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On me watching Porky’s

June 19, 2011 / posted in Business, images of being-human, universal nothing / No Comments

I wonder what its like to live a life where you want the world to end. Where you want to put a stop to all sadness or happiness. Every few years you hear rumors that everything will stop — that we are out of control and beyond all reason.

And what must that be like, to be so disappointed?

I’m sure the little things are alright. I am sure that you can still pet your dog, or glance out your side window while driving and see a beautiful bird in mid-flap, soaring by you. I am sure your lunch still tastes good. And that it’s nice to take your shoes off and lay in bed. Plus you can still look forward to orgasms… But to lose your belief, to lose some fundamental faith? What must that be like? And then, why even get up in the morning? Why even stay sober?

It must be disappointing when, like the day after your 10th birthday, you get up and life goes on. Mornings are still foggy. People still stop at starbucks on their way to work, and they don’t seem to care that the sky has fallen, and shown its skeleton — and that there’s nothing there. Only you see it. Nothing left at all. Nothing.

I don’t think that I have a problem with this. But I think some people do. In thirty years, where will I be? I’ve seen now that the super-geniuses can grasp and implement like nothing else. And while it’s magical when that happens, ITS FUCKING REAL. I suppose my fault was that I thought I would always make typos and have to test functions that I just wrote. But the fact of the matter is, everything is well within grasp and it seems the only thing stopping anyone is my own lack of focus. I must have wasted 3 hours just walking in circles imaginging lines of code that I was too tired to write. But it’s all right there, within grasp. The time taken to write anything is well less than the time taken to decide what it is you want to write.

one thing I don’t get is why anyone gets out of bed. about 7 or 8 years ago… I suppose I found my answer. I want to keep things going, keep things interesting… I want to do the things I do because that’s the best way to keep challenged. It’s a play-dough world. But what if you didn’t think it mattered, that nothing was worth doing or that your job was horrible and that was the best you could do?

I can’t imagine what that must be. I can’t imagine what it must be to be the downtrodden of the earth, to be the remnants of something else. To always be 5 minutes off. I mean, there isn’t any perfection. It’s all shit. We’re all lego pieces, stuff that we have lying around that we use as best we can. There’s nothing inherently good or bad about anything. We just have the morals we have because that’s part of the challenge. That’s part of the picture. And even if there isn’t a picture it’s just part of who you are.

Sometimes I don’t understand myself. I think I lost something within the last few months, or maybe a year or two ago, and I just didn’t notice. In a way though, once you touch upon it, there’s really nothing there. You’re standing on your own two feet. And while the mirror of other people’s faces is your own mirror — when they dance or wonder — you respond… so the puppetshow is alive and well, but that’s not what I had thought would be there. It’s like how in the process of learning chess the board will get so big, and other times get so small. It’s a matter of what’s in the box. And yet in the end, you need desire. I can’t account for that. Can you? Men and women greedy in different ways — and need to be greedy in different ways. You need to have unfathomable connections to things like volcanos, unicorns and the bottom of the ocean. And I guess that’s the only way to walk under a continually shattering sky.

Losing faith isn’t like anything actually changes, it’s more like finding yourself in the wrong parallel universe. We’re just sort of trapped in between slides of ourselves. And then when like at the end of a sonata we have the recapitulation, we return home and find out that it’s incomplete, and not right.

You know I hate Lord of the Rings. But that’s Frodo coming home. He’s left and returned to the physical location but unlike Dorothy he can’t go home.

Because there isn’t a home for him anymore.

At times like this, I suppose we need to be the brave travelers of the world. We have to be the sundry spirits of Xanadu or some kind of nonsense like that. the alchemist, whatever. Alchemy is a matter of spirit, a matter of individual transcendence… but that’s the same kind of psychotic misalignment those mediveal alchemists had — they mistook spirit for something physical. Iimagine Rene Descartes or some such philosopher digging through corpses looking for the seat of the soul. And yet all they find is more fibroblasts. Blood, collagen. What does this seat even look like? Madmen have searched through hundreds of dead bodies, eagerly cutting into the dead criminals looking for something they know not what.

That’s the wonder of Star Trek you know. They are messages in a bottle zipping around a deadly serious and completely apersonal universe being hysterical about themselves. I’m sure Herman Hesse’s Stepphenwolf is laughing Mozart right now. That sounds about right. So many directions I can go in! All of them amount to sand though. It’s your own trip. And beneath that, is more of your own trip. That you have a trip, or that you don’t have one. It’s so meta it’s the next Hipster Kitty.

But at the same time it’s like, you can do something about it. so why not “go green” or whatever. Save the Earth! Or fuck the Earth, the Earth can take care of itself lets just drive our cars around and be stupid, cuz that’s the most fun. I really look around and see nothing but that, and I despise it. All those commercials on tv, where everyone just parties and parties. Cuz I guess only so many of us sit in an office, so only so many of us get that — but everyone, and anyone can and should party.

Pointless.

but I guess I prefer to sit in my room and listen to music and stare at my navel. That’s what I did today. And oh, sometimes I crammed small bits of electronic material ushered carefully down fragile tubes to generate more fragile “documents” so as to appease people who were convinced by me (mostly) to pay us hundreds of dollars, if not thousands, to have.

It sounds kind of goofy but that’s only until you realize that it’s not like the money matters either.

This is what ppl do when they have too much time on their hands.

This is what i do.

See what happens when I watch 80s high school comedies about getting laid? I guess this is the same thing. Me laughing at some guy’s penis stuck in the wrong place.

from Social to Universal, what comes after a Monetized Economy?

April 29, 2011 / posted in Business, images of being-human, life as we know it, rational choice theory and homo economicus, rules, Uncategorized, utility / No Comments

I’ve written about the failure of our economic models to account for our happiness and welfare in the work place. I want to go into a little more detail about what an alternative view for our society might look like post-money, but first, some more general news about the failure of our economic models to register real value outside of the work place in terms of the Global Economy.

 

Current Opinion from some Economists today…

…expresses a criticism of the FED. At the Roosevelt Institute there recently was a panel on the Future of the Federal Reserve, a large debate surrounding the current actions and criticisms of the Federal Reserve as well as panel talks about the FED’s current program, the so called QE2 which is scheduled to be halted by June of this year without a clear date (or even plans) for a better and more effective QE3.

It seems that the general consensus agreed upon by everyone except the Fed and the government is that QE2 was in fact too conservative to be a success and was in fact a failure. QE2 did not generate the jobs people hoped for nor did it spark the economy with low interest rates.

The FED becomes an easy target in current debates as to why the economy is at risk as to why haven’t job growth happened and who is to blame. I am not an economist, so I will spare you the details, but I am very interested in the subject. If anything, we are plagued by a systematic failure of the existing financial infrastructure. The problem comes from huge debt. In order to handle many of the national and international debts that are due this year entire nations will have to get debt financing. The question, of course, is who do they get it from?

If the government that prints money has no money to pay for its debt, then who does it?

The current bailout situations and the burst of that financial bubble earlier in 2008-9 resulted in monetizing private debt as public debt. A short term solution seems to be simply to do the same thing again. If that happens, loser in these transactions will be individuals who have saved up money. It will eat away at the savings of the American public — in fact of the rest of the world since the US dollar is known as “reserve currency” meaning that people in other countries will use the US dollar to transact business because their own government’s money is not considered stable enough. In fact, China has the largest amount of US currency in reserve, totalling an astounding 3 trillion dollars.

But of course, decisions the FED stem directly from situations here in the U.S. and not of the rest of the world.

This might stave off the problem for another time, but the debt problem persists. Interest rates will mount and at some future point an even larger debt will be incurred, things time with our public economy and our private savings exhausted… our credit exhausted…

So what is the solution?

If you are not sure if you can trust the reserve currency, the idea is to switch to a currency you CAN trust. In this case, GOLD and SILVER. SO you see that the price of gold is to break $1,600 for a troy ounce by the end of 2011. Additionally companies that mine metals are a desired commodity as well as indicated by China’s repeated bids to buy foreign mining and farming companies. In fact there are rumored talks among some of China’s officials to reinvest their U.S. Currency into Gold.

