its power and... well, watch out.

The Mexican "illegals" demonstrating yesterday were so interesting to me because they seemed as they as much in the midst of an internal as well as an external struggle. You could see it and hear it as they momentarily looked proud, then uneasy, then excited.

It was as if, in those moments of joining a demonstratin, they were coalescing as a collective, navigating their way into "becoming" something other than what they had been. Illegals to citizens. Mexicans to Americans. But also fighting to retain something else that they could not leave behind.

I'm not sure they are yet clear what they ultimately want. But their willingness to dive into figuring it out makes them a force. Those rallies were game spaces to claim a complex identity. And it's that conflicting journey, a process that they travel with passion but also discipline, traversing "the system" into prominence, balancing who they have been, are, and want to be... that can make them particularly effective players in the modern public sphere.

Because if these marches are a series of game spaces for them, for now they are using each space wisely. Taking each seriously. And for now they are managing it without the rootless violence of soccer fans from Liverpool, or frustrated Muslims around the world, whose institutions right now serve them no further than theirs bars, mosques or privacy of their homes.

We native born-Americans have our own rootlessness. Which is not a problem until we ignore it. Why? Because as fewer of us share rituals connected to "public space," we have fewer connections to the "public good." Such rituals and spaces don't need to be heavy. Or serious. Think of national holidays. The one day a year that the mass of us share with real joy is Thanksgiving.

That may be unfair. People interact with their neighbors. Parents around the country certainly socialize with other parents, looking after their children. And America has always had a transitory "moving on" attitude which provides oxygen to the national psyche.

But any existing (or even healthy) restlessness is probably amplified by fears around globalization. We are, to increasing degrees, creating gated communities. Which reinforce the ability to personalize private space at the expense of the public.

Here. Let me take a leap: however heavily accented their English, anyone in yesterday’s crowd of Latin Americans was probably more capable of shaping the direction of this country than many of us who were born here, especially a non-married, childless blogger like me.

Without strong emotional ties to larger real world collectives, a person is an individual in the most negative sense. Alone. It’s why the buying power of straight, single Americans as a demographic will never translate into political power. Especially single straight men.

Gay men and single women don't have the rich social ties generated by children but, so long as they face perceived discrimination, they do have cause.  They are actively navigating roles. Even that is fading as they rise in status.

Those "illegals" marching belong to larger communities which are actively in emergence. They have a cause that's not simply about discrimination. It's a shared identity about a journey that was visible (and audible) watching them on C-SPAN.

You could see it in their complex ability to juggle English and Spanish. You could sense the memories of what they left but also what they seek. It was in their eyes as well as the words from their mouth and heart.

They may not have deep roots in this country, but they have connections to institutions whose roots run very deep, are rooted in place, yet extend beyond simple concepts of geography: church, ancestral home and... seeking to create someplace they can someday claim as home.

As useful as the web can be to create collectives like “My Space,” we still live in an atom based world. Gravity matters. Nothing is more proof of that than seeing the gathering of these crowds of immigrants.  In today's world, if you're not religious (even if its the religion of the secular), and can't collectively share a sense of memory as well as longing, you will find yourself more and more isolated.

Advice to moderates and liberals, find your own offline institutions with places and rituals that support and nuture things you hold dear. The conservatives have them. Radicals (right or left) tend to be utopian and create their own. The only other adult group I'd say are the haplessly deluded who believe they need neither, outside of holding on to avoiding any commitment which may end in loss.

Finally, while my comment about Starbucks may have seemed flippant, the truth is I think potential rituals and places will (or can be) inevitably be rooted in brands. Businesses with whom we form conscious and unconscious relationships. Markets exist as much as to reflect as to reinforce values.  Those brands operate in markets that can impact their success or failure.

