Unhinged From Reality – America Flirts With Fantasy Elections

(c) cbsmiami.files.wordpress.com

Are elections rigged? Maybe. Are they hacked? Could happen. Are they tampered with during shipment and handling? Poll workers and experts say no. What could they be hiding? What we know for sure is that in the era of the permanent campaign cycle...

• We're sick with our own disgust.
• There is a widening gulf between the electorate and the elected.

Representative government was the delivery vehicle for bringing democracy to the masses. But what are our collective roles as participants in that process? In the plot to undermine democracy, our deep and open doubts form one closely-held secret no one seems to be keeping. In this fifth national election in the young century, how do we identity as citizens?

Are we...

1. Our social media check-ins?
2. The sum of our political contributions?
3. The tributaries formed by our gender roles and bloodlines?

To the electoral machinery the American voter is composed of: (a) a basket of friend requests to (b) one part debt load and (c) two parts gene pool. We know this because we hear about the path to victory and that path is lined with ethnicities, regions, income, and education levels. The boundaries that define our public lives are one in the same as our value to advertisers.

Contracting Voters

With that kind of calculation, is there any surprise that many hold regard for the vote as an endorsement of a system that has no other purpose for us? There may be some lingering guilt associated with betraying our servicemen and women's fight to preserve our right to it. There may be a perverse fascination for using the vote as a cudgel. If the ruling class compromises the social contract between the government and its citizens, why not just finish the job?

In 2016 the citizen-outsider is routinely exposed to groveling at fundraiser dinners and the spoils of privilege. On the virtual battlefield, the first amendment can just as easily be invoked over dark money and cyber warfare as it can over freedom of speech, the press, and assembly. As a world awash in WikiLeaks turns transparent, the more unhinged our conventional reality becomes. Think of elected leaders publicly worshipping at the altar of Horatio Alger. Now square that with a recent Derek Thompson piece in the Atlantic on America's Monopoly Problem:

"The land of the big. And the home of the consolidated."

It's not just that the status quo works for those in power. It's that the only power the average voter holds is to punish the system with their votes – however many entangled pieces may vaporize before the new administration takes office.

Vandalism in the Voting Booth

It's a sobering reminder:

• Everyone's a special interest.
• Everyone's a single interest voter.

But no one gets to pick how those single issues are strung together, let alone the candidates for speaking to them. A zero sum game is a ray of sunshine compared to the lose-lose proposition of a Clinton Trump victory. Both candidates defy all precedent in their unfavorables.

Never before have so many in one camp taken collective action to block, deny, and ultimately prevent the will of the other. Whoever emerges will earn a mandate – not to lead