So why aren’t U.S. officials fazed? Everyone’s doing the same dance right now — everyone’s still using U.S. currency. At some point there needs to be an exit strategy. According to Max Keiser, Goldman-Sachs officials have started sipon money from the stock market into commodities and alternative currencies. One such online company, Zynga, wildly successful for its which had made a move last year in Oct 2010 to create its own currency. With the investment of Goldman-Sachs officials, the Fed is investigating the matter. According to Keiser though, Goldman-Sachs is siphoning money from Wall Street all the while keeping the bubble of pricing up through the use of computers that trade. One of his evidences despite the Dow’s recent record high even in this bad economy stems from the drop in VOLUME even while the PRICE is high. The idea being that the unwitting American shareholder will be left holding the worthless shares when this new bubble bursts.

 

Holding the bag means holding… what?

So my judgmental sentiments aside, it seems that when the economy “downsizes” in value because of inflation — because the monetization of our economy creates excess value, value based on speculation of the future value of money — the system will implode. Much of this is doom and gloom. One fair indicator of when this will happen in the near future is the fall of the United States as an economic power — passing its economic torch to its largest landowner, China as soon as 2016 according to Chris Martenson.

This of course may not happen, 2016 still is over one presidential term away, and who knows maybe Bernanke will wisen up and the Financial overlords that bombed a 65 trillion dollar world economy to personally make for themselves a few million will find themselves in jail…

But if that doesn’t happen, there’s a good chance that we homo sapiens will have to reorganize into a new resource distribution system. Doubtlessly, this will involve money, as people have always had money, but it may not involve capital as the primary exchange for labor.

This is a little beyond the scope of this post, but it’s perhaps important to note that democratization of private industries is not the key to establishing a more free society.  The logic of freedom, as Zizek put it eloquently:

the key to actual freedom resides in the “apolitical” network of social relations, from the market to the family. Here the change required is not political reform but a transformation of the social relations of production—which entails precisely revolutionary class struggle rather than democratic elections or any other “political” measure in the narrow sense of the term. We do not vote on who owns what, or about relations in the factory, and so on — such matters remain outside the sphere of the political, and it is illusory to expect that one will effectively change things by “extending” democracy into the economic sphere (by, say, reorganizing the banks to place them under popular control). Radical changes in this domain need to be made outside the sphere of legal “rights.” In “democratic” procedures (which, of course, can have a positive role to play), no matter how radical our anti-capitalism, solutions are sought solely through those democratic mechanisms which themselves form part of the apparatuses of the “bourgeois” state that guarantees the undisturbed reproduction of capital.

He continues on here, citing how violence is the inescapable and inevitable truth of the States’ impotence, and that extending the logic of the state into new regimes is a needless production of the same. So rather than dwell in violence and democracy, let us instead move back into the apolitical communities where most of us are heavily invested and are infact, as American sitcoms like to show us, largely apolitical.

There are perhaps an infinite number of possibilities but I will cover only one form, Peer to Peer Networks, which, instead of being an extension of state democracy, or state anything, rather is an extension of the communal commons “space” by which most of us interact anyway… (even if it’s not recognized by our current global the economy as such.)

 

Introducing Peer to Peer Networks

The rosey scenario of so called Peer to Peer Networks comes from a computer analogy but it carries with it a sociological ideology of individuals interacting as individuals and not through the manifests of corporations. Peer to Peer interaction gets a great deal of exploration through P2P Foundation, a utopian organization that seeks to explore the very real possibility of a new form of distribution closer to the maxim ‘think global, act local’ in which interested individuals interact with one another in mutually beneficial ways. If you think this is radically different from Homo Economius, you’re absolutely right. This organization tends towards the touchy-feely-poetics but one article likens the difference between spiritual self-suifficiency vs interdependent interbeiningness via “spiritual collectives” vs “gurus” with the emphasis on collectives as being more wholesome since we are socially interconnected.

There is much to be said and in my opinion (not said) about how P2P is beneficial but as presented here, the impetus is to take a larger view of who we are as human beings and offer a human solution rather than one concocted through the confines of “Rational Choice Theory“. The thinker I would like to cite for this line of thought is Hazel Henderson.

Henderson is a grown-up hippie. Her main attack on the economy today stems from what she sees as two critiques:

  • Seeing monetary exchange as the only meaningful measurement of production
  • understanding human beings as theoritical economic creatures that seek only to maximize utility and reduce cost

    • She points out of course, that people are not so perfectly greedy, although greed is a part of who we are… and that over half of all the meaningful production occurs through the work of women. The PTA meetings, the cooking, the cleaning, even helping your neighbor paint their house on the weekend — these are meaningful acts of production that are not measured in any form of monetary exchange. Likewise, for her, financial instruments whose only purpose is to change a tax status or promote speculation is not a meaningful act of production, although it carries with it a monetary cost. Many of the ‘goods’ we enjoy, like the environment, likewise cannot be monetized, valued or taken into the consideration as a cost inherent in any kind of business plan. As such, the environment is generally worthless and meaningless according to economic theory. Also, our hanging onto the notion of GDP as a meaningful measurement of economic health makes no sense, especially since new cars may be exchanged between two countries and then counted as GDP for both countries.  Structurally her critique means a few things:

    • Money fails as an indicator of meaning since it fails to objectively capture what we value
    • On the producer side, a variety of interactions exist without any consideration of money (they are valueless, even if those behaviors maintain the quality of life for all)

    Our attempt to organize our society around economic theories of value is a terrible thing, resulting in incredible amounts of waste and human misery. We work too long to support those we love who we never see because we have to work.  An extensive video of hers can be found here: The Alternative Economy of Hazel Henderson.

    If you are like me, then I apologize, because the only thing I find somewhat grating is that she calls it the “Love Economy”. All the same, her suggestion is not to remove money, but to de-center it.  Instead of money, we would find meaningful metrics in the healthiness of society through several different axises which are not tied to the market.  She cites thirteen separate axises of human need.  For instance, the quality of clean air will be measured by environmental engineers on a scale relevant to their industry, not to a dollar value which can then be compared to other monetized “goods” and found to be more or less valuable than other goods as an ‘objective’ dollar amount.

    The Love Economy however, is just one expression of P2P. In the larger picture, the Love Economy stems from a trying to arrange society in order to maximize it values, something which is largely impossible to maintain if you hold that the only value is the collection of money.

    This would mean the end of the cost-benefit analysis and ROI for decision making. (If you would like to glance a governmental body of text related to the work I do on a daily basis for businesses, take a peek: Cost Benefit Analysis for Americans with Disabilities Act 2010, in particular “side transfer for water closets 602.3”.) Even if this text puts you off, I am afraid most of us would not be able to function without these kinds of “objective” guidelines.  How would managers or committees decide any course of action without a financial basis to limit and define meaningful activity?

    It’s most likely too, that the destruction of money as the primary signifier/coupler/de-/re-territorialisating agent will signal the end of corporations. The injunction of corporations as legal entities that benefits key players in the corporate hierarchy must end.  Corporations as entities of ownership and resource control were seen by Marx as a form of communism and collective ownership, but modern corporations are concentrations of wealth and power in the hands of a relative few:  I forget where I heard this but something like the top 34 corporations in the world have more GDP than all but the top 8 countries, of which the corporations are “members of”, but you can imagine how long that would last, especially with a weakened US dollar.  As reported by Lenin’s Tomb this class struggle is comparable to what’s happening in other countries like the middle east because it’s a class struggle, even if the stakes are somewhat different.  If corporations throw their weight around, of course local governments that can’t follow them need to provide conditions for those corporations such that a corporation will understand that it makes monetary sense for them to stay.  This is perhaps ironic for those of us living in the United States, as our material wealth in the 50s – 90s had come from corporation’s exploitation and the oppression of other nations for the US’s material interests, as pointed out by Keith Hart.

    But now that the corporations have become increasingly powerful in a global economy, they have the option of forcing by design or accident local changes to their favor.  It’s not too far off then, that Corporations can be considered the dominant species on the planet.

     

    from Social to Universal in a Global Economy

    Given such a dramatic statement, for us individuals to understand our place in the world we cannot rely on simply being just a citizen of a nation or a worker inside another corporation.  We have to understand our role as producers and consumers, first and foremost (since that is how we meaningfully interact with a value-system of money).  This switch from citizen to consumer/producer fuels much of the current revolution in Search Engine Optimization.  Most of the industry is still mulling over how social networking influences online presence.

