Apple’s Great ‘n All, But It’s No IBM

This week’s TWiT touched on an interesting question after the news that IBM celebrated its 100-year (nuts, right?) anniversary: “which of today’s four dominant American tech firms will be around in 100 years—Apple, Google, Amazon, or Facebook? The consensus was Amazon. This is a favourite barstool debate of mine, so while I mostly agree with the panellists, I thought I’d expound a bit.

Google might seem like a pretty safe choice, but I’m not convinced. Although, long-run, maybe it gets broken up ATT&T-style. One of the best books I’ve read recently (apart from Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble, which I’m now recommending to everyone) is Tim Wu’s The Master Switch. I think he’d probably argue that Google is at the crest of its “empire.” It will almost certainly have anti-trust issues in the future. And despite its various cool skunkworks projects, it’s still a search company (that’s getting steadily less good at search) that makes all of its money on ads. May not look like it now, but Google is replicable.

Facebook? They got greedy. They wanted to be the new internet. And now American FB usage is declining for the first time. More instructive in understanding Facebook’s future, though, is the broad gut-level aversion to the way Zuck is now following all of us around the web. Everyone I talk to about this is figuring out their own way to circumscribe what Facebook knows about our lives and our online behaviour. And, by extension, circumscribe its reach. It will remain an important part of the social infrastructure of the web, and it will still have enough juicy data to be profitable, but as soon as an alternative comes around that feels like Facebook felt in 2006 (intimate, exclusive, and cool), it will cease to be the the hegemon of the social web.

Amazon has a good shot at being around for 100 years because its core business (online retail) will be around in a hundred years and changes in that market, like new competitors or new technologies, aren’t likely to kill ‘em dead. It’s hard to imagine how, barring some summer-blockbuster-aliens’n'asteroids-armageddon scenario, Amazon just goes away. It’s also easy to forget that Amazon is one of the best-positioned future purveyors of cloud services.

As for Apple, an Infinite Loop? Maybe not. Post-Jobs it will just go back to being a clever little consumer electronics company. A shadow of its former self, but still making stuff. Apple will be Sony. And in 50 years, somewhere in Cupertino there will be a museum dedicated to the aughts, when the world trembled bi-annually before each new buttonless slab of silicon and glass as though they held commandments, not angry birds. Maybe there’ll be a statue of Jobs somewhere…

And on the pedestal these words appear:

`My name is Ozy-jobs-ias, King of Kings:

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’

No buttons remain.”

I Need to Eat Some Vegetables

For the last few months, I haven’t been reading as much stuff that I disagree with as I should. As a rule, I think everyone should visit an ideological neighborhood on the other side of town (or the internet) at least once a day. It’s good for you, like eating your intellectual vegetables.

But lately, I’ve been consuming nothing but beer and poutine. The beer in my case is the Daily Show. It’s good beer; I liken it to the Red Racer IPA, which I savour for the art with which its craft brewers balance its hoppy bite and the subtle, comforting sweetness of its finish. I imbibe good-natured, honest satire nightly for the ironic distance it puts between me and and a well-curated sample of the world’s the world’s topical absurdity and corruption. I know every night is excessive, but I seriously can’t sleep without it.

Rachel Maddow is the poutine. And depending on your politics, you might think that’s either a swipe at MSNBC or an unfair diminution of the virtues of fries, cheese curd and gravy. I think it’s neither. Both are great, both are entirely without substitute goods in their respective market niches, and neither pretends to be something its not. You’ll never find low-fat poutine and Rachel will never agree with Sarah Palin. And I like them both that way.

I was thinking about this tonight when John was on Rachel’s show. First thought: “Sweet! What goest together better than beer and poutine?” Second thought: “I need to eat some vegetables.”

When things are going well for my side I like nothing better than a visit to World Net Daily. All that talk of FEMA concentration camps and black helicopters lets me feel smug and self-satisfied. (Almost as smug and self-satified as I feel when either Rachel or John visits the other side on my behalf and returns with hilarious footage.) But when we’re losing, I retreat to my chosen echo-chamber.

Now I agree with Rachel that conflating the Right Wing Noise Machine and MSNBC is unfair because the former is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the GOP (or is it the other way around?) and the latter is still an independent news and opinion operation. And I agree with John that it’s unfair because the former is so much better at overheated rhetoric and manufactured outrage than the latter.

