Portland-based essayist and author William Deresiewicz explores what kind of values support the hipster persona in the opinion pages of The New York Times.
“What’s the affect of today’s youth culture?” he asks. In other words, what’s going on underneath those pork pie hats and ironic t-shirts?
Today’s polite, pleasant personality is, above all, a commercial personality. It is the salesman’s smile and hearty handshake, because the customer is always right and you should always keep the customer happy. If you want to get ahead, said Benjamin Franklin, the original business guru, make yourself pleasing to others.
…Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or the movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small business. Every artistic or moral aspiration — music, food, good works, what have you — is expressed in those terms.
Deresiewicz also says the term “sell out” has no resonance in the culture today–it’s “an idea that has rather tellingly disappeared from our vocabulary.” I’m not sure that’s bad.
Also, I don’t think it is wise to lay the “youth culture” label on hipsters and be done with it. As I write this post, there are young people of another class occupying city centers across North America and they have a very different set of concerns, “affability” nowhere among them.
At the same time, I do relate to what Deresiewicz is saying. Hipsters, and the Bobos who share their values, are selling themselves in increasingly obvious ways and he’s right to question where it all leads. Can you really be friends with someone who’s always selling? I guess it depends on what’s being sold and how, but the concept is mostly off-putting (even though I can see myself in this particular mirror).
I see myself not just because I’m a Bobo who frequents Portland’s hipster coffee shops, I’m also a writer who has to sell to survive and a Netizen who is “always on.” And I believe, like the hipsters in Deresiewicz’s piece, that business is a powerful engine for social change. When you run a business the right way, you’re literally changing things for the better for your customers and your staff. A conscious business like Patagonia, for instance, is worthy of our praise and a great example of how it can be (and needs to be) moving forward.
Of course, Patagonia is not born of hipster values, nor run by hipsters.
It’s hard for me to see people “taking care of business” and each other as anything but a good thing, especially when the business in question is focusing on the triple bottom line.
Let’s encourage, not discourage, more social entrepreneurship. At the same time, let’s find a balance and value much more than crafty commercial solutions to today’s problems.
I loathe the state of TV news today. The American public is fed such a distorted view of events, filtered as they are by bought-and-paid-for pundits, not reporters.
Clearly, this sad state of affairs calls for a response, and The White House, for one, has one.
Since April of 2010, White House videographer Arun Chaudhary and Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest have been creating West Wing Week, a newsreel-like recap of the President’s week.
I know it’s PR, but it’s so much better than the news. On the news, it’s all vitriol all the time, which limits our idea about what government is. On TV, government is nothing more than a game to be won or lost, like football. But online, we see it’s much more than that and we get a much better feel for who this President is.
I do not agree with many of the things Obama does, or all that he stands for. He’s much too conservative for me. Yet, I like knowing that he’s a smart and charming guy busy working on our problems.
As the field of right wing contenders narrows down, and an alternate to Obama is offered, it will be all the more important for the President to showcase his looser digital self, not just online but on TV, as well. The challenger is going to be a starched suit, we know that much, but the contrast between the two needs to be magnified in order for the Dems to hold the executive branch.
“It isn’t the consumers’ job to know what they want.†-Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs passed away from a rare form of cancer last week at the age of 56. Since then, I’ve read a handful of articles about the man and the impact he made on modern culture. Maybe you have too.
The one article that stands out for me is by Christopher Bonanos, an editor at New York magazine. He helps us understand Jobs by revealing the connection between Jobs and Edwin H. Land, the “genius domus” of Polaroid Corporation and inventor of instant photography.
Land, in his time, was nearly as visible as Jobs was in his. In 1972, he made the covers of both Time and Life magazines, probably the only chemist ever to do so…
Both built multibillion-dollar corporations on inventions that were guarded by relentless patent enforcement. (That also kept the competition at bay, and the profit margins up.) Both were autodidacts, college dropouts (Land from Harvard, Jobs from Reed) who more than made up for their lapsed educations by cultivating extremely refined taste.
Land, like Jobs, was a perfectionist-aesthete, exhaustively obsessive about product design. The amount he spent on research and development, on buffing out flaws, sometimes left Wall Street analysts discouraging the purchase of Polaroid stock, because they thought the company wasn’t paying enough attention to the bottom line. (When a shareholder once buttonholed Land about that, he responded, “The bottom line is in heaven.â€)
In other words, both men were difficult to work with, which is something corporate culture seriously frowns upon.
I also took note of some articles where Jobs is not saluted for his singular vision, work style nor his enormous contributions. Free software advocate, Richard Stallman, wrote, “Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.” Clearly, Stallman has another, more radical, vision for the advance of digital culture, and it’s a vision where sharing is central to the enterprise.
