Boyfriends are like buses. You wait ages for one, then three come along…

- an unnamed but insightful friend

Hurray, someone who also cringes when business is described as ‘family’. Mike Wagner takes the time to explain why:

You’re not Moses
and employees are not your people. You’re not responsible for their
motivation or their happiness – they are adults. You are an adult. You
partner together to get the work done. Calling your business a family,
thereby making you a parent, is dead wrong. If you need to be needed,
get a puppy dog.

I find the ‘family’ metaphor more common in the US where I have to report some employees do not bristle at it. Perhaps it makes them feel within their comfort zones. But there are many who don’t feel that way and Mike give further reasons for calling it a misplaced metaphor. This is the most powerful one:

Your people know it isn’t true – you’re NOT a family.
Who’s the most “important person” in a family? The person upon whom the
precious resources of time, money and energy are spent: the weakest
member of the family. Babies, the infirm and the elderly qualify.

The
most important people in your company are not the weakest. The
producers are. Thinkers are. Technicians are. Initiative taking grown
ups are. And even they have no guarantee they’ll have a job at the end
of the week.

I believe the reason for the family metaphor is that it is the most benign collective out there – even though it can also be profoundly dysfunctional and cause much damage. Companies want to style themselves in that image because it helps them to reduce employee autonomy without using force, relying on social pressure. Family is the Greater Good for which sacrifices are naturally made, so… "What do you mean you don’t agree?! What a selfish individualist you are! You ought to be more of a team-player, etc. etc…".. is the subtext.

Well, my metaphor for business is another "F word" – feudalism. Same structure (pyramid), same hierarchy (monarchs, lords, merchants and serfs), similar approach to innovation (centralised decision-making, patronage, budgets).

via Johnnie

Steven Baker of Blogspotting writes about his experience of casino backstage:

They have banks and banks of TV screens looking at the tables and the
traffic of people. They have fixed cameras over every table, and
tracking cameras operating within what look like black cantaloupe-sized
half domes on the ceilings.

They zoom on one woman’s behaviour:

Then he saw it. She had her cards, a black jack, and with one quick
movement she upped her bet by adding another $5 chip. We watched again
and again in slow motion.

This is still fine by me. The casino is private property, in a business where some people are highly motivated to cheat. It is what happened afterwards that I find interesting.

They decided she was no pro. Still, they sent a security person to talk
to her as she was leaving the table. We watched. She was surprised,
confused, then grave. Then he said something that put her at ease. She
relaxed, smiled, joked, and then went along her tipsy way.

I share Steven’s unease and his realisation that these casinos are giving us a preview of life in the coming age of surveillance.

Increasingly our movements and gestures, online and off, will be open
to scrutiny by companies and governments alike. It will be up to them
to decide what to crack down on, what to let pass. In making these
decisions, they’ll be weighing not only our innocence or guilt, but
also our happiness as customers, our ability to stir up a fuss, the
cost of the public perception that they’re snoops. The upshot: We won’t
have much privacy, but crafty governments and companies will give us
the illusion we do.

In other words, technology in an environment that has not evolved to match it, i.e. has respect for the individual as a fundamental principle, eventually leads to a dystopia. In a society without openness and individual autonomy,
technology amplifies and entrenches the power of the centralised
system, however benign the
original intention. I am reminded of The Difference Engine, a novel by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. The story is set in Victorian times, in a society with all the pathologies of an authoritarian system, i.e. one lacking proper checks and balances. It is taken to the point of grotesqueness and shown as ultimately fragile – its strength rests on the technology to the exclusion of individual freedom. Innovation is institutionalised, variety killed, leading to vulnerability to outside innovation and to inherent flaws within the system.