But I’m not arguing that they’re equivalent. Mostly, I’m re-stating the obvious: that we live in a world where we never have to listen to people who don’t think the same things or the same way that we do if we don’t want to, so if we don’t want to become intellectual lard-asses we have to choke down something nasty from the other side every once in a while. I’m also pointing out that your own echo chamber is a seductive, comfortable place when you’ve just suffered a “shellacking,” so now’s when it’s most important for us to mix some greens in with our poutine.

Tea Baggers Have More Fun: South Park, Beck, and How the Midterms Were Lost

The X-Men were big when I was a kid. The kids in my neighborhood would all get together, each assume a character, and roam around searching for evil and tyranny to confront. Of course we had to invent the evil and tyranny, but that was part of the fun. Last week’s South Park episode reminded me of how much fun it can be saving the world from an imaginary tyranny, but if I’d been watching Glenn Beck, I’d have recognized that fourth-grader’s self-indulgent thrill twenty months ago.

I credit Slate editor David Plotz with the most convincing explanation for the ascendance of the Tea Party and the successful hitching of the GOP cart to their frothing, wild-eyed horse. In last week’s politics podcast he argued that midterms are won and lost on turnout and that the best way to gauge which party is going to muster the greater turnout is to determine which party’s base is having more fun. This theory resonates for me because I remember having a lot of fun on November 4th, 2008, in a Obamaphile-packed bar in Keene, New Hampshire, but also because the Tea-Baggers look like they’ve been having a lot of fun this past year too.

First, let’s examine the premise. Are midterms a turnout game? The polling suggests that they are. Congressional Democrats actually have a higher approval than their Republican counterparts, though neither party enjoys a lot of support. For months in advance of election day pundits have been crowing about the “enthusiasm gap” that Democrats faced, and indeed the base failed to show up. The electorate last week was old, white, and angry. But I think they weren’t just old, white, and angry; I think they were on a mission to save America from a muslim, Kenyan, dark-skinned, socialist/facist/whatever-ist armageddon.

Liberals and progressives haven’t been having much fun lately, so we’ve been retreating to our familiar Bush-era habits of sneering, cynical ironic detachment. Mine has been Dana Milbank’s new book about Beck, as you might have guessed from the theme of this post. Events like John Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity resonated because it struck the right balance between collective therapy and biting satire (as Stewart always does), but it was still a party for the kids who didn’t get invited to Beck’s. There were some kids in my neighborhood we didn’t let play X-Men with us. (I’m not sure why; kids are just mean.) And I don’t think those kids were having nearly as much fun.

Which brings me to the potentially frightening corollary to the fun theory. Our current media landscape makes it easier for the right to whip up this kind of fervor than it could ever be on the left. Beck invents a new impending apocalypse or rapture or fanciful America-imperiling cataclysm traceable to the sinister machinations of Woodrow Wilson at least once a week, and the other four nights he’s checkin in on calamities already in progress. He gets to use his imagination. And his fans get to feel like they’re confronting Magneto (whose outfit kinda suggests he’s behind the whole terrifying gay agenda) every time they go to the ballot box.

On the left, all we’ve got to rally the troops are real threats to the world as we know it. We’re gonna need some superpowers.

Why Advertising is More Influential When You Call It Advertising

What is advertising? There’s a Hey Whipple Squeeze This answer: controlled persuasion. And there’s a Don Draper answer: conspicuously compelled consumption. But another answer, one that spans Paul Lazarsfeld and Crispin Porter, is “influence.” Persuasion and influence are not the same thing. Macluhan would have distinguished the two as hot and cold—persuasion is hot and influence is cold. Advertising can be either, but our media, until recently, have favoured the hot over the cold. And not just the ads; persuasion has been beating influence up and down our mediascape since FDR’s fireside chats. So what changed? Advertising becomes persuasion when it tears down the fourth wall and loudly, audaciously, unsubtly calls itself advertising.

I listen to a technology podcast call This Week in Tech that’s produced by Leo Laporte. It’s a roundtable format featuring conversations between members of California’s tech-media axis. People like Jason Calicanis join in for kicks. Listeners number in the millions, but since many download episodes via bittorrent, it’s impossible to know their numbers with any certainty. Which is one of the two reasons its so surprising that the show has successfully attracted and retained advertisers. The other is that the members of the panel openly talk and about the advertising break when it happens. There’s even a running joke that when it’s time for the host to talk about the advertiser, one of the regular panelists, John Dvorak, leaves to “baste his meat.” There’s no subtext, no attempt at seamless integration with the content. The host periodically just says, “time for our ad; ok, here it is: we’d like to thank…”

In our media-saturated world, we’ve all become better at separating signals from noise and one of the trends that seems to accompany our collective tuning out of advertising is an increased emphasis on integrating content and distribution, message and medium, ad and ed. This trend is based on a smart premise: advertising needs to cool off; we need a little less persuasion and a little more influence. But what if the relationship between these two modes of advertising is less linear than we think? What if we can achieve the same shift from persuasion to influence unsubtly? Content producers are determined to preserve the separation of church and state that we hold so dear, so we’re suspicious of anything that looks like the blurring of this line. And we should be; just watch five minutes of Transformers if you’re wondering why. Michael Bay’s way isn’t good for content producers who want to preserve their integrity; wouldn’t it be great if there were another way?