    Online presence includes all the online discussion in the 3rd dimension of consumer to consumer (the first being business to consumer and the second being consumer to business).  The freedom of information on the internet has eliminated the days when corporations had control over their timely product unveilings, or their press releases.  The internet has allowed companies to have a better feedback of what works for their customers and what doesn’t.  Since the speed of information is so much faster, companies need to release products that aren’t perfected in order to remain competitive or deal with informal press releases better.  Both Apple and Coke have proven adept at providing expression as their main marketing maneuver rather than the more traditional marketing which aims at offering consumers impressions.  The influx of twitters and facebook “likes” and “shares” have proven to have an increasingly huge but causally unclear influence on search engine ranking.  Already all the major SEO companies have begun to recognize that in good marketing relationships with customers online, your cusomters produce your best (and worse) content.  More often than not, relationship building online and instantaneous information flow has allowed each of us to become both consumer and producer.

    Which brings me to back to the original point, the producer-consumer dichotomy. One interesting point, among others, that came from an interview with Rachel Botsman came from her observation that we generally think of ourselves as citizens only, or first. That kind of view will need to change in the near future when we have to reorient ourselves as simply participants. In a peer to peer economy, we will be both consumer and producer, not just consumer. We will be directly responsible for our individual interaction and participation as to how resources are transacted. Her example is eBay, in which strangers can participate on equal footing for remote merchandise that is bought without examination.

    The philosophical implications of this are many.  The internet has provided a new objective, recordable voting mechanism for companies to be ranked even before consumers open their wallet to “vote” in economic transactions.  A blogger can collect a valuable audience which then becomes an asset to marketers.  Facebook is an extremely intelligent implementation of this kind of collection of information, perhaps one that rivals even Google, with it’s long term information hoarding.  This kind of objective interaction with the Other verges on an interaction with the Universal.

    Arguably this kind of dichotomy was marked by the first modern cosmopolitian philosopher, Hegel.  Hegel reverses the formalism of Kant by extending Kant beyond subjectivity and as Zizek says, Subjectivising substance devoid of content.  By the imposition of his dialectical process, Hegel reaches the notion of the Universal, garnishing a multitudinous rambling along the way.  Any contemporary philosopher who seeks to tackle the universal must address Hegel, even if it’s by avoiding the Hegelian Dialectic method.

    The most traditional conception of the universal is best expressed through Lacan’s (read Zizek’s) Real in which madness, phantasms and partial objects cannot cohere into a meaningful subject.  Is this rhetorically not the perfect analogy to describe the unlinked disorder of the internet where we reach 404 and partial hits on keywords — such as when I search for one word and get something completely different that I click on?  I don’t want to go into schizoanalysis or anything like that.  Rather I want to point out that our relationship with the universal, especially as monitored through the internet is mediated by a direct attempt by a corporatized other to impose universality on each of us small others through a medley of law (and other paranoiac applications).  Whether this be through the paranoid discourse of the state (legality) or through the internet’s opposing hysteria as expressed through Bing’s initial video campagin today we have the increased injunction from the Other Enjoy! and Obey! simultaneously.

    This is not a new injunction.  I won’t blame this on Hegel, but increasingly in an more ethnic world with global trade, everything becomes relevant for examination — starting with culture and human rights and ending with intellectual property and intangible costs.

    Overlawyered.com‘s author, Walter Olson has written extensively about how the legal system has developed into the political monstrosity it exists as today.   Apparently attorneys before law school were more pragmatic, trained on their job in apprenticeships.  After law school invoked a liberal agenda to use the legal system to argue for change, everything became a matter of litigation — what was perhaps previously a personal dispute between you and your boss now became a matter of employee and employer for all to bear witness to.  Increasingly individual concerns have become scrutinized, first through totalitarian states like Stalin and Maoist Communisms, but more recently in the overlawyered culture that exists today — anyone can sue anyone for anything, right or wrong.  The influx of attorneys qua politicians (up to 30% or 40% of politicians are attorneys, I believe) comes from the desire to use the court room as a place to change law, which it isn’t supposed to be.  Legislation is supposed to change laws.

    Anyway, in many ways, the injection of the internet into the intermix of what is accountable (accidential emails, even blogging about belly dancing can ruin a divorce settlement).  This kind of dissemination of all aspects of human life even a humorous but somewhat mostly true guide on how to live with your philosopher-relative or life-partner becomes fodder for the voracious paranoia (followed by aimless surfing/hysteria) leaving footprints of human desire and meaning objectified even if this wealth of information doesn’t lend itself directly to meaning.

    Don’t get me wrong, participation in the world is definitively more meaningful than retracting into rigid rationalism, i.e., Hegel is more relevant than Kant, who can’t even leave his house without a God as a universal-guideline.  After all, isn’t that what WW2 showed Sartre?  Young Sartre stopped writing so much and took his place as a public intellectual, held himself accountable for his actions and attempted to take his message of humanism and authenticity in the face of an ever-growing global economy of maginalization and monetization of human meaning.  After all, old Sartre knew that meaning was in social interaction not in transactions.

    Social interactions is something people complain about losing, in an environment with too many people, when we can be alone in a city of one or fifty million people.  Companies are finding out that we got choices — as with any sales person today has to answer to each of their clients: “Why should we buy from you?”

    Just like companies are discovering that collecting Facebook shares and re-tweets is the truest indicator of actual meaning.  And that meaningful relationship will lead to trust, reliance and transactions.  Given this article, that social networking produces the same chemicals falling in love, perhaps I should rescind my statement — that love economy isn’t so far off…. only perhaps “economy” is outdated.

    Perhaps we should call it the love network.

    Meaning at Work, or Why utility is a prori only to itself

    March 27, 2011 / posted in Business, images of being-human, life as we know it, utility / 8 Comments

    When I was growing up, my parents presented me with a life path.  It went something like this:

    1. Go to public school
    2. Go to College
    3. Get a job
    4. Get married and buy a house
    5. Have kids
    6. Work until your kids have left home
    7. Work until you retire
    8. ????

    I asked them, what’s the point of that?  They didn’t have much to say, I’m not sure why, but their basic argument was to say, well, look at us.  We are doing it and it’s fine. (Ironic perhaps, but they are at step 8 now, and the four question marks seem to loom over them everyday…. such that they still have no answer.)

    But at the time, being something like, 10 years old, I didn’t have much to say.   I’m not going to fight-club my way through this, but I will mention that this post will survey a growing trend that I have noticed across different areas of our online media, that of where meaning and work inter-relate.  After all, even if you don’t follow the schema above, if you wish to be “standing on your own two feet” you’re going to have to contribute to society in a meaningful way.

    Contribution doesn’t always mean being paid but it does mean earning a living somehow and not soaking up someone else’s resources.

    But that’s the catch isn’t, it?  I mean, how I defined the problem: in a meaningful way. That’s problematic.

    If you’re on the blogosphere reading this post written in American English, most likely you’re in the upper part of the Global Economy.  Not necessarily at a leadership position, but certainly in the upper stratas of the global-economy.  So you think of the world in terms of $$$$ in terms of capitalism.  How does meaning fit in?

    After all that’s what this blog is about: Meaning.  In particular:

     

    Meaning in the Workplace

    I’d like to cite an article first written by Tammy Erickson.  You can find the article in the Harvard Business Review Blogs.  The article is titled: Meaning is the New Money, although the url suggests an earlier title was about challenging deeply held something… (probably belief?)  To sum this article: Erickson challenges the common belief about what best holds us together as a work-force when we work at a job.  For instance, my parents suggested that I do something I like.  What I like, like many teenagers, had nothing to do with earning money because it was pretty much focused on pleasing myself.  And no one will pay me to do things that please me.

    So while many of us like money, working a job to make money isn’t something (I hope) most of us have to do.  What my parents meant is that we should do something for a living that we at least enjoy.  If you think about it, most of us spend more time with our coworkers in a week than with our loved ones, at least during our waking hours.  That’s kind of a sad thought.  All those turn-key children.  Left alone without guidance from parents who slave away….

    No, Erickson argues that we all need meaning in our jobs, we all need to be energized by what we do, to believe that it matters.  Here’s a compelling quote:

    My research has clearly shown that high levels of engagement, and the associated discretionary effort, occur when our work experiences reflect a clear set of values that we share. For many today, meaning is the new money. It’s what people are looking for at work. Clear company values, translated into the day-to-day work experience, are one of the strongest drivers of an engaged workforce, one primed for successful collaboration.

    Now if that doesn’t convince you read, or at least skim, the article I don’t know what will!