The difference between the impact of technology online and offline couldn’t be more stark. Offline we have the modern Panopticon, surveillance cameras of increasing sophistication and intrusiveness. Online we still have the ability to protect ourselves or can find those who can help us do so rather than have our ‘protection’ imposed by a centralised institution. Yes, the internet is an anarchy and a sewer – as Ben Laurie who ought to know describes it . But it is also a space where new ways of doing things can emerge and more importantly where individuals can flourish without depending on organisational resources. Offline we are defenceless against somebody building the aforementioned Panopticon, online there are ways to design against it.

So simply put, I’d rather have the anarchy and the sewer with individual sovereignty than a Big Brother in whatever disguise.

This is another example of off-line type of thinking.

The reality is though that outside of our little insular world of blogs
and co-presence what we do has no importance. To your average neighbor
Justin is just some weird guy walking around with a camera attached to
his body, blogs are just another confusing computer term and the
cluetrain might just as well be the mid-afternoon commuter train in any
major metropolitan city.

The impact of the blogosphere and other online -spheres begins with the people who create them. The internet has changed the way those people can do things. Some have tapped right into it, some are yet to do so and some may never care. It is not about creating big organisations and processes to change the existing order. The internet is about ‘ends’ i.e. the users, distributed networks and distributed sovereignty.

The truth of the matter is that for the person worrying about making
next month’s rent or being able to pay their child’s doctor bill
without bankrupting themselves none of this has or ever will matter. If
anything the poli-sphere for all it’s partisanship and bloodied
knuckles is far more relevant to our daily lives than any post of
thoughtful consideration from the tech-sphere.

People have always worried about the mundane stuff and always will. But once their ability to take control over more of those activities increases, you won’t be able to put the genie back in the bottle. Innovation is real, change happens and individuals involved in it have nothing to lose by pushing at the boundaries.

It just seems to take bloody ages.

[World-class violinist plays for hours in a subway station, almost no
one stops to listen]. The experiment just proved what we already know
about context, permission and worldview. If your worldview is that
music in the subway isn’t worth your time, you’re not going to notice
when the music is better than usual (or when a famous violinist is
playing). It doesn’t match the story you tell yourself, so you ignore
it. Without permission to get through to you, the marketer/violinist is
invisible.

Seth Godin offers good reasons for an overwhelming response by readers to an article reporting the above experiment.

It bothers us that we’re so overwhelmed by the din of our lives that
we’ve created a worldview that requires us to ignore the outside world,
most of the time, even when we suffer because of it. It made me feel a
little smaller, knowing that something so beautiful was ignored because
the marketers among us have created so much noise and so little trust.

I agree. My attention is now rationed carefully as I am in control of it more than ever before. I gladly (and sometimes angrily) block and evade unwanted interruptions. From my ‘unmediated’ online interactions I know that there are others who feel the same way.

We take our attention away from those who have commanded it for decades. We take it with us to our networks, to communities we create and trust. The trail of marketers and advertisers following the commodity that feeds them – our attention – is instructive and occasionally fun to watch. First they ignored us, then they laughed at us, then they feared us. They still do but now they are also imitating us. I lost count of the number of ‘me-too-social-networks’ being built by companies and their agencies. 

Contrary to the popular sentiment I think transparency is a double-edged sword for marketers – I insist on it not because it will make me trust them more but because I want to avoid their attempts without giving them any attention whatsoever. I resent the time spent working out that something is ultimately a marketing ploy. That is why my own sources are trusted – they will not trick me in order to ’steal’ my attention. The price for such luxury is blanking out anything without context.

So the reminder to those who interrupt – do not disrupt my circles.   

Scoble’s reaction to Tim O’Reilly’s response to the code of conduct:

It, even, looked a lot like a mob because the feedback was so consistently anti the proposal. Anyway, I was just reading my feeds and saw that Tim O’Reilly responded with a lengthy post.That’s how to respond to a mob. Take on their concerns head on and remain calm.

Does a consistent anti-proposal feedback make a mob? Well, there I am anti uniform code of conducts, so is Johnnie and Euan and Hugh and Damien and Jackie and many others that I rate. Does it mean we are a mob or even a part of a mob? Just wondering because that would, in the words of Scoble, make me feel uneasy.