The other way is exemplified by TWiT and by Gizmodo. Last week, when I arrived at Giz my eyes were assailed by a page awash in garish red. At first I thought it had been taken over by the Chinese, as my beloved Onion (hilariously) had been this summer. Worse, it turned out. It was Budweiser that had consumed my favourite gadget site. They sold everything; it was all Budweiser, with ads running amok all over the page. And I felt completely indifferent. Hey, everyone’s gotta make a buck, right? The thing we thought we’d have to sacrifice—the explicit identification of ads—is exactly what we should embrace, and to the extreme. Sell it all, every last pixel. Be unsubtle about it and, if you’re not selling your integrity,  your fans won’t fault you. They won’t be persuaded of anything, but they might be influenced.

Yeah, but how many Ahmadinejad supporters tweet?

The unfolding of the #iranelection protests over the weekend has been a coup for Twitter, mostly because the tweetosphere was the channel through which the best information about the election (theft) aftermath was emerging. The now-famous Saturday CNN fail further emphasized the advantage tweet-based news-gathering holds over the oh-so-80s stringers, reporters, cameras, and satellites paradigm: immediacy, agility, redundancy, and authenticity. So it’s settled then, Twitter was on fire while CNN was re-running an inane Larry King interview with some meathead from American Chopper. Twitter succeeds where old media fails.

Well, no. Here’s why: Twitter aggregates the observations and opinions of people who tweet. Sometimes people who tweet have something to say that isn’t getting heard, like when their government cracks down on old media. But all social media is subject to structural biases. Obama dominated Facebook last November because his campaign benefited from broad social and cultural – in other words, structural – affinities with the medium. Ahmadinejad supporters simply don’t tweet, so in a Western mediascape where Fareed Zakaria is  a day late and a source short, we hear from the reform-oriented, urban, iphone-wielding (SMS was blocked so most tweets were coming through smartphone apps) intelligentsia.

When re-tweeting replaces reporting – whether because newsrooms are slashing their foreign bureaus or because a cabal of mullahs are restricting  media – structural biases are ignored. Mousavi’s supporters took to the streets by the hundreds of thousands yesterday; their voices deserve a medium that can penetrate the theocracy’s digital curtain. But how can we claim we’re witnessing the triumph of disintermediation when the only sound we hear is a chorus of tweets?

I’ve been meaning to Check that out: Celebrating à la carte culture

The holidays are when we’re reminded that we live in an age of plenty. And I’m not talking about food or shelter; we’re free from cultural want, the important stuff. I listen to most of my rear-end top ten lists (Slate’s, NPR’s, The New Yorker’s) as spoken word, podcasted. It’s the first new medium that is structurally, ontologically tailored to our new habits of consumption. Podcasting is designed for time shifting—I listen when I get around to it, when I have nothing better to do. I’m so flush with media, I have to squeeze it into the few remaining un-entertained cracks in my life.

Top ten lists, podcasted or otherwise, are a thriving genre. So much so, actually, that I could use a top ten list of top ten lists. And I don’t think it’s because the Internet is conditioning readers to consume more condensed, distilled, list-ified information. I think it’s because people are more able to curate their culture consumption. I like TV and I like music, so I have a lot of conversations with friends about what to consume. And recently, I’ve noticed myself saying “I’ve been meaning to check that out.” A lot. My procrastination habit, alarmingly, has migrated to my media consumption. Don’t as how long my Netflix queue is.

I don’t think I’m the only one telling my friends that I’ve been meaning to watch or listen to something. I think we’re all saying it a lot more and I think it’s a trend worth noticing. Whether by TiVo, Surf the Channel, Bit Torrent, or iTunes, everyone’s consuming media on their own time. And that’s a good thing for our culture. We’re experiencing a major contraction in broadcasting—with the networks cutting scripted content and replacing it with the cheap stuff, like Jay Leno and (appallingly) Mama’s Boys—because broadcasting is inefficient. It relies on passive consumers grazing aimlessly for content. Sometimes we would find something great and make a point of watching it next week, but why bemoan the loss of “appointment TV,” when all that’s changed is that we no longer have to make an appointment?