There’s an email making the rounds right now, for instance, about fighting high oil prices. It suggests a focused boycott of ExxonMobil, action which would ask drivers to spend several months actively avoiding purchases from this business' gas stations. It points out a “don’t buy gas day" would be of limited impact. Rather, target this powerful brand with behavior which takes a cumulative toll over a period of months rather than one day.

It would certain transform a weekly (daily?) chore of "filling up" from a drag to a statement. It would, in fact, ritualize it. Give it meaning. And if you don't think gas stations can offer rituals around a place, come to New York City's Houston and Lafayette, where cabbies hang out at the car wash.

Can your local ExxonMobil-alternative help you create such a ritual by creating a relationship with you? Do you have a relationship with the folks where you buy fuel? Can you convince the franchisees who pay their money to headquarters to threaten to make their own switch? Worth a try.

For my money, I say the boycott should be less about prices and more about energy choices: pushing Exxon to invest a healthy portion of its profits in R&D on alternative fuels. And lobbying the government to use our tax dollars to do the same. Cheaper gas to me is just... cheaper gas. It further extends our willful ignorance about how disconnected we are to our resources.

Regardless, an e-mail generated boycott is an interesting outgrowth.  Perhaps America’s politically charged and multi-lingual immigrants are teaching the rest of us a lesson. It pays to speaks to a few languages, be flexible in one’s identity, and, not least, be ready to join with others to commit to something you believe in. To put a stake in the ground that says, I am here with you. We belong.

by Jonathan Field

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 III

In the last few posts, I’ve been exploring a range of issues around the narratives that drive modern life. The stories we tell ourselves that give meaning to political movements, businesses, or modern social institutions; i.e. nuclear family, liberal arts educations, democracy, etc.

Stories which give human beings the confidence to get up in the morning and feel assured that life has some order, whether it’s that they’ll have a job to go to, that they are deserving of certain status among friends, or even simply that when they go to turn on a faucet, water will come out.

Underlying all this attention on narratives/stories is my instinct that we are living in a period where stability seems ever more elusive for a variety of reasons. Globalization. Corporate competition for short term goals. Outsourcing. But among all these dynamics burns another issue: a faith, shared by the religious, atheists, conservative and radicals, alike, that stability as a human constant ever  existed. Or can exist "if only..." (as in "if only we followed communism, free market capitalism, Islam, whatever).

The idea of the possibility of stability, itself, is proving full of holes. The sweeping narratives which imbued trust within so many of our institutions for the last 100 years (whether marriage or our plumbing systems) are not holding up. Ask anyone who lives in Iraq or New Orleans. When modern infrastructure cracks under natural or human forces, authority which we once took for a given can at times disappear.

What I'm suggesting is this: while related institutional failure can (and should, in my mind) be examined to identify and assign accountability, we are as subverted by the stories we tell ourselves about leadership and permanence as we are by the mediocre individuals that we too often appoint to fulfill our faith in its role.

More, faith in “leadership” is part of a larger desire for narratives about permanence and stability, the sum total of which will increasingly prove corrosive to generating human action.

Okay, what’s that mean for putting food on the table, managing a business, a just getting a date?  Basically it means that, more than ever, we should mistrust any group or person selling permanent solutions to anything: organizational strategies, tenure at our jobs, or a dating service that promises to find one’s life partner.

The Hollywood paradigm of the last 100 years suggested that with luck, smarts, and money, we can actually locate and buy ourselves permanence. That, in fact, we deserved it. The right partner. The coolest car. The smartest, sweet set of children. In a sense, the late 1990s marketing focus on “design solutions” is symbolic of two forces - an admission that life is a series of incremental steps towards survival, and/or a desperate hope that if only we get the right design team, they can permanently bring us back to a state of grace.

Note: I am not saying there's no thing as a great solution. I am as big a sucker for "fix it now" desires as anyone. I go to a doctor with the flu, I'm way more relieved to learn that, rather than just abstract advice to "rest and it's a virus that will eventually go away," that there is an antibiotic the MD can give that will make the pain disappear. Immediately. Forever!

