Category: Net Culture

Rather than call someone a wanker, why not…?

1) Have a long, slow, luxurious bath! Perhaps buy some expensive body lotions or bubble bath. Make sure it’s nice and hot and just sink into it!
2) Why not get a back-rub? If you’re that stressed, a calming back-rub can bring the smile right back to your face for a very reasonable fee.
3) Treat yourself to something small that you’ve never been able to justify buying before. Something like a CD or maybe some expensive hair products. It’s ok to be good to yourself. It really is…
4) Book a holiday! Aggression just slips away when you know you’ve got a holiday coming up. Think of the beaches, or the nightlife, or the food! Don’t you feel calmer already?
5) Why not go for lunch with an old friend? Old friends always like to catch up with each other – and all that chat will bring you right back to what’s really important! Don’t your problems seem small and insignificant now?
6) And if you can’t go out – why not get some wonderful food brought in! There are many glorious places to order food from in London. Just because you don’t have time to appreciate them, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have time to appreciate yourself!
7) Just take the afternoon off. Work’s not everything. Perhaps you’d feel better about things if you just got away from everything for a few hours.
8) A walk in a park is a wonderful way of valuing yourself more and might help you slow down. Smell the flowers! Look at the view! It’s not quite a holiday, but it’s a good thing to do every now and then…
9) Or perhaps you could have a picnic with friends? That’s several ideas all mixed together. And it’s bound to make you feel more content and relaxed….
10) And the easiest and simple way to make yourself feel better, and calmer and happier with the world? Just drink a few glasses of water, find somewhere peaceful and have a glorious relaxing afternoon nap…

So in a tiny room in the whitewashed lower-colon of London’s BBC Television Centre this evening I (and about ten or so other punters who work mostly on the BBC’s intranet) got to talk to and ask lots of questions of Chris Locke – of Cluetrain Manifesto / Rageboy infamy.
I have a whole raft of opinions about some of the stuff that was discussed this evening – some pertaining to my current job working with Greg Dyke’s culture-changers at the BBC – some pertaining to some of the casual references to honesty and complete openess in the workplace – and a lot to do with Chris Locke’s ideas about trusting people who work for you to work in the best way, letting the people who buy and use your products tell you what they’re for and what you’re doing wrong, actually empowering them and actually freeing them – because they’re going to be free soon enough anyway, and if you don’t get with the program, then someone else (the community itself) will. I have a nasty tense feeling down my spine that indicates that I’m horribly bastardising a lot of this. But it’s midnight and I’m tired.
Anyway – quite a lot of his ideas are based around the radical many-to-many communications and publishings of the internet that are resistant to hierarchy and let everyone have their say. But I think the sucesses of the internet that he describes develop specifically because it is a property of the internet that quality and usefulness self-promote. Good stuff is linked to. Good stuff is seen. Useful commentary is read.
This may seem like an obvious statement. But it’s really not. The hyperlink doesn’t only destroy hierarchy, it’s also the most profoundly powerful meme-spreading tool in existence. You have an idea – a concept – and suddenly anyone in the world can reference it. And if the meme is good and powerful, then it will replicate itself – it will self-propogate via a tiny mental tendril cyber-represented by a tiny piece of blue-underlined text. The idea in miniature, quasi-spreading. Anyway – the point is that such amazingly creative projects arise on the internet (and more importantly can be found on the internet) precisely because many many other projects are not as good. There is an immediate issue of quality of idea, quality of entertainment, quality of entertain- (or inform-) er.
This means the internet is immediately mediated and stratified. While everyone can communicate – everyone can say something, the interesting people rise to the top and form communities because they are good entertainers, meme spreaders, communicators etc. But the places where Chris is talking about introducing this culture don’t have a mechanism built into them which is as simple as the ‘hyperlink’, and they have additional communication abilities that can submerge interesting conversation, creative working, transformative processes under the person-to-person equivalents of trolling, spam and cracking. If such a transformative way of being is to emerge in the corporate culture space, then a gelling agent must be employed. A structural gelling agent. As ‘HTML’ is to the web, so the mechanisms of internal structure must frame free-wheeling experimentation and imaginative development.
In my experience on the net – as in business – there are a hell of a lot of people who haven’t got the slightest idea what they’re talking about and can’t even describe what it is they want to talk about that well. Listening to such people within your organisation voice their opinions doesn’t enhance your business any more than pretending to listen to them and nodding sagely and trying to make them feel valued would.
What’s needed is a mechanism that legitimately frees people from hierarchy by allowing the talented, skilled and imaginative operate as clump-formers – seed crystals that become impromptu centres of trust and creativity. Ideas of webs of trust, of individuals relating to one another and becoming friends of friends of friends, of creative enterprises which aren’t top-down governed or top-down selected – but are self-selecting for quality – these are the interesting ways to transform your business. And there’s an implicit structure there from the offset…
Appendix: Anyway right at the beginning of his talk, he said that there had been a reaction to something he said in one of his earlier lectures. And it was all about how to get webloggers involved in content creation for big companies like the BBC. And he mentioned that you could get in some of the better writers or people skilled in particular forms of content. And then he mentioned that they could be tremendously useful. And I sat there with a head full of questions – how would they be useful!? Which webloggers was he thinking of? But mostly I wondered if any weblogger really finds it easy to write in the same way in work as out. And I thought probably not – because when larger things are your responsibility other than the vague entertainment of twenty or so London-based-geeks, then you’ll probably get slightly more tense about how much of a fuckwit you look… Ends