    Isn’t what all the corporate magazines talk about?  Team-building a corporate culture with a cohesive message so everyone is on the same page, working happily towards a shared goal?

    So now, if I get this right — companies not only need to produce more value for their customers than it costs (monetarily) to produce that good or service — they also need to produce meaning for their workforce so that their employees are on board the project too… not just as a wage earner, but with a clear vision and focus as to how their work at the company is meaningful and helps others in the long run.

    Sounds like managers also need to become teachers!  And CMOs and CEOs need to be philosophers!  So then, if I take this article literally, business organizations need not only a clear cash flow that makes fiscal sense for them to operate and survive business cycles, but also that businesses need a clear pedagogical skeleton so that the message is disseminated from the philosopher-CEOs and COOs and CFOs that drive a business towards its strategic goals.

    Certainly many of the more successful corporations that have exploded since their founding today have that clear mission and vision of the kind of company they want to be.  But besides the issue of meaning, what else is at stake?

    What happens when we lose meaning?

     

    The Great Depression of the early 21st Century

    Certainly in our current lifestyle, we find ourselves amid a “Great Depression” comparable to the many depressions in the earlier part of the 20th and latter part of the 19th century… For instance, Detroit basically has 50% unemployment (from World Socialist Website via Jodi Dean, here: The Depopulation of Detroit).  If we take Detroit as a sintome of our current employment life, what does that entail?

    The issue as I see it has less to do with what happens if we get meaning back in our life, but what happens if we lose it.  If we treat our jobs as vehicles for money, which is how we might traditionally look at our job, we end up in a completely different kind of “depression”.

    From the Socialist Worker via Jodi Dean, we get an interview of Alex Callinicos called Capitalism’s Crisis.  This Callinicos hails from a Marxist view of what has traditionally been seen as a deficit on the part of laborers.  I’m not a big Marx expert, or even fan, but I do find him useful.  The idea is that the surplus value of a laborers’ only real commodity (his time, energy and life-force) is where capitalists make their profit.  The crisis of capitalism that Callinicos refers to is the end of capitalist profit.  I don’t want to talk about capitalism too much here as a system, but the basic idea is that as long as capitalism is profitable that profit can be spread among everyone (albeit unevenly).  When that profit stream dries up, it needs to get its $$$ from somewhere, so Callinicos talks about how it is going to try and take more of it from its working class by deducing wages or benefits.

    So the lack of jobs that say, Detroit faces (along with the rest of us) also stems from the lack of profit that is to be had (eating up all our equity from our finance instruments circa 1980 to mid-2000s).  By the way, Alex Callinicos also wrote a book called Against Postmodernism which I read trying to figure out what Postmodernism was.  I was an undergrad at the time, and frankly, my first attempt to grasp what he was saying resulted in a huge fail.

    But in any case, if Callinicos is correct, then our current recession is actually a depression.  And as such, it is unlike the depression resulting from the speculative crashes in 1929 — this depression is actually a crisis in the logic of capitalism.  If the system of economic redistribution is no longer adequate to redistribute… meaning or money or whatever it distributes, then it has failed us.  To quote Callinicos,

    The great Russian revolutionary Lenin said there’s never a really hopeless situation for capitalism as long as workers allow it to survive.

    Sooner or later the system can recover from any crisis. It would be difficult for it to return to the pattern of the recent past, as the financial system has been seriously weakened.

    While the slump continues, it’s important to see that it’s uneven. One section of the system, the historical core in North America and most of Europe, is still quite depressed.

    But if we look at China and the economies associated with it, which include Germany and Brazil, they are growing quite quickly.

    This reflects the way in which the Chinese state threw everything into preventing a protracted economic slump.

    The fact that this bit of the system is growing is a further destabilising factor, however.

    It produces tensions between the US as the dominant capitalist power, and China—increasingly seen as the major challenger. That makes it harder to manage capitalism.

    But even if they do find a way of muddling through, what produced the crisis was the logic of capitalism and the system—a system that is driven by blind competition in pursuit of profit.

    That system will continue to produce crises and continue to try to solve them at the expense of working people and the poor.

    So the only real guarantee of escaping crises like this one is to get rid of capitalism altogether.  That may not be a bad idea, but it also may not be necessary.  Callinicos seems to adhere to Marx to understand what Capitalism is… but you should also understand that Marx himself did not really see capitalism as a horrible system.  Faulty, to be sure, but not without its merits.

    Nonetheless, we can take this Callinico’s call to action a step further.  Richard Seymour, author of the blog Lenin’s Tomb, in an article titled Towards a new Model Commune critiques the basic segmentation that happens in capitalist culture — the organization of the workforce, the regulation of our 9-5, the unthinking box each of us puts herself in when we think, oh I should get another job, often with a helpless conviction that there is in fact no other way for one to live…. that we cannot effect a change in the larger system because I’m just one poor little me!  What can I do? The question then comes as a parallax reversal of JFK’s statement, we should not live for our system — we should ask that our systems live for us, allowing us to live.

     

    Beyond Nihilism: Meaning without Utility

    Having followed me thus far, you’ll be impressed with how far “left” I have gone.  But this is not a matter of liberal or conservative however; the status quo has no substance in itself.  People will only adhere to a meaning if it continues to service them well.  So the question is more aligned with Immanuel Wallerstein‘s dichotomies from his World Systems Analysis.  We have rather, three parties, a defense of the status quo for no change, a desire for some carefully measured change, and then we have those few who want radical change.  Critical theory, or at least a philosophical eye on the relations that be want change, push for change, dooming it to be “left”.  So what does this mean? Our “left” and “right” positions is really more accurately, a measure of how things can be “better”.  The Americanizations of Liberal and Conservative are anything if not misleading.  Conservatives may want change, but it’s not so much change of what is fundamentally sound, but a tweaking of our current day back to the intentions of “the good ole days”.  Liberals more would more on the side that what is fundamentally sound has yet to be.

    Thus, the content of both sides is irrelevant, their positions are metered around what is seen as being fundamental “change” or not.

    So my point in bringing this up, if anything is that while you’ll see that while this entry has gone into the very “liberal” ideologies of Marxist critiques of capitalism, you can find similar thoughts echoed, if not in the right then at least in the status quo.

    My evidence for this?  Straight from the business blog of Tony Schwartz, We’re in a new energy crisis.  This one is personal.  While much of this blog’s purpose is to promote their “The Energy Project” which has to do with auditing tasks that businesses (and their front running exes) perform to save energy.  Not energy like green energy or electricity, but personal energy.  What does this blog post reveal about one of his key principles?  It’s worth quoting:

    Companies need to take up the cause of a new way of working.

    The companies that build competitive advantage in the years ahead aren’t going to do it by seeking to get more out of their people. They’ll do it instead better meeting people’s core needs — physical, emotional, mental and spiritual — so they’re freed, fueled and inspired to bring more of themselves to work every day.

    What assure people energy — what meets their needs — is to give them meaning, to energize them with a goal, exactly what Erickson writes about above.

    But then we knew this already.  Victor Frankl wrote Man’s Search for Meaning which is actually a memoir of his survival from a Nazi Concentration Camp.  His analysis and conclusion is that human beings need meaning to survive.  He observed that those who survived the camp did so because they had sufficient reason not to give up.

    I don’t think that we of the global economy are ready to give up.  And our daily lives DO have meaning, albeit personal meaning.  For many of us, our jobs mean a little bit, we find a way to incorporate what we do into the larger picture of how others live around us.  Even still though, to get supreme satisfaction is requires more than just knowing that we did our part in some small way.  Having a personal disjunction between our life with our family and friends and what we do in the office is perhaps one of the greatest conundrums of the modern era.

    Both Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Jean-Francois Lyotard (to mention a few) cite our postmodern, post-industrial society with its circularity of capital (C-M-C and M-C-M) with its built-in limits as endless producing — all without producing any meaning.  Instead, meaning is foreclosed between production on one side, and consumption on the other-side through the parallax multi-faceted kernel of $.  The only thinker I know of who seems able to transcend this analogous gap between money, commodity and capital is Kojin Karatani and he proposes a barter type system as a way of side-stepping the dialectic. (Slavoj Zizek has written extensively about parallax gaps, of which this is one… but he does not offer solutions, just further re-defining of the problems in the dialectical structure.)

    Anyway, such discussions between meaning and money are fit for another time.  And my reading of Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy is quite rusty.  I did try and tackle this subject before here: On Capitalism, a Tragedy although the approach was quite philosophical.