I also believe in the profound value of great design. And stories. This post, itself, is a narrative. I'm not saying that the importance of story or design will disappear. More than ever brilliant engineering and creativity is critical to approaching problems. We need nuanced stories and skill sets, not to mention passion, to approach a country or a city or a relationship that is unraveling.

Rather, I’m saying that at exactly at a time when the world is proving itself to be what it always was – in constant beta formation - we are more and more desperate for permanence and ultimate authority.  Putting faith in access to permanence or ultimate authority is a fiction that doesn’t only prevent us from propelling the traction necessary to... well "deal," it robs us of the practical and poetic depth that actually delivers the richness of life: our experiences amid the navigation.

My own narrative here is that we don't need eternal truths - what we need is eternal vigilance, specifically around accountability. But that's much easier to simply state than put into action.

If you are a secular thinker in the sense that you believe that individuals hold more responsibility than God (or the Gods), then accountability is rooted in institutions. And right now in the United States, for instance, institutional accountability is harder and harder to maintain. Just look at the rationale behind the war in Iraq, and the murky waters you need to find "some truth."

Talking about accountability, I left last post writing about Las Vegas' ascedence over Hollywood. Games versus stories. Given that I've mentioned accountability, these "bits" need to circle back to the role of games. I will get there. Promise.

Here's hoping that I'm creating the modicum of stability necessary to building a readership... more later.

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

Commitment

by Jonathan Field

My office is a room in the back of a boxing gym. I rent there because it’s affordable. It's also never boring. While the gym is noisy at times, I can always tune out any bedlam by closing my door. And if I’m momentarily frustrated or need a break, there’s always a lot of life to follow amid the doings of the gym.

This past week I let myself get distracted watching two guys spar. One of them was Amadou, a young guy originally from Senegal whose most noticeable feature is a bright smile. The sport frequently attracts a person of mixed disposition, on the one hand usually friendly, even gentle, on the other touched by an aggression which finds its fulfillment physically, within the confines of a boxing ring. That’s certainly true with Amadou.

Once he climbs through the rope on to the canvas, his sunniness disappears. Indeed, his entire presence changes. Not that Amadou is a great fighter. He’s a bit too eager. At times he trips over his own feet. He takes five shots to land one. And yet to anyone who steps in the ring with him, he’s dangerous. On the canvas, as Mike Tyson would put it, Amadou becomes a man “with bad intentions.”

The other day he sparred with a guy at least a foot taller, 30 pounds heavier, and with at least six more years experience.  It didn't’t matter. The novice young Senegalese fighter intimidated his bigger opponent from the first bell to the last.

The key thing to watch was Amadou’s jab. In a sense, it was the punch of an amateur. He’d telegraph it slightly and then, his legs and arms somewhat disconnected in their search for ground from which to get momentum, he’d throw. As the boxing expression goes, you could see his punches coming a mile off. Regardless, his bigger and more experienced opponent kept finding Amadou’s jab knocking him back.

Looking at it happen, his trainer said something to the effect that "the kid's power is in his eyes as much as in his hands." When Amadou goes out to whack you, he has the face of a man totally committed to your undoing. You may see Amadou coming at you, but in those moments, speed is irrelevant. Chances are that even if you get out of his way, the sum total of his presence is somehow going to impact you.

Perhaps it’s an overstatement, but in a sense, Amadou moves with an intention that ends up defying metrics. It’s as if the power of his commitment allows him to stop time. What interests me is less the expression of that commitment (boxing), than its power. His presence outside of the ring (a sunny smile and easy charm) is proof that joy is as powerful as rage in radiating its lights on the world. But watching Amadou box reminded me of something more important.

Human beings who can commit to something are clearly more effective than those who don’t. Okay,
that assertion is a no-brainer. But it’s also too easy to forget. Especially when a “good idea” inspires people to start something like an organization or a business. Watching intention in the confines of a boxing ring reminds you that smarts, imagination, and even bursts of passion are not enough to translate into something that endures.