Matt: gninrom doog.
Tom: ayeh
Matt: ?neht thgin tsal gnibbulc tuo og uoy did
Tom: sey
Matt: .keew gnol a neeb s’ti .derekcank gnikcuf .htimsremmah ot kcab tnew dna godtoh a tog i
Tom: elihw a rof decnad dna zratspop ot tnew ew
Matt: ?uoy fo ynam
Tom: ?yllaer
Matt: .skeew gnorw fo kcats elohw a dah ev’i
Tom: sdneirf rehto s’ovad fo elpuoc a dna em ,ovad ,nomis ,nai – wef a
Tom: kcul dab
Matt: ?yadot ot pu uoy era tahw ,os
Tom: .okraD einnoD dehctaw tsuj ev’I
Tom: .legnA dna yffuB hctaw thgim won kniht I dnA
Matt: .taht wonk t’nod i
Tom: .kniht, ti evol d’uoY .ti ees ot evah ouy hO
Matt: .raey fo emit siht ta lufituaeb s’ti yltnerappa .wek ot gniog tuoba gnikniht m’i hguohtla
Tom: ?haey
Tom: ?gnihtemos ro retal eivom a rof pu eb uoy dluoW
Matt: ?saedi yna .ees ot gniog er’uoy tahw sdneped
Matt: .noitaripsni rof kcuts etiuq gnileef ,syawla sa ,tub .oot dnekeew siht nwolcedispu na gnitirw eb ot desoppus m’i
Tom: .doog eb dluow ti dna flah dna ruoh na rof citats yalp dluoc yeht !seivom gnikcuf eht s’tI – tsirhC suseJ .smlif cificeps ees ot seivom eht ot og ylno ohw elpoep dnatsrednu t’nod yllaer I
Tom: ?leappa eseht fo yna
Matt: .looc os era srotca krow fo tuo .dnuora gnignah tsuj sruoloc tnereffid ni pu desserd elpoep .CBSH ni ertaeht teerts looc yllaer emos s’ereht yadot htimsremmah ni :yllatnedicni .gnihtemos ro tra ecnamrofrep emos saw ereht fi ebyam ro ,ot koob a daer dluoc i dna rethgil tib a saw ti fi ti referp d’i .gniht eno ylno gniod ot sruoh elpuoc a etacided ot drah tib a ti dnif i
Matt: .se htiw taht ees ot desimorp i tub ..xap’k
Tom: .gniyonna er’uoy dog
Tom: ?gro.gabcitsalp no siht tup I nac
Matt: .ekil uoy fi
Tom: .ekil I
Tom: ?retal klat .tib a rof etamtalf ees og ot evah I
Matt: ).semordnilap htiw dnuora gnikcum tsuj ,em dnim t’nod( ?”was i tac a ro rac a ti saw”
Matt: .puy
Tom: amanap ,lanac a ,nalp ,a nam a

