Monday, October 7, 2002

Teddy Bush

I listened to some of President Bush's speech earlier this evening. It was good, even as his speeches go (he has outstanding speechwriters and doesn't go off script, like Clinton tended to do).

But the continuing mobilization for war continues to creep me out.

The real problem, I believe, is not weapons of mass destruction. Its the stories we tell ourselves. And by "we" I mean everybody. It is in pursuit of our stories that we use our weapons.

Stories are the basic format of human interest. They are what give us sports, business competition, romance and the evening news.

Every story has three elements: character, conflict and movement toward resolution. Subtract one and the story goes away. If your team is up by 20 points with three minutes left, the story's over, replaced by the race to get out of the parking lot.

The story after 9/11 was the War on Terrorism. We were the good guys (terribly wronged, and out for Justice), and Al Qaeda were the bad guys (terribly wrong, and out to end Civilization as we know it).

Then, after we liberated Afghanistan from Al Qaeda and the Taliban, our nemesis, Osama Bin Laden, was nowhere to be found. Alive or dead, he failed to oblige us with a character who was actually doing something in our story.

Without Osama to keep the story going, the War on Terrorism sagged in the ratings. We needed a new antagonist. Enter Saddam Hussein, the old antagonist who never went away.

I'm sure all the bad stuff President Bush says about Saddam is true. And I'm sure it all justifies going to war with Iraq to terminate his regime. But the whole thing fits the story format a little too snugly for me. The Saddam Problem showed up a little too quickly after the Osama Problem failed to resolve itself.

I'm also not comfortable with the national character President Bush's new National Security Strategy describes: one that speaks loudly and carries a big stick.

Making a big deal about being the world's biggest overdog tends to cast us as a natural antagonist in a lot of other people's stories. Nobody likes to root for the overdog. That's another problem with stories.

I gotta go, but I'll leave you with George Lakoff on the role of metaphor in the first Gulf War. Regardless of which side you take on this thing, it should make you think.

Introducing T-Commerce

Here's a deeply thoughtful piece by Rickard Linde. with lots of original ideas and just as many influences. Here's the allied blog, too.

MultiMarc

Marc Canter is holding a multimedia conversation over at his blog. Dig it.

Blog du jour

I'm digging Trial and Eror, by Alan Graham.

What's the Webcaster deal?

HR 5469 has passed. Here's Lou Josephs' take on it.

Not everybody is happy. Maybe nobody is happy. Yet. Still not clear.

Here's BlogCritics on one sticky issue. I've been getting emails on this issue and related subjects. Hard to triangulate in on what went on, or is still going on.

I will be writing about it, of course. There's just a major bandwidth issue right now for me.

Here's Mitch Ratcliffe on related legislation and issues.

And here is Kurt Hanson in RAIN.

From the mailbag...

Let's see... Here's LetGeneral Motors Destruction of California Transit Systems. Clear Channel's dominance of radio...

The mail forwarder ate my homework

It turns out that almost 1600 emails sent to one of my email addresses stopped coming to me on July 17. But they weren't lost. They just arrived.

So there's my excuse for not having responded to whatever it was.

Unfamous lasting words

Gary Turner is making a play to become blogging's Bartlett's.

Cheap sports

You gotta love the undershark

Nice backblog on from Ernest Miller at LawMeme on my Real Battle piece for Linux Journal. LawMeme and Donna Wentworth at Copyfight are both on the story, which is beginning to gather around Larry Lessig's current mission, playing Beowulf to Valenti's Grendel as he takes Eldred v. Ashcroft to the Supreme Court.

Here's the L.A. Times story from yesterday's paper. More background: The Cultural Anarchist vs. the Hollywood Police State, an outstanding feature that ran on September 22.

The big story, writ small

Michael Wolff in Mouse, Trapped, his latest This Media Life column in New York Magazine:

It may just be a matter of management priorities: Do you focus on share price, market reach, product quality, kicking ass, or, just as strategically, your own entrenchment? The challenge is to create a company that can't get rid of you, in which you can survive any mistake you make (and if what you care about first and foremost is your own continued existence, you're going to make a lot of mistakes), in which you are guaranteed to be the last living cockroach.

He's talking about Michael Eisner, whose greatest talent, we're all suddenly realizing, is for self-preservation. In the age of disposable corporate culture, he's made himself immortal by taking Disney hostage.

Wolff adds,

To understand the extent of his grasp, you have to look beyond the present mess to the larger mess. That is, since the acquisition of ABC seven years ago, or since the death of Frank Wells in 1994, or since the departure of Jeffrey Katzenberg six months later -- everybody has a favorite precipitating event -- Disney has been a weirder and weirder, more and more dysfunctional, bizarrely isolated place...

...he's stayed in power so long, and against so many unlikely odds, that nobody can imagine a world without him — it's this frustration of being stuck with him that's so infuriating to so many people. He's ingrained, omnipresent. Like Castro or Saddam. He's just a standard of evil (and when you're the standard of evil in Hollywood, that is really something).

And I'm suddenly realizing that this story of Eisner is also the story of Hollywood vs. the Internet — a campaign of paranoid entrenchment waged under the leadership of three generals: Jack Valenti of the MPAA, Hilary Rosen of the RIAA, and Eisner.

Valenti and Rosen run professional associations, which are like labor unions for suppliers. As with labor unions, their calling is not to follow market forces; but rather to oppose the ones that appear to threaten their jobs.

But Eisner doesn't run an association. He runs a company with a long history of forming and following market forces — a history that ended roughly when Eisner morphed from manager to mogul. Now his job is paranoid self-preservation, writ large. By fighting the Net, he fights his own marketplace.

He's still going to lose.

Truckin'

My body aches. After five days of hauling boxes and furniture around, my back is so stiff I can barely stand up. But I'm sitting in my office under the magnolia tree, watching dawn's light on the cliffs of Santa Cruz Island, which adds a jagged horizon to the roof of the house next door, which is the new one we actually own. We're renting this one. That one has a much better view. It was also built in the Thirties and needs serious work, which is why we're living here. It's even more complicated than that, but I'll spare you.

We're down to about 80 unopened boxes now, most of which (the ones that are mine) will have to wait. Tomorrow morning I leave for the Digital ID World Conference in Denver, and then to another event (details later, when I find the links) in Seattle. Then we start planning for the Linux Lunacy II Geek Cruise out of Ft. Lauderdale (to the Western Carribbean). I speak at all three.

I also believe there are still openings at the two I name. Check 'em out.