    And no, I don’t think capitalism is a tragedy, I was just playing off of Michael Moore’s Capitalism, a Love story.

    So the takeaway?  If anything it’s not that we can work more hours in a day.  Or that we could be more productive if we paid our employees more, or save our economy by shrinking the benefits to those who have jobs.  I suppose I can write a little bit on that some other time, maybe.  But what I want to end with here, is simply that if we are to find our way out of the current economy deadlock, and our collective dissatisfaction with how much we work then we need to take a risk and alter the way we approach work.  This can’t happen until businesses collectively see their mission to be more than just greed and profiteering.  The world today is remarkably different from when Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations.  The main difference is that the world then was much bigger.  Today we live in a sandbox. We find our resources dwindling and our pollution with no where to go.  We used to shit in someone else’s backyard — but only now we see that someone else’s backyard is also our backyard.

    If anything we need to forcefully reinstill meaning into our existence.  Instead of embracing the null of capitalism and relying on transactions and cash flow to be the determining factor of meaning and rationality (decision making) we need to find some other means.  Which will be hard, because we wouldn’t be changing the tangible pieces on the table.  We would be changing the intangible relationship of those pieces, the logic of how they work together.  I think if anything, the experiment of a centralized bureaucracy like the Soviet Union’s most likely isn’t the answer…

    So to get back to the takeaway, we have to understand that Homo Economicus cannot be the basis for Rational Choice Theory.   This kind of maximization of utility can only be cohered when understood in conjunction with a meaningful metric.  Only one kind of meaningful metric exists:  MONEY.

    One could argue that the metrics don’t need tampering and the basis for rational choice is sound, it’s rather the instrumentation needs to be refined.  But then if you use the Energy Project as above, can we actually put a dollar sign for every effort spent on pedagogically infusing an employee with the company mission?  Or the time spent by a manager to explain to an employee how they fit into the company network?  Or the extra productivity an employee may show (or not lose) because such time and energy was spent?

    Well, business has a vested interest in these things, and big business has a ton of money and a need for quantifying studies so I am sure someone has been insane enough to create tools to describe what I’ve described directly above.

    But in all seriousness: I am not alone in voicing a concern that economic theory is insufficient in properly modeling and putting into practice what is healthy for human beings.  This article:  Goodbye, Homo Economicus from Economist’s View voices concerns about the insufficiency of linking rational choice theory (with its model of humans as homo economicus, interested mainly in external measurable values of maximizing utility and minimizing cost).

    What the “madmen in authority” heard this time was the distant echo of a debate among academic economists begun in the 1970s about “rational” investors and “efficient” markets. This debate began against the backdrop of the oil shock and stagflation and was, in its time, a step forward in our understanding of the control of inflation. But, ultimately, it was a debate won by the side that happened to be wrong. And on those two reassuring adjectives, rational and efficient, the victorious academic economists erected an enormous scaffolding of theoretical models, regulatory prescriptions and computer simulations which allowed the practical bankers and politicians to build the towers of bad debt and bad policy. …

    Which brings us to the causes of the present crisis. The reckless property lending that triggered this crisis only occurred because rational investors assumed that the probability of a fall in house prices was near zero. Efficient markets then turned these assumptions into price-signals, which told the bankers that lending 100 per cent mortgages or operating with 50-to-1 leverage was safe. Similarly, regulators, who allowed banks to determine their own capital requirements and private rating agencies to establish the value at risk in mortgages and bonds, took it as axiomatic that markets would automatically generate the best possible information and create the right incentives for managing risks. …

    The scandal of modern economics is that these two false theories—rational expectations and the efficient market hypothesis—which are not only misleading but highly ideological, have become so dominant in academia (especially business schools), government and markets themselves.

    I am not familiar with the author of this article.  Where this article stops, is in suggesting how economics could be reformed so that the internal models that build our current understanding of how resources and finances should be handled better on a different axis of value.  That’s okay though, this article is from a blog about economics, not about meaning in the face of rational nihilism via utility… an understanding of money that is nearly a priori due to its near-circularity.

    But if anything, the takeaway should be that our current system needs to change in some fundamental ways because of a lack of meaning in our workplace and the lack of integration between our system of resources and how people live.

    It’s not enough to BS a company work-place environment.  That environment needs to be genuine. People today are quite savvy at detecting bullshit.  Likewise any meaning a company creates, like the lessons in a public classroom, for it to be meaningful, need to be integral to our personal lives, in some way.  And that choice has to be allowed by each individual, we need a society that sets the proper conditions for such connections to thrive.  What such a society should be, or how it should be transitioned onto is of course, a difficult but collective choice each of us needs to make on a daily basis. In the case of public education, nearly impossible for students — perhaps near impossible for us capitalists — as we’ve defined our global system of economics to systematically exclude the intangibles, thereby excluding the very things that assures each of us the highest priority in meaningfulness!

    Still, the next time you go to work, decide for yourself, if this is what you ought to be doing.  Not in terms of today or tomorrow, but in terms of next year, or ten years from now.  Understand that maximizing a paycheck is like maximizing utility.  Getting a pleasant job that is close by is like minimizing cost.  Is that really the best way to live — according to such minimal and circumstantial constraints?

    After all, in the journey of being alive, we collect things, bank accounts and stuff.  It’s not been accepted that anyone who has died has come back to really talk of their post-life experience.  Even still, we all see that No, you can’t take it with you.

    So the worthwhile part needs to be the journey, not the destination.  Why else would we possibly be here and now, alive today?

    If this is so, then society should try and maximize its populations’ “journey” instead of maximizing utility in the form of numbers in a corporate bank account…

    rule #1 of business (and life)

    March 8, 2011 / posted in life as we know it, manifesto, note to self, rules / No Comments

    Do not try to change people’s behaviors.

    (Don’t base your business or inter-personal relationships on trying to get people to change).

    Beyond Existentalism

    March 1, 2011 / posted in Business, images of being-human, manifesto, rhizomatic architecture, Theory / No Comments

    it occurs to me two implications of the previous entry one existentialism:

    http://sulphuroxide.com/2011/02/22/meaning-in-the-face-of-annihilation/

    1) that if meaning only works for one’s self, there isn’t any reason to respect anyone else’s mental capacities or conclusions, except for purposes of “living together”. in cases where more authoritarian minded individuals would think things like ‘single mothers are bad for society’ ( http://www.npr.org/2011/02/24/134031175/For-Single-Mothers-Stigma-Difficult-To-Shake ) there’s really no reason to respect anyone else’s life choices, or life situations… the same goes for gay marriage and homosexual relationships wherein concerned individuals would deem others as being in ways that detrimentally affect them even while more libertarian or liberal proponents would claim that such adult relationships fall under rubric of ‘no one’s business but the parties involved’…

    2) nonetheless, for these reasons, existentialism does not have any strong role in politics.

    while i adhere strongly to the ‘meaning is ultimately meaningless’ camp — i’m not sure where else to go with this. in the past few weeks ive been sliding really close to vulgar marxism… where questions of beauty and aesthetics become less relevant… simply because of how these problems are defined (up in the air, too, vapid and ‘feel good’…). at the same time though, especially in practice with web development (as the most obvious case) beautiful code — aesthetically pleasing algorithms and presentation — remain at the forefront of my conditions for a project that is more ‘completed’. this is a definite issue, to put it bluntly, at the onset, a huge contradiction.

    i think this ‘huge problem’ that i have is very similar to more traditional philosophies (of which i think i draw a large part from)… namely the differences between idealism and physicalism… the lines are badly drawn (imho) because it’s not so much the mentalists vs the physicalists… but really a difference between “ontology” and “ontic” or design and economics. zizek fielded this area strongly with this back in ticklish subject although I must say that by parallax gap, he may have resolved it enough in his head that the question is buried but never fully addressed anymore but as a more general debate… i don’t know i havent read any zizek recently…

    a more pragmatic approach can be found within the debate between urban designers on the point of view of ‘good design’ vs ‘economic business plans’– neither of which by itself, are always what’s best for neighborhoods. the quote froms directly from this discussion, and it’s eloquently put by mariela alfonzo
    you can catch the link here: http://www.publicprivatepassion.com/2011/02/can-cities-take-stand-on-good-urban.html