Well of course the big news of the day is that although I’m not actually one of the people in this advert, at least I know a fair share of them [found here! oops!]. According to the advert they’re exactly the kind of people that are needed for the position of ‘sales executive’ for Teddington, they understand field sales and have a positive attitude and motivation. Whereas I was under the impression that they were a group of idle webloggers, many of whom have actual proper jobs, and who submitted their passport snaps to an impromptu online collection – little expecting that an unscrupulous newspaper advert designer might whip them off to white-passport-photo-slavery in [pron]AZZER-BUY-JAHN[/pron].

Let’s examine the advert from the top – I don’t know who they all are, but I can point you in the right direction for most of them. Firstly is the redoubtable Davo who is leaving us shortly for Noozleland, then comes Graybo who we are reliably informed by a huge thick arrow has a vibrant personality and lots of confidence (despite appearing to be grimly sitting through a particularly implausible and depressing European art-house movie), then there is a clown – which can only be Mo Morgan during one of his summer holiday educational breaks which he spends in clown drag helping misanthropic Irish children to avoid becoming misanthropic old bastards who work for the government. Beneath him is the well-known poet, homosexual and long-dead fop Oscar Wilde, then there’s the beautiful Meg Pickard who seems entirely unthrilled about the whole affair over on her site (‘in with anger, out with love’), a substantially younger-than-he-is-today Nick Jordan and finally an out-of-work actor who I imagine probably pays the bills ocasionally by getting stints as ‘third homicidal maniac’ in Crimewatch reconstructions.

It’s KPMG-link time all over again. Only this time, we’re talking about Starbucks. In a piece published at Backwash.com, it appears that a man who posted a link to the coffee company about how good Starbucks coffee was has been hit with a cease-and-desist, and been asked to remove said link forthwith. Last time with KPMG I encouraged everyone in the world to link to them immediately. They’re an internet business, and so susceptible to looking like an idiot online. With Starbucks, however, it’s a little more insidious. We really don’t want to give them any more publicity. So I’m thinking a different approach this time…

So link to sites that say that they hate Starbucks. Link to articles that explain how crappy they are. And how they’re putting people out of business. Link to No Logo‘s discussions of clustering corporate culture. Spread the meme everywhere you can. But don’t link to Starbucks because….. ooooh scary…. they really don’t like that. [PS – don’t bother linking to Starbucks Sucks because I think it’s been co-opted by the man!]

Is hyperlinking free? Can you link to whomsoever you wish? According to KPMG, apparently not! Chris Raettig received this e-mail a couple of days ago, asking him to remove the link to their site as they didn’t have a ‘formal agreement’ that he could do so. The very basis of the World Wide Web is challenged by such legal claims – being asked not to link to someone else’s site compromises your ability to comment upon and reference online material. And if you can be legally challenged simply for linking to someone, then every link must be legally suspect – a ‘fact’ which could cripple the free flow of information as it would affect all sites – from news portals to search engines! So I’m asking you today, in the defence of online freedoms, to link to KPMG today. Say nothing libellous, but feel free to be snarky about them…

Because of this thread on Barbelith, I’ve suddenly become extremely politicised on the whole “Smart Tags” debate. There’s more information over at Glassdog and you’ll notice that I’ve added a button to the right hand side of the page to stir up trouble with.