The truth is that Amadou may or may not evolve into a great fighter. But for now, the gym's more experienced trainers are impressed. As long as he maintains that level of intention, the kid’s physical limitations won’t stop him from transforming into someone who warrants athletic respect.

All to say that generating traction takes commitment. It’s a core ingredient around which structure and process are formed. Without the commitment underlying structure and process, initial enthusiasm dissipates like the sweaty regret of a beaten fighter wishing he’d never put on his gloves. At that point, the business or organization either falls into malaise, or simply dies.

Boxing may not offer a perfect corollary for parable. Fighter and audiences are not the same as brands, institutions, and markets. Unlike the three-minute rounds of a sport, businesses and organizations have cycles that are less predictable. But watching Amadou led me to think about benchmarks for success or failure in various projects in which I’ve participated through the years.

In my last post, I wrote about a group that Titus and myself once formed to produce a new mythology of peace for Israeli-Palestinian existence. I also mentioned that we did not succeed. For all our well-meant intentions, we could not manifest corresponding commitment from other people.

It wasn't that we lacked desire for things to work out. It was we didn't have enough. Putting it all together required gathering a nuanced weave of components: from participants to processes that could leverage their efforts in satisfying ways. Had we a greater reservoirs of time, partners and money, perhaps our positive intentions would have proved resonant. But the inability to summon the requisite time, partners or money may have reflected the inadequate depth of our desire.

Which is to point out the following - however great the excitement that good ideas generate, there is probably a mathematical formula that proves how much greater the need for commitment. Have an ambitious idea? You better have even more ambition to execute. Without it, even brilliant ideas are doomed.

Whatever “thing” a person seeks to develop, public or private, challenges always emerge. The greater the number of components (as in the parts and participants), the greater the chance of things falling apart.

To paraphrase playwright Arthur Miller talking about life in the theater, a world composed of many parts and many egos, success requires having “a mouth and stomach capable of chewing bicycles, alligators, and whatever comes at you.” That description is actually apt for more than theater, apropos to anything from raising a healthy child to creating a business.

In economic and cultural terms, global and digital tool-sets liberate the creative abilities among many sectors of human beings: artists, business people, activists or entrepreneurs. Sites like That’s Capital emerge on the backs of software code that is out there for the public, nearly free. That code exists as a component of a larger infrastructure suddenly made accessible for the mass. But such liberation has a cost.

The digital process, itself, has its own rules for framing creativity. For instance, within the physics of molecules and gravity, digging holes takes sweat. Tools like Typepad, Photoshop, and Final Cut require their own expenditures of energy and focus, but compared to working with earth, it is easier to tweak the latter’s byte-based products.

An open-source world leads to an always-on attitude. A sense of living in environments that are always capable of being morphed. Creativity is unbound. Don't like something? Edit a new iteration, or even delete it. Just walk away.

That translates to a paradox. In that environment, it’s easier to start something. It is also easier to never finish.  Among people who work with digital technology, everything is malleable. And that probably effects our perceptions in the offline as well as the online world. 

As a friend told me recently, after spending many hours playing Nintendo’s Tetris he’d find himself driving in Los Angeles wondering if he could push a button and fly. Obviously he knew better, but periodic lapses into an pixilated-consciousness can impact how we operate.

Take this post. I have edited it at least 11 times, first publishing it on the net last Sunday. I took it off the site the next day, realizing that the post was pretentious and, worse, impossible to read.

Was it smart to publish before it was perfect? In deleting it, have I lost face? Did I create any confusion by pinging it out to the world wide web, tapping into an internet distribution system by alerting RSS feeds or tagging sites upon my multiple postings, nevermind the post's deletion? Or is this process just part of my own internal wiki?