    Ultimately, the bottom line is you cannot reach a compromise between urban design and economic development – that’s a losing battle. I firmly believe you need the former to achieve the latter, but you have to understand the latter when devising the former. We HAVE to stop looking at “design” as a line item within the “costs” section of a pro-forma.

    the company apple masters these principles with their slick ipod, and iphone designs… and while they do not have market dominance wen it comes to the cell phone industry, they are industry leaders.  if you apply this ‘solution’ analogously to philosophy then you get that meaning, in order to be more than an existential statement of how one navigates — in order to be ‘meaningful’, it must also be epistemologically sophisticated in how one interfaces with their situation, to put it in a smarmy but ‘duhh’ kind of way. so as far as politics go, we can’t be sophists… and we can’t be arrogantly totalitarian, but at the same time, we need to reify our problems. we must be sophisticated in the deleuze and guattari way via concepts — we must seek to address problems that are critically problems — in how those structural crises make a real impact. we can’t address all problems that we find — because many of them are not really meaningful problems.

    how we separate this, between what is meaningful and what is not, throws us back quite a few steps. the ‘corporate’ response would be to define the problem in a tangible metric… so that we can attain that goal. which of course, would please stock holders, give us a strong sense of progress… but this ‘solution’ by itself also did cause the stock crises of our current day. we do also need to keep in the big picture as well. which is a problem, because tactically we have ‘solutions’ which cannot be ‘solutions’ in an open-ended undefined system.

    you realize that philosophy as a whole works best when it abstracts/extracts meaning from complexity.  it reduces phenomenon the way language names things, the way we put new information, new items we encounter into old files.  so philosophy, and a systems approach can best work at giving us tools to handle past situations.  it can ‘predict’ previous events accurately because the relationships which were relevant at the time of philosophizing were — relevant.  things change, and sometimes those events don’t work no more — the indexes have been re-shuffled so a system may not predict anything much anymore.  i think this is where the quote above (from an urban planner on the relationship between ‘good’ urban design and ‘productive’ economic plans) applies.  the various ‘schools’ are great, because they have focused on their limited scope questions on real world situations.  we’ve gotten so in-depth!  but that depth is narrowly defined and runs the risk of becoming a kind of art-for-artists.  in order to make great statements that shake up those studies AND make them accessible for outsiders, we need genius,  we need something new and fresh to break out of old paradigms.

    believe it or not, the bloggers from the havard business review all echo the same issues.  in a world of structured relations, structured cash flow, marketing plans and business plans… urban planning and a SYSTEMS approach, we need what they call ‘innovation’ — part of the key in many of their posts is a kind of ‘how to break out of our mold’.  if existentialism as a philosophy only works for one’s own meaning — how we connect with others, how we expressedly cross the gaps in this field becomes a matter of innovation and creativity.  after all, getting stuck in one’s head is like starting a college in academia. to use a classic example, do neurologists and cognitive psychologists talk to one another?

    to use the quote above as an analogy, to use effective communication requires that we understand the mindset of the one we speak to and our own mindset.  both need to inform each other, which means of course, a transdisciplinary approach. (again, DUHH).  how descartes has problems with this, stems from how he defines the mind as a closed system.  well guess what, our minds ARE closed systems in so far as we think about them as such… they obviously still manage to create objects and process new information in astonishingly innovative ways.

    where this happens at the subterranean level, is of course, what deleuze and guattari call rhizomes.

    how we facilitate and actively push for those connections is what i call rhizomatic architecture. ITS NOT JUST ABOUT TREES (aborescence), BABY!

    on Testing Cheetos in Soviet Unterzoegersdorf

    February 10, 2011 / posted in art, Business, images of being-human / No Comments

    Economics and market behavior is a huge area of study — the best business minds are all interested in it — so rather than try and make an exhaustive account, I would like to point to one particular event.

    A northern European group that started off making fictional zines and theorizing on ‘happenings’ called monochrom created a few years ago a last bastillion of Soviet culture called Soviet Unterzoegersdorf.  What started out as a village in the Austrian countryside ‘remade’ into the last Soviet Country (with tours available) became so widely popular that monochrom could not in good conscience continue to give tours.  Having three times the population of a 500 people village swamp the village for a weekend would be potentially devastating.  Eventually, in order to further the experience, monochrom created an ‘adventure style’ video game.  I won’t go into detail about the game here, what I am more interested in is how this experience interfaced with the economy.

    It seems that with capitalism, we desire experiences, the novel experiences things can give us. There are plenty of Marxist thought about this — but what is interesting, although perhaps difficult to assess is how these novel experiences become translatable into other Cultures, of other peoples, and even of one’s past cultural experiences — which become commodified into a new kind of hybrid experience entirely, neither of the past nor of our ‘normal’ experience, but wholly of the present.

    Monochrom went on to have various installations such as the Unterzoegersdorf computer (which ran on a coal furnace one had to shovel continuously in order for another person to be able to play Tetris) as well as various Unterzoegersdorf installations.  There was one especially interesting moment when they were kicked out of a computer convention as the Unterzoegersdorf representative with the Unterzoegersdorf camera man was borderline-trolling party-goers, perhaps offensive to Disney officials running the convention.  The Unterzoegersdorf representative also, for purposes of art, had the wild experience of eating a glob of wasabe ‘not knowing what wasabe is… and deciding that it was capitalist posion’.  Of course, one assumes the Unterzoegersdorf camera man was using a modern camera, something the Unterzoegersdorf representative did not even seem to notice as being astounding.

    One particular event they did was particular applicable to this discussion.  The website boing boing hired Monochrom to do a viral video for Cheetos, paying them a sum of a few thousand dollars.  Monochrom saw a prime opportunity to further explore capitalist relationships with their very anti-capitalist characters.  The results are below.  I invite you to take the time to watch all 6 segments.  It is delightful.

    Unterzoegersdorf/Cheetos Campaign

    While amusing, one cannot help but think that the compete rage of the Soviet Unterzoegersdorf characters, in part jest, at being ‘tricked’ and ‘used’ to promote a very Capitalist-foodstuff but in part seriousness — for Unterzoegersdorf-ians to find their livelihood but a ‘colony’ of the Global Economy.  While Cheetos is featured heavily in the dialogue as the center of conflict, the nature of the Monochrom’s tension is more on the side of Unterzoegersdorf-ians trying to figure out what to make of the raw junk of Capitalism.  It may benefit Cheetos only to be repeatedly mentioned and pondered — we laugh because the weird orange coloring DOES smear all over our hands.  In fact, we are reminded of Cheetos and that may be enough to make our mouth water (or wince) in association.  Larger questions remain largely unexamined What should we make of our own economic proliferation?  How should we come to terms with ourselves?  In an exploration of Unterzoegersdorf we come to face ourselves as Other — perhaps in what only great works of Art do — reflected back to ourselves our own values in negativity, as dissymmetry and excess, the best non-linguistic analysis of all, something even Emmanuel Levinas refuses to see — when he preaches of the acceptance of the Other but cannot accept those ‘asiatic hordes’ which surround Israel… and refuses to deal with them as citizens of humanity…

    I’d hate to think that if I were to continue on and on, I would end up swallowing myself into a Hegelian synthesis of some sort, negative and particular made universal, more or less.

    I also strikes me that this entry is applicable with the previous On Testing IRL although creating such a viral meme does not in fact have a control group of any sort. One is immediately hypnotized in Soviet Unterzoegersdorf our own image, as fascist as they are in our unthinking allegiance to our own ideology, something which accepts Cheetos as blindly as they reject it.

    on Testing IRL

    February 8, 2011 / posted in Business, life as we know it / No Comments

    So I did join Ramit Sethi’s earn1k insider’s list.

    It’s quite interesting to note how often he responds to objects and naysayers about his product. Of course he’s right — if you can’t spare 30 minutes from your day to save you potentially hours then you’re wasting time by even considering throwing 1k into a program on how to improve… (business practice, marketing, negotiation skills…). Most of his regular emails seem composed of this kind of hustle, to urge people to get off their butts and refuse mediocrity.