Michael Wolff of Adweek also has some bite in his eulogy.
The rebel and poet and romantic figure, was, too, an authoritarian and despot. Microsoft, heretofore the gold standard in corporate hegemony, was left looking like a disorganized and mealy mouth liberal regime next to Apple’s ultimate dictatorship.
The irony of Jay Chiat’s “1984” Big Brother Apple ad was most of all that Big Brother turned out to have a great sense of style.
Dictatorship seems like a poor word choice, as I believe Apple employees are free to quit their jobs whenever they feel like it. Wolff also says he argued with Jobs when he met him years ago. Why anyone other than Wolff would care, I can’t say.
On a more positive note, Jobs’ friend, the great ad man Lee Clow, wrote in a memo to staff at TBWAChiatDay (Apple’s long-standing ad agency), “He was the most amazing person I have ever known. He was a genius. He was an innovator. He was the best client we ever had.”
The man’s legacy will no doubt be discussed casually and seriously for years to come. Some will insist Jobs was a humanitarian, others will only see the draconian nature of the corporation he led to unquestionable greatness.
In 1985, Jobs said about his hero, Edwin Land, “The man is a national treasure. I don’t understand why people like that can’t be held up as models: This is the most incredible thing to be — not an astronaut, not a football player — but this.†It’s a great point. We need American inventors like Land and Jobs to inspire millions of others to pursue their own dreams and to make things that deliver utility and beauty. We do not need them to coddle the press, or cut corners on the path to perfecting their offerings.
Steward Brand is an icon, and a man I’m learning more about. His thinking is central to a talk I’m preparing to give at Geekend in Boston next month.
It was in 1984 that Brand, founder of Whole Earth Catalog, helped put together the first ever Hacker’s Conference, held in a remote part of Marin County, north of San Francisco.
At the conference Brand famously said, “On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.â€
This tension between free and paid is at the heart of my upcoming talk, so it was a pleasure to find this half-hour public television program that documented the pivotal event where the words were first uttered.
http://youtu.be/bl_1OybdteY
I watched the program last night and was struck by how early the free versus paid argument shows itself. Some of the hackers present believed all software should be free, given that each new solution is a building block for the next problem to be solved by them or by someone else. Others in attendance held to a more traditional point of view, claiming that they didn’t want anyone tampering with their product.
Today, these themes continue to play out. Apple is a closed systems design shop, whereas open source developers continue to make not just great products, like Word Press, but also solid businesses built on support for the free software.
I don’t typically think of software as content, but it is. Brand says information wants to be expensive, or free. Information is broad enough to contain both software and content. But what makes one offering free and the other paid? Is it the whims of the producer that dictates price, or is the price set by market conditions?
My own answer to this question is both. You set the price on a whim, then adjust it over time as you get a sense for what the market will allow. For example, many content-driven projects begin as free offerings focused on building an audience. Once the audience shows up in droves every day, the company, or individual, can start to introduce paid offerings in the form of subscriptions (typically for premium content), merchandise, events and consulting, to name a few of the possibilities.
In the wake of a week of violent protests in Great Britain–spurred, as they were, by the police killing of Mark Duggan–I’m not surprised to see authorities and mainstream media cast blame in any and all directions, including in the direction of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
I’ve long contended that citizens’ media, at its core, is deeply radical and that it’s just a matter of time before “the powers that be” pull the plug. It appears that “the time” is now.
According to The Guardian, British Prime Minister, David Cameron, said his government is looking at banning people from using social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook if they are thought to be plotting criminal activity.
“Everyone watching these horrific actions will be struck by how they were organised via social media,” said Cameron.
“And when people are using social media for violence we need to stop them. So we are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.”
Cameron’s disdain for a media channel he has little control over, led ReadWriteWeb writer Curt Hopkins to claim, “David Cameron joins the long line of powerful men who totally miss the point of social media. What Cameron is pursuing is, in effect, a ban on free speech.”
Of course, some American authorities are walking in lock step with Cameron on this issue. Philadelphia’s mayor is trying to ban “flash mobs”. Yes, flash mobs, those innocent moments of public theater have apparently been co-opted by groups aiming to steal and cause other unlawful disruptions; therefore, they must be stopped.
Also, in Oakland last week, Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) shut-off of subterranean cell phone service in its downtown San Francisco stations in order to prevent a protest.
When people need to assemble and protest they will do so, in free nations and unfree nations. With social media tools, or without. Politicians and their friends in the media business point fingers, deflect blame and fail to ask (much less answer) the tough questions–like why are so many people upset and willing to act out in the first place? And that’s a terrible disservice. Civil society is an agreement between people, not a managed state.