I don't know. I do know that reading it gave me a headache. I had started off wanting to explore ways that the public vests authority within institutions and brands. How the seamless presence of those brands and institutions (their symbols and process in life) inspire a collective sense that trust is warranted. 

In an attempt to be thorough, I found myself moving the post into knotty territory. At some point I chopped the post in half, and starting writing about the way money acts as a sign of institutional authority. Then I took a casual swing to explore barter among friends of mine who avoid using traditional currencies (dollars) precisely so that they don't need to answer to traditional sources of authority - like "the law." I ultimately made my way back via a bumpy path toward the connections between infrastructure and interface and trust.

The core of the post looked at how globalization and digital technology opens our eyes to the complexity of various infrastructures, in the process creating broad levels of anxiety. My argument was that in an open source universe, the guts of the machine make all seamlessness less easy to maintain. Given that a seamless interface serves as a fundamental organizational symbol to earn collective trust, that dynamic leaves people unsettled.

Simultaneously, it leads brand and organizational management to over-rely on less-useful aspects of packaging, which turns out to be as ineffective as employing chewing gum to patch a leak. The effort to appear seamless or authoritative  becomes transparently empty. Ahhh....let me explain all that next post.

Here's the important thing for now: my attempt to explore all these issues led to a composition whose substance and shape mirrored what I was writing about: the difficulty of producing something seamless, nevermind logical. Framing all those pieces in an essay, well, let's just say I lacked the ability to create my own infrastructure from all the components.

I ended up spending the next few days on other projects, periodically attempting new drafts, or just watching guys pug it out in the ring. This post is, admittedly, just a new iteration.

Soon I will be taking another stab at my original focus: exploring the connection between the difficulty of generating trust, authority, and consistency amid complex environments. And linking it to the fragmentation seen everywhere from brands like G.M. to something that is both a brand and an institution: a nation state like Iraq, or as my smart friend Martin Anderson pointed out, the actual Iraq War.

In the journey to finish that piece, I ended up thinking about commitment. And now I end up calling attention to how this post is composed. I do that in the belief that identifying the elements and act of composition can tease out a glimpse of my larger interest: the symbiotic relationships between infrastructure, interface, and areas of trust and authority. And how difficult those relationships have become to sustain.

Just as a boxer feints at times not to confuse opponents but to find the best angle from which to maximize impact, this post serves as my ground for starting a larger proposition. Namely that because we produce and create from a digital mindset but live within a molecular bound world, commitment and intention become more scarce and valued, as they provide the first step to earning the authority that inspire commitment from a collective.

The digital tools that give us power to act on a particular vision simultaneously obscure how difficult a vision is to actually fulfill. In allowing us to consider morphing directions and desire (change directions, careers, partners, etc.), digital technology tempts us with possibilities. Ultimately, that abundance of choice can tempt us to avoid taking action.

Within the complexity of modern culture and markets, then, individual commitment and intention become correspondingly more complex and valuable. Especially in creating an infrastructure for a brand or an organization. And critical to galvanize participants with the trust that joining a process is worth it.

Note: all that may explain the success today of fundamentalists of every stripe (right to left). Their commitments are either to returning to some idealized glorious past or building a utopian future. Because their visions are idealized, they are easy to express. The force of their commitment can be enormously impressive and win converts. Give them leadership positions, though, they're faced with the same infrastructure problems as any of us. In general, they're better at destroying or impeding than advancing anything that a mass public views as useful.

Thinking about all these issues is close to home for That’s Capital. Building an audience means facing our own infrastructure and interface issues. We need to generate compelling content (audio and text-based conversations) and design a structure that enrolls access, interest and participation among a larger public via search engines, other blogs or podcasts, and conversation as much offline as on it.

Hopefully, we’ll maintain the gutsy spirit of guys like Amadou, not in our aggression as much as our commitment to knocking ‘em out. Here rather than jabs, we'll be looking to generate posts, ideas of consequence, and thoughts about the good things and bad things who deserve our lefts as well as rights.

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!