    This is good because often many of my closest friends, while all intelligent and capable, do not invest their time into activities that will benefit them in the long run. Video games are the best time-waster. You spend 40 or 60 bucks to buy a game and then spend the next week or two playing it and beating it. It’s good to spend 12 hours, say on Ico or 115 hours on GTA4 and then go to bed at night feeling like you’ve made progress. You have made progress. It’s just not applicable to life. It’s the same thing with wildly successful multi-player games like Left 4 Dead, Battle Field 2142 or Call of Duty 4. Yes I’ve played most of these games (except Ico). And I’ve not beaten a single one of them. But the online games are especially trying because you do cooperate with other people, or play against them, and you get players who take them way too seriously. Any sense of accomplishment from a video game is real — even if the accomplishment and the work never fully or even partially translate into a real life benefit. Unlike say, climbing a corporate ladder or learning a new trade… So the email urging is good. People are hooked in some sense, many many people. And it’s good to call people out — the ones who would set goals for themselves but never follow through… because the goals are only there for them to remind themselves that they aren’t as loserly as anyone else… (I find that so annoying, to have a ‘serious’ conversation with someone who believes they will do something but never do it!) So I do agree with Ramit on this.

    But at the same time it’s freak’n annoying. I didn’t realize that reading his emails would mean that I would get badgered into doing whatever he wanted me to do. Taking action right away, or at least within a reasonable time frame. That’s okay though, because if it’s annoying enough I could always unsubscribe. But I won’t because I do find value in what he says, even if most of his emails is him responding to whining (he must get alot of people who reply with whining).

    Anyway, I’m starting to ramble but I did look at Ramit’s offering of a 60 minute interview with Tim Ferris on the subject of testing. They are about the same age I am, and they speak of testing as Testing. I listened to the interview while I was writing some database code for MySql and while answering some emails on a Saturday afternoon. The subject of testing is interesting, although I kind of wished they had set the foundation for it better.

    In my work-life I don’t have much guidance as to how to go about conducting business. Since my services are relatively new on the market (as a niche business), testing is necessary for me. So some areas in which testing apply are in a networking situation, saying different things for the breakfast 30 second microphone time — is useful. Trying out different pricing, and trying to see what fits best is another thing I’ve done. Asking customers and potential clients how we may better service their needs, also works. Ferris had some interesting and useful comments about testing (for instance don’t test when the risk is too high). Perhaps I am too new to Ramit’s blog — because I am not certain what the context is for testing. For instance, when is it good to test? The interview seems to conclude that testing is always good — when the risks are not too high. I guess this is alright, but I think at some point, testing becomes trolling. In real life or online.

    How do you know what to test? Going back to the video game scenario, people ‘test’ the rules in video games all the time. For instance, in the original Battlefield 1942 people learned that they can put the engineer bombs into a jeep and drive it into a tank, effectively destroying the tank with a car bomb. That’s testing but the rewards are so low… and transitory. Owning on an online server might be great if you are 14, but it’s less relevant if you’re 25 or even 35… Social ‘situations’ online such as on discussion forum don’t seem like a good place to ‘test’ although asking people their opinions on things is less a test than just surveying… (this is where I disagree with their notion of testing, although its vaguely applicable). If anything, determining when to test seems like a matter of boredom or curiosity. Ultimately, doing website SEO requires some kind of testing — to find out one’s target market or to find out which words are the ones which best attract customer dollars (if it is indeed that kind of website). So testing as an effective activity really depends on the context of what’s really at stake. When does testing become less effective and more about provoking people for whatever reaction they get?

    If anything, the most useful point about testing is more about how to determine when we need to test something. It’s obvious when we aren’t getting results at all or if we don’t have enough information to make a decision that we need to expand out knowledge base. The best way to do that is to test new situations. But it becomes less obvious if we are succeeding that we need to test if we are to maximize or improve what we want to do. Life is (often but not always) about learning new things. If we are complacent, satisfied with what we have, or afraid of losing — then testing becomes less important. Likewise, how we can step outside of our normal processes and conceive of a new way of doing things — paradigm shift or whatever you want to call it — is a completely different topic in itself, one that has had many many books written about it. In fact, such a level of creative-stepping-outside-of-the-proverbial-box is the wet dream of many many scientists, writers, managers, marketers, CEOs… and of course all those really smart finance people who create new finance instruments for investors all the time.

    So figuring out how to test or construct new paradigms or ‘scripts’ as Ramit calls them, may be beyond the scope of this entry, even if that’s what I’m talking about. In fact, the other side of testing is the purpose of testing — at least in business — and that’s INNOVATION.

    Recently Harvard Business Review Blogs have got some interesting thoughts on INNOVATION. Two of the three articles they have relate to the topic of testing. For instance, Quicky is an open-source model for product innovation, created by users to try and make better products. In essence, the users themselves were suggesting what they would like to buy. That certainly circumvents normal business ‘testing’. Of greater relevance, though, is this entry on Google’s attempt at being innovative — which basically could be resolved if Google were to test its innovations before committing to creating them. This is a clear case where testing is necessary.

    In general, testing isn’t just about originating a new idea and seeing if it will fly, it’s about interacting in the field of interest — succeeding where you want to succeed and trying new things to mark out territory for proposed behavior.

    On this vein, it may be of greater interest to introduce someone who has built a career off of testing (social boundaries) — and then publicizing it for all to gawk at… Would Ramit interview Tucker Max about testing and how he determines what next to test or how he goes about ‘testing’? (Who knows, maybe he already has! I just started reading the Ramit’s blog, but I don’t read Tucker’s…)

    *note, bringing up the two of them yet again seems kind of nefarious, or atleast it feels that way to me, but I think relevant because their models of interaction seem so similar… it may be interesting to see if Tucker Max can engage on the level of discourse Ramit seems so bent on focusing… and what he might be able to say… if it would even be relevant at all. It is of note though that Ramit did mention pick up artists I haven’t listened to this pod cast, but I did read the entry. Ramit’s main criticism about PUA is that it’s more about scoring than less about personal self-development… I don’t know… do you think Tucker Max is about personal self-development? It seems to me that he is about some kind of development… although it’s quite unclear what.

    On Effort and Success

    January 12, 2011 / posted in Business, note to self / 2 Comments

    Under some small convincing (and it was small) a dear friend of mine convinced me that I should email Ramit Sethi and see if he could not help me with my 2011 new years goals.

    To set the record straight, I don’t have resolutions. Resolutions are stupid. Resolutions have the unspoken implication that we have been doing something wrong all along and that we need to reform. Sometimes in majorly dramatic ways. And human beings are not that great at suddenly changing habits. Habits are what make us who we are; since we can’t think or react to everything with our full attention. Habits are what allow a virtuoso pianist to excel with seemingly impossible pieces but it’s also what causes any other pianist to fail (the hundreds and thousands of times they try to tackle that same piece).

    Plus the majority of resolutions are vague. Vagueness does not lend itself to developing a plan or a metric on how to achieve something. And the achieving of that something is what we want to do. So be concrete and have a plan.

    So instead of resolutions I have goals. Goals are great. I do have them. One of them is to get out of debt. I am in debt because 2010 has been a bad year for me, financially. I spent too much money trying to patch a dying relationship, for much of 2010 and while I was doing that I also neglected my work and my business. As a result I didn’t exactly make very much. In theory I should have even still, made out okay, but like I said I spent too much. And it’s not like the money is the issue; it’s what I did with the money… trying to find new things for us to do together… But more on that some other time.

    Back to Ramit Sethi. In case you don’t know who he is, he is you should check this out: Ramit Sethi I haven’t read all of his things or perused the amazing amount of content online surrounding him but I have a great deal of respect for what he’s done. Since he asked for each of us to include as much detail as possible, I took about two hours in the course of working on other things at work to craft a careful email. I tried not to include too much detail. But since the business I have is a particularly odd one, I felt I needed to explain some of the background involved. If he gave a suggestion that I had already tried that would be useless. So I tried to give as much detail as I thought he might need.

    I had an idea of what he would say though. So I have included the dialogue below.

    In case you are wondering, I’ve given much thought about whether to post or not…. I decided why not. It’s not offensive. And there’s something to be learned from it. I could learn from this. So here goes:

    I said:

    Hello Ramit,

    My cousin, who reads your blog, has convinced me to write this email and explore this opportunity. First off, just a little background — I have read and enjoyed your book I Will Teach You to be Rich and I have watched quite a few of your videos on youtube. I find what you have to say to be interesting and I have an idea of what you might say in response to this email — but of course I have no idea what you will actually say.

    I would like to sign up for your earn1k.com but I do not have 1k as I am currently in debt due to trying to finance a failed relationship. I am attempting to get my personal finances in order but as of yet have not made enough to get out of debt.