I can’t remember the last time I paddled out on my remote control for a good ol’ fashioned channel surf. I’m embarrassed that my preferred mode of procrastination used to be the act of looking for media. Now I have a surplus of media with which to procrastinate by actually watching or listening and it’s the discovery of more new, great content that I’m putting off. Ignoring, for argument’s sake, how the content is paid for, am I not better off? As a culture, we can stand to lose a little fat, so let’s stop grazing.

Have you seen this video?

Have you seen this video? How ‘bout this one? Or this one? If you’re reading this, you’ve likely had dozens of these little nuggets of YouTrivia show up unannounced your inbox over the past 18 months. More often than not with a subject line like “you have to see this…” Well here’s one you probably haven’t seen. (That’s right, you’re hearing God Bless the U.S.A. by Lee Greenwood.) David Plotz, editor of Slate, mentioned it in a December podcast and I thought he deserved a shout-out for noticing what seems like a persuasive example of the limitations of social media as ideology-agnostic cultural Cuisinarts.

This was seen by more than 13 million people. 13 million, 20,000 of whom clicked the link on Rush Limbaugh’s site. And neither of us was one of them. Why not? I guess no one thought we’d be interested. Sarah Silverman’s hilariously vulgar plea for intergenerational political dialogue among the chosen people? Now that sounds like it would be more up our shared alley. I think about a dozen people sent me that one. Here’s the point: Sure, the social transmission of media is breaking down some cultural walls, but it’s reinforcing others.

About six months ago, my thesis supervisor, a confirmed liberal of the Daily Kos/Nation sort, told me she’d managed to get herself into a conservative email chain. Turns out her parents belong to that curious species of American who votes Republican no matter what buffoon is on the ticket. I read a few of the emails and I felt like I’d just stolen the enigma machine. Just as I suspected: they actually think he’s a Muslim!

The tubes can connect people who think differently, but they may actually be better at connecting people who think alike.

Enough! Time to get uppity

Thomas Paine’s Common Sense appealed to the collective reason of colonial America. Reason was very much in vogue at the time, with uppity intellectuals across the pond like Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau fermenting discontent and promoting radical ideas. You know, sort of like community organizers. Paine’s famous revolutionary pamphlet detailed grievances with the British monarchy and policy prescriptions (like armed revolt). It was all about change; change that rational Americans should embrace. But Paine’s rhetorical gift wasn’t his ability to persuade his reader to agree with his argument; it was his ability to persuade them he was pissed off. Righteously, unambiguously, inconsolably pissed of. And that they should be pissed off too.

Paine went to the trouble of introducing himself to his reader with four short paragraphs. (He’d only been chased out of the U.K. a few months earlier, so it was probably a necessity.) And he did so not with an even-tempered assurance that he was a reasonable man. No, he assured Americans that he could be motivated by passion. The uniquely inspired rhetorical maneuver of his text was his assertion it was entirely natural for him to be angry. That the British violated American “natural” rights, he argued, was “the concern of every man to whom nature hath given the power of feeling; of which class, regardless of party censure, is The Author.”

It would benefit Barack Obama enormously in these final weeks of the presidential campaign to learn the same trick. His even-tempered demeanor has served the Democratic candidate well as he introduced himself to the country, but it’s time he showed a little “power of feeling.” He has been so afraid to make himself vulnerable to Angry Black Man Jackson-Wright stereotyping he is abandoning the “natural” rhetorical advantage of change agents: righteous anger. The hardest hitting line of his very reasonable Democratic convention speech consisted of two syllables. “Enough.” Empathy is how great politicians win constituencies otherwise way out of their reach. (Bush had it and it looks like Palin has it.) And shared anger is a bountiful source of empathy.

So get pissed off, Senator. Your future constituents already are.

In Praise of Waffle(r)s

Waffles are delicious. That grid pattern? Sheer genius. Right up there with electricity and the printing press among the all time great inventions. If you distribute your syrup carefully, dribbling just a bit in every square, you can get precisely the right ratio of sweetness to doughyness in every single bite. Pancakes, with their consistent, unwavering smoothness, are fundamentally flawed: always either too much syrup per bite or too little. Pancakes know no moderation, no subtlety. A pancake is a unified, clearly defined thing and many consider its cohesiveness a virtue, but it is structurally predisposed against balance, against equilibrium.