For any of you that are unclear about Smart Tags – basically the new Windows XP operating system and IE6 include this feature so that Microsoft and it’s friends can insert links into every webpage that you visit if you use their browser. Every instance of ‘bookstore’ will link through to some grubby little money-making e-commerce site which is prepared to give Microsoft a sizeable amount of cash. This is a completely invasive practice. To start off with – does a link represent a tacit endorsement? At the moment, certainly. I control who I link to on plasticbag.org and the day that you can’t tell my recommendations from those of the corporate overmind is the day that I shut the site down. But it’s also not good for consumers or users or visitors – because their choice of destination is immediately limited by a huge skewing of the playing field. In fact the only beneficiary from such an action with be Microsoft itself – and frankly they have more than enough money already. Fight this one, people.

Imagine, if you will, a healthy body. Now introduce two types of foreign elements – lets say bacteria and viruses. I’m now going to bastardise their life-cycles horribly. Bear with me.

Viruses need to spread to other bodies before either the immune response of the body finds and kills them, or before they kill the body and are trapped within it – but whatever their evolutionary strategy, they cause damage to the organism concerned. Bacteria on the other hand are more varied beasts. Some bacteria are horribly damaging and can kill creatures, while others have formed symbiotic relationships with their hosts, and can fulfill such functions as aiding digestion. The latter form of bacteria may have an evolutionary advantage over the former, as will the organism that they inhabit.

Now imagine that we are not talking about organisms and their genomes, but instead ideas – memes. Let’s pretend that the body is a huge and highly fertile environment for memes – the internet. And now let’s consider analogies between e-commerce ventures (dot.coms) and the two bastardised life-cycles I have described previously.

The internet was essentially an environment free from commercial ventures until six or seven years ago, but when the memes were introduced, they flourished immediately. The question for many people was what would these memes do to their host? Would they act in a viral fashion – spreading themselves and gradually damaging it, or destroying it (leaving no room for other memes and leaving an interesting discussion about whether the memes would survive a leap into a still other form of quasi-organism), or would they become the grist that aided the internet’s development – gave it an advantage to flourish and develop.

Interestingly enough, for the last couple of years, no one really discussed the possibility that they might simply lose the evolutionary struggle under pressure from hundreds of thousands of millions of other memes born directly from the internet itself:

The Museum of E-Failure
“We call this digital compast heap “The E-Failure Museum” – a multi-megabyte collection of screen capture files documenting the home pages of 120 commercial Web sites that didn’t make it.”

A List Apart confronts the current ‘crisis’ in the web creative industry in the US. The effects of the recent down-turn in dot-com fortunes has yet to hit the UK with quite as much force as it has in the US, although each week another dire e-commerce venture sinks vaingloriously beneath the mire (with a silent chirp of ‘yes!’ from me).

The situation in Europe and the UK is of course very different from that in the US – the UK has had the benefit of watching the US and either following in its wake or slowing down. When I went to Los Angeles last March I was astonished by the amount of web-based ventures advertising on television and advertising all over the place. That level of hysteria has never quite been replicated over here. Also, one of the benefits of the trans-atlantic delay is that many companies who got two years of funding are not going to run out of it, quite yet (give it another three months). And why? Because they got the funding after their American compatriots.

The rest of Europe is another case again. Some countries (Spain for one) have yet to invest heavily in the net, and so have the whole boom and bust to come – albeit probably with a certain degree of awareness of how America responded to it. It will be, by all accounts, a much less dramatic endeavour.

Which is of course why our esteemed prolific can say (which such ease and peace in her heart):

“Crisis? Wot crisis? Plenty of work here in the Netherlands, no sign of a slump. Our company is small, has longstanding clients. We will be merging with another smallish company that also has solid clients. Neither company ever had to rely on ‘VC’ money.”
“There are 180,000 jobs unfilled in the Netherlands. I’m not worried. I’m lucky. At last.”