    The biggest goal I have for 2011 involves a company I run with a partner of mine called Yours Truly Accessibility. We would like for this company to be profitable. My goal for 2011 is to get YTA into the green. Currently it is in the red (because of taxes) but was in the black for much of 2010. If anything, we need to work on our marketing. Can you give some suggestions as to what we should or should not look further into? But before you can address that, I think I need to give you some background on our unique company.

    Company Background
    This is a small company that offers consultation to businesses for compliance with State and Federal laws for disability access. Basically any place that is open to the public and accepts public funds needs to comply otherwise they could be sued for an act of discrimination under the Federal and California Civil Code. With this comes a maximum of $4,000.00 of damages per instance. Given the complexity of the California Building Code (CBC) and the Federal Civil Code (Americans with Disabilities Act 1990 and 2010, Americans with Disabilities Act Accessibility Guidelines 2004, Architectural Barriers Act 1968, and so on) businesses need experienced professionals who are experts in this very narrow field in order to successfully navigate these compliance laws. Most businesses, and architects do not realize this until they are sued. Overwhelmingly architects will claim they don’t need us because they are already experts. But they do need us, and in conversation I can catch many of them saying things that are just untrue. I don’t want to offend any of them, but it seems that their license gets in the way of their ability to acknowledge what they do or do not know. Attorneys, of course, love us.

    Without getting too detailed, there are several external factors that structure our niche:
    Neither the legal profession nor the construction and design industry covers this field. The CBC is under the purview of architects and contractors but they know nothing about the Civil Code. The California Civil Code and the Federal Civil Code are legal areas but the determination of compliance is measured in the building code, something attorneys know nothing about.
    Local enforcement agencies like the county and city building department are state entities and do not have jurisdiction or responsibility to enforce Federal Civil Code. At various points the CBC portion of access conflicts with the ADA.
    While this area is beginning to become more noticed by many struggling architects and contractors, they still lack the experience — the many years and thousands of sites that I have inspected, consulted in and been an expert witness for. Most of this experience was done under a different company, so I do not have working relations with those schools, cities and businesses.

    Marketing
    I think this is enough background here. We do have working relations with a Disabled Rights Non-profit but our main marketing approach is to network with the existing business community through local Chambers of Commerce and bar associations. Our greatest sources for referrals are attorneys. In order to be a better resource for attorneys and businesses, we started to give MCLE seminars and free informative ADA seminars to Chambers of Commerce starting in 2009. We also have maintained a blog on accessibility and have done some youtube videos in which we give out general tips.

    We have had some success through these avenues, it takes such a long time to contact the people in charge and have them host it. We don’t want to host the seminar ourselves because of the cost involved. Going through existing organizations with existing members would guarantee us a better turn-out.

    As of yet, there isn’t much competition as most businesses do not know that we even exist. Most businesses are apathetic unless the business owners become frightened of being sued or are already sued. Ideally, we would like businesses to hire us before they are sued as after they are sued they still need to hire us anyway (and pay for the lawsuit and/or the settlement). I don’t think the goal to becoming profitable is to charge more. If we were busy that would be fine, but as it is, businesses are not forthcoming because accessibility is viewed as damage control. Providing access is important but it’s not urgent. Many businesses take the unethical attitude that “yes, we are not in compliance but we are going to wait to be sued before we do anything.” Furthermore, small businesses have very tight margins. They require a great deal of time and hand-holding. I would rather not run a company where we do work once and then forgo future service, but I also don’t want the mom and pop shops to keep calling about every little issue several months after we’ve done work for them. Perhaps we need to find a third purely marketing individual?

    What we have started to do this year was to call every single Chamber of Commerce we could find, and offer them a free ADA seminar to be set at a date of their choosing for 2011. As this is a recent endeavor, we have yet to see how well Chambers respond. At first talk, most Chambers seem apathetic. A few Chambers are angry and don’t want our help. The Chambers most eager for us to give a talk to their members are ones in which many of their members have been sued. If Chambers host us for a talk, they will inevitably look better to their members (as trying to help)… and it’s not like they can turn to anyone else to speak, as there isn’t anyone else in Los Angeles that can offer the level of expertise that we do. I do intend to aggressively follow up with every Chamber until they give me a resounding “NO”. Beyond performing public speaking engagements and following up with the Chambers which would like for us to help them, is there any other kind of avenue that you think we should be pursuing?

    I realize this is fairly long — but I did want it to be brief. There are some long term goals we want to implement and are in the process of implementing but those are at least a year or half a year off. In the meanwhile, short term survival is really very important. Should you need any more information, please let me know.

    I thank you for your time and your open invitation.
    Looking forward to your correspondence

    Best Regards

    —
    Alex Lee

    His reply was almost instantaneous. I drove home and when I got home he had already replied. He said:

    Sorry, this is really long. Do you have 1 question for me?

    I had a sinking feeling, but thought I should do as he said. (After all, it is insanely long). I said:

    How can I market our inspections to businesses better?

    He replied with:

    i cover this in my Earn1k course (earn1k.com)

    you can also get jay abraham’s book, getting more out of all you’ve got

    All in all, a disappointing exchange. Maybe he’s swamped with emails, I can get that. And I see what he’s doing. By asking for questions he’s doing research on his readership. He’s taking notes on where he can help the most people, and find out how to satisfy his readers. That’s cool, but in answering him, I gave him a genuine response that took a bit of effort. Or maybe I misunderstood his request for a question and asked the wrong kind of question.

    Now, I understand you can’t get anything for free but here is the deal: He’s done plenty of work building up his clientile, his readership. He’s put in hours and hours of thought. He’s helped plenty of people. He’s been on TV. I’m sure he must feel that he has plenty of cred. I mean, credit. He’s built up his reputation. But in asking for 1k he’s changed the nature of the game. Asking for $10 for a book is one thing, but 1k is alot of money. If anything he should value my 1k more than I do, which means giving a little bit more to earn that trust so that I part with it. If he feels that he’s earned it, then well, from this entry it’s obvious that he hasn’t earned it from me (although I am sure he’s earned it may times over for other people).

    After all, I have no idea what his earn1k program would do or if it’s scammy. It feels scammy. But I am not willing to take that risk at all. Now I am even less willing to take it.

    I do wish him well, and he is young and smart. I am sure if the earn1k program doesn’t take off, he’ll find some way to recover. But conversely I do have a feeling it will take off… though there are no secrets to success. Just mindfulness and hardwork.

    A different good friend of mine made the observation ‘ppl don’t win the lottery twice. people seem to think that if they got it once that they can easily get it again.’ Now of course Ramit has worked hard for what he’s got. He’s put in ALOT of man hours. But a large part of that involves meeting the right people, talking and learning from the right people, and learning the right lessons at the right time. You can be sure that for ever Ramit Sethi who is a successful blogger and writer there are tons more who work just as hard but don’t have nearly the same success for whatever reason. It may be time and place, it may be the influence of those around them. It may be them. Who knows, if we knew what the secret of success is, we would all be successful.

    I understand the concept of success relies strongly on the concept of failure. (But not necessarily)… And those are all just concepts. Is it possible for everyone to be successful? In theory yes. Ramit in his book I Teach You to be Rich defines success not as money but as being able to do what you love. Part of that means allocating your resources (time and money) to the things that you love and not to the things that you don’t… but also to pay good attention to set up structures and habits for the things you don’t love so you can maintain those necessary ‘boring activities’ going (my words not necessarily his) so that we can continue to maintain our relative lifestyles.

    I agree whole heartedly with that. I also liked his book so much I bought two copies and gave both out as Christmas presents for the end of 2010.

    So that’s it. I am up to 1033 words at the time of this writing (atleast in this edit), and still going. And no, this is my blog ‘space’ and I will ramble as much as I like. Should I narrow this post down to one sentence?

    NEVER TAKE YOUR SUCCESS AS A SIGN THAT YOU’VE MADE IT. DON’T COMPROMISE, PUT FORTH YOUR BEST EFFORT, AS ALWAYS.

    The game changes with each plateau we hit, and the hill gets steeper. We have to build on our past success not ride on it. Anyway, this entry is mainly for my own notes. I am sure that I will need to be reminded over and over of the above, as time goes on… Unfortunately, sometimes when we (as individuals and as a people) get that taste of blissful happiness, we can forget to be our good selves and just get plain fucking stupid, and greedy. All relationships included, even the ones we don’t have.

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