If I could ask the two presidential candidates one question, I’d want to ask which they prefer, pancakes or waffles. Why? Because the one thing our politics needs more than anything else, more than campaign finance reform and de-sound-bite-ification combined, is a renewed appreciation for waffles, waffling, and wafflers. Now, I know a lot of people associate flipping and flopping with pancakes, but both are really properties of the waffle. And I’m pro flip-flop. JFK was a flip-flopper and a waffle man; that guy could not leggo his Eggo. His foreign policy was all over the map, not a hint of Goldwaterish “moral clarity.” And he did OK. How about Reagan? He flipped and flopped on a macro scale, yielding his campaign belligerence toward the USSR as he realized that he had a real negotiating partner in Gorbachev. Wafflers make great presidents. Unwavering consistency does not.

One of the great frustrations of this election for me is the anti-waffle media prejudice. The lessons producers and journalists seem to have learned from the 2004 election seem to be that the two great sins a democratic candidate can commit are a) windsurfing, or equivalent and b) waffling. Obama is constantly being lambasted for supposedly flipping and flopping on this or that issue. If you ask me, this is a symptom of newsrooms being hollowed out and replaced with a few interns who know how to do a Lexis Nexis search. It doesn’t take much to find a minor inconsistency when candidates are stumping three times a day for 18 months and the interwebs are cataloguing all of it. Cable news is a hungry beast. It needs to be fed.

Waffling, to me, means intellectual honesty. It means a willingness to understand opinions you don’t agree with. It means listening to people other than communications and media consultants. If Obama’s a flip-flopper, I say we’ll all benefit from a healthier politics and a tastier syrup distribution.

A Piece of Advice for John McCain

Dear John McCain,

Why hold back? The mood is right—the only thing Americans like better than a hero, is tearing one down. The only thing Americans like better than celebrity is manufactured infamy. He’s on top of his game: sinking three-pointers, striding around air force bases in hostile countries (too cool for body armor, looking quite fetching in sunglasses), and inspiring Europeans to wave the stars and stripes where for seven years they’ve been burning them. But the wings won’t melt by themselves. In fact, they don’t even seem to be made of wax. You’re going to have to shoot the SOB down. You know how to do that, don’t you?

No, I’m not talking about your Air Force service in Vietnam; I’m talking about your 2000 presidential campaign against a fresh-faced “compassionate conservative” named George W. Bush. (And his then-unknown sidekick, a gifted strategist named Karl Rove, who’d seemingly been bullied in middle school and taken to compensating by overeating and inventing sinister schemes for the undoing of his employer’s political rivals.) Didn’t you father an illegitimate black baby? I think I remember hearing that somewhere… Well, whatever, I’m getting sidetracked.  The point is that you’re running against a very unique candidate – never has there been a Democrat so difficult to slime publicly and so easy to slime covertly.  So turn ‘em loose; call Rush, Anne, Bill—I dunno—James Dobson? Is he on the list? Whatever; just ask W. what he does when he wants to convene the Justice League over a gay marriage amendment. There’s got to be some sort of secret signal.

The point is that you have to get everyone on board and up the ante a little. Here’s why: Obama is stagnant in the polls and failing to pull ahead despite your consistently pitiful performance and his surprising ability to hit nothing but net, even on issues outside of his extensive range of expertise (like Iraq) perpetually and with style. You’re making mistakes that would embarrass most fifth graders and closing in the polls.  Americans are telling pollsters that they just don’t know about this Muslim-y-sounding internationalist, but that you, the curmudgeony grey-haired white guy rambling through his old war stories to anyone who’ll listen, remind them of their good-natured (if ill-tempered) gran-pappy. You need to seize this moment.

Warmest regards,

Dave Godsall

P.S. Among the potential effects of this plan is a Barack Obama presidency. He’s stagnating in the polls because many Americans feel alienated by a strong campaign that looks, to the Fox viewer, like it’s being run for a coastal elite club to which they hold no membership. His numbers are weak because when these people see the coverage of Obama’s  worldwide #1 smash hit superstar week they’re predictably more inclined to read that chain email their crazy evangelical uncle sent them about how Obama’s going to start Koran instruction in public schools and appoint Louis Farrakhan Secretary of State. If you’re clumsy enough to expose too much of the slime and filth to the light of day you’ll show this Fox viewer something all Americans like: an underdog. Regardless of what Chris Matthews feels running up his leg, Obama is running against power more entrenched and more pervasive than the media’s.