…this time, with a bite:

Scumbags of South Africa, you have been warned.  Later this month, women there "will be able to arm their vaginas
with the Rapex device , a product priced at 1 rand (around 14 cents) and sold
over the counter.

Still, don’t understand why some people are calling it vengeful although agree with their conclusion:

Some people – including women’s campaigners – have criticised the
device for being "vengeful". Well, as its inventor, Sonette Ehlers, has
said, it’s "a medieval device for a medieval deed". If any rapist finds
himself hopping with pain as a result – as well as facing the fact that
the only way to remove the device is said to be a highly awkward and
incriminating hospital visit – that seems just fine to me. Yes, it’s
vengeful. Yes, it hurts rapists. Oh well.

via Boing Boing

Found in a TechDirt post about Bluespamming i.e.mobile spamming (via text or Bluetooth).

..now that the promotion is done, the folks behind it are absolutely
thrilled that they got such a positive response. How positive? 15% of
those spammed responded, which means that they pissed off 85% of the people they spammed with a promotion on their mobile phone they didn’t want.  That’s success?

This is why Jackie and I used to talk about LOI (loss on investment) in marketing and advertising (as opposed to ROI on campaigns, a metric that marketers worship so much). How many people do you annoy by interrupting them with your ‘commercial messages’. Incredibly short-sighted and eventually fatal.

Update: More recent examples of Bluespamming.

David Weinberger has no comment for Hillary Clinton’s comments policy – a point well made. Alas, in turn he gets picked upon in his comments section and remedies his own conversation stoppers. Peace and harmony ensues.

WSJ reports:

Space could become the next frontier for advertising campaigns under a
concept unveiled by one of the agency’s staunchest supporters in
Congress.

….plans to introduce a bill that would make “NASA space assets
available for commercial advertising and marketing opportunities.” If
that ever becomes law, companies and universities might be able to
market themselves by plastering logos on equipment or sponsoring
equipment such as cameras on the International Space Station.
The
revenues, ultimately reaching perhaps $100 million, would be used to
build up a self-sustaining prize fund to honor space innovations by
entrepreneurs.

Another attempt to ‘trade a commodity’ that doesn’t belong to either side. Our attention.

Love this:

Bringing American consumers reports from small companies and artists
who have been taken advantage of by large corporations. We wish for
these corporations to be held accountable for their actions and to
change their business practices.

Another way the internet shifts the balance of power. Bit by bit.

via Boing Boing

This sounds wrist-slashingly excruciating.

The campaign features the humorous use of
fictional foes – aliens, ninjas and zombies – to illustrate that
defending against online security threats is easier than fending off
these comically rough customers.

By using humor in a relevant fashion, we can engage and inform IT professionals at the same time. Feedback from focus-group customers supported the decision to use
IT-geek humor as a jumping-off point into a serious topic like security.

Oh yes, IT-geek humour is something that blends so well with an ‘interacting flash video’. Groan.

The aforementioned creative Web experience
features an interactive flash video that leads customers through a
visually striking experience that delivers more in-depth product
information as they move through the site.

What is a ‘creative Web experience’ in advertising? I mean, do I get to create anything? What do I experience except a sense of loss (time and wear & tear on the eyeballs) topped with embarrassment at watching it in the first place. Where’s my ROI on watching such ‘creative interactive ads’?! Btw, I searched the ads as well as the "Easy, easier" campaign, but no luck.

Let’s not dwell on detail, let’s get more substantial – Steve Brown, director of product management for
security and access product management at Microsoft:

We’ve heard loud and clear from business customers that security
products not only need to provide the greatest level of protection but
also must be easy to manage and integrate with existing infrastructure. This ease- of-use is one of the key competitive
differentiators that Microsoft brings to the market with its Forefront
security products.

From what I understand the holy grail of greatest level of protection and ease of use is not one that Microsoft can claim to have found. But what the hell… Alec, would you care to have a go?