Meanwhile, I think it’s important to ask where the management teams at Facebook and Twitter are on all this. According to Financial Times, Facebook has hundreds of people around the wold tasked with enforcing its ban on co-ordination of violence. The Blog Herald, reports that Facebook has assigned even more people to remove posts that explicitly incite violence, as a reaction to the events in England.
It must be noted that Facebook is partly owned by intelligence interests and radical right investors. For background on this piece of the story, see Tom Hodgkinson’s take down in The Guardian.
Another interesting window into how media works to control the message is on display in this bit from the BBC.
It’s clear from this interview that BBC briefly lost control of the message. “Mr. Howe, we have to wait for the official inquiry,” pretty much says it all. BBC wants to be fair, but a man was murdered. Facts are facts, and the fact is no one wants to report on why these things happen. No one in mainstream media wants to say the police are racist, and the government corrupt. Because they’re school chums who live in the same neighborhoods and belong to the same clubs.
Which brings us back to citizens’ media and the power of push button publishing. Even if you take Facebook and Twitter out of the equation, the internet runs on corporate infrastructure. Sure, you can run your own servers, but the data has to travel over fiber-optic lines owned by AT&T and other telecommunications behemoths.
Communications technology is nothing more than a tool and it can be, and will be, throttled at will. Yet, oppressed people always find a coordinated way to resist. Disarm one tool and another will be instantly adopted. So, let’s stop with the diversions and focus on the problem–lack of economic opportunity is an injustice not only in England, but everywhere. And when lack of opportunity is coupled with police brutality, the powder keg will explode, time and again.
[UPDATE] This is also a topic we discussed during last night’s recording of The BeanCast.
The New York Times just introduced me to Jstor, a not–for–profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive of over one thousand academic journals and other scholarly content.
Jstor is in the news because Aaron Swartz, a 24-year-old agitator for free access to information on the Internet managed to illegally download more than four million articles and reviews from Jstor, which provides content from the most prestigious — and expensive — scientific and literary journals in the world. Swartz’ act of defiance led to his arrest. He now faces 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines for felony counts of wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer and recklessly damaging a protected computer.
Mr. Swartz is not a run-of-the-mill hacker, says the Times. He has been known for his computer work since he was 14, when he was involved in developing the software behind RSS feeds, which distribute content over the Internet. At the time the investigation began, he was a fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard, though he was later placed on leave. His friends and supporters are now rallying around him–45,000 have signed a petition on his behalf.
The case against Swartz is a big story, and it’s a blow to the free culture movement. But my interest spiked when I learned that institutions pay tens of thousands of dollars for subscriptions to Jstor, which stands for Journal Storage.
Founded in 1995, Jstor started with 10 journals available to a few American universities and has since expanded to include about 325,000 journal issues available at more than 7,000 institutions. In other words, Jstor is a shining example of a thriving paid content model operating online.
Stewart Brand said, “On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”
With Jstor in one corner (and Swartz in legal trouble), paid content is looking like a pretty tough competitor.
As a person with five active blogs, multiple Twitter accounts and Facebook pages, Flickr, Vimeo, and so on, I truly appreciate the following performance.
I think it’s important to ask yourself if maybe you’re over sharing. When I look at Twitter, in particular, I feel that many people are over sharing, which is annoying. People also have axes to grind, and Twitter again seems to be the preferred online place for that. But do I, or you, really care that so and so had a bad experience at Sheraton Four Points? Do I, or you, really care that so and so doesn’t like social media pundits, or people who show up late for meetings?
Just because you can share, doesn’t mean you should.
Over the past few years, I have not been devouring books like I once did. Mainly, because I absorb and reshape so much online content on a day-to-day basis, that the idea of leisure time reading now seems other than leisurely to me. Which is lame. Thankfully, I fixed the lameness for a time this week, when I cracked open Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson, and kept reading until I got to his last, and most important, sentence of the book: “Free may be the best price, but it can’t be the only one.”
There are lots of interesting places in Anderson’s text to focus. One I’d like to address in more detail here is something Anderson calls “The Penny Gap,” which is a pricing model that changes the score.
“There are really two markets: free and everything else. And the difference between the two is profound,” Anderson argues. “If you charge a price, any price, we are forced to ask ourselves if we really want to open our wallets. But if the price is zero, that flag never goes up.”
Anderson’s book is well researched and offers lots of economic theory. In his “Penny Gap” section, Anderson points to George Washington University economist Nick Szabo and his ideas on “mental transaction costs.” Szabo looked at micropayments and claimed that such systems are “destined to fail,” because the cognitive costs are too high. Or as NYU professor Clay Shirky said, “In a world of free content, even the moderate hassle of micropayments greatly damages user preference, and increases their willingness to accept free material as a substitute.”
All of which is a terrific argument to go ahead and charge a fair price for one’s paid offerings.
I started charging for my weekly email newsletter in March and set the opening price at $1.00/month, or a quarter per issue. Is that price too low? It’s not too high. I chose one dollar because that’s the cost of a song in the iTunes store, and something that’s very easy to agree to, but what I’ve learned is price isn’t the issue when charging for online content. The issue is getting people to agree to pay at all.
So here’s what I’m willing to do to boost circulation. During the month of July, you can subscribe to Hungry for Gumbo for free. Your subscription will last the life of the newsletter. Simply send me an email (db at davidburn dot com) asking for the free subscription and I’ll sign you up. If you don’t like receiving the newsletter you can always unsubscribe, which is also free.
How does this motivate you to pay me for my writing? It doesn’t. But it may motivate you to share my writing with others who will pay.
I’ve been tossing around the idea that my writing, editing and publishing “isn’t about me, it’s about you,” for some time now, and I have to admit it’s a tricky concept to wrap my head around.
The academic view is that writers, editors and publishers are people with something to say. But the definition is a lot looser when you ask people in marketing and media to weigh in on the ancient art of storytelling. Marketing and media people like to see storytellers as community guides or content shamans.
Programming instructor and game developer, Kathy Sierra, guest writing on Gaping Void, describes the need bloggers have to cater to their audience:
You do not want to be the guy that must ask constantly, “how can I get more comments on my blog? how can I get more followers and fans?†The real pixie dust is when you ask yourself, “how can I help my users get more comments on THEIR blog?â€. You want to be the guy who asks, “How can I help my users get more followers and fans?†And that is why I have always been such a fan of Hugh and Gary V and Tim Ferris, for example.
So it’s all about empowering the reader. That’s not hard to understand, unless you think about it for a minute…
Forget social media. Do great writers seek to empower their readers? Is that what Melville was doing with Moby Dick? Is that what Hemingway was doing with The Old Man And The Sea? Yes, the readers of these classics walked away from the book a better person for having read it–that’s central to the value exchange between writer and reader. But we’re talking about authorial intent. Was the intent to make their readers more popular, more well spoken, more knowledgeable? I have a hard time believing that. I think it’s much more likely that Melville, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Vonnegut and all the rest intended to tell a timeless tale.
I get that it is up to the writer to provide the canvas, the brushes and the paint so you, dear reader, can paint a picture. Where the logic falls apart for me is realizing that not that many of my readers, or yours, have their own blog or want to toot their own horn. They’re readers–people who like to consider, not reblog, the information presented. In other words, digital production and distribution of content has changed the game, but the fundamentals of storytelling remain.
Bottom line, there’s a difference between writers using story to connect with an audience and a marketer using story to connect with customers. I’m still working out just exactly what the differences are, but intent is a big one. Marketers intend to sell, and are judged by their abilities to sell, not by mastery of dialogue, suspense or plot. I know we all have to sell to survive, but writers first need something to sell and that something is the product of long and lonely hours–the very opposite of social.
On Sunday night, I launched a crowdfunding campaign on IndieGoGo, a site that provides a platform for small business owners, filmmakers, writers and others looking to launch and manage on online fundraising effort for their project.
It’s been a humbling 48 hours. As you can see from the following screen grab, we have plenty of “crowd,” but no “funding” yet. It stings a bit, but I want to share this stuff because there’s some good learning here that others looking for this kind of funding might benefit from.
This traffic report from IndieGoGo doesn’t indicate where the visitors are coming from, but I assume most of the views are the result of my promoting the “AdPulp Journalism Fund” on Twitter, Facebook and AdPulp.com. So, I have enough influence to drive people to click and consider, but I’m weak when it comes to motivating conversion.
Weak though I may be, I hope to improve and find new ways to go about raising money for AdPulp. One thing that occurs to me at this early stage is the need to go one-to-one with this ask. That means email, letter writing and in-person appeals. Somehow I need to establish a personal connection to the site for our most ardent supporters.
I want the campaign to work, and I want to learn what works and what does not. I also would love to see my paid email newsletter, “Hungry for Gumbo” take off. Right now, I have nine paid subscribers to the email. As you can see, it’s tough going, this path to the paid content mountaintop.
I’ve been invited to speak on the topic at GeekEnd in Boston in October. The title of my talk is “The Honeymoon Is Over And The Bill Is Due: Paid Content in 2012 And Beyond.” I’d like to be able to share a few personal success stories at that time, but I’m going to need to roll out some innovative new approaches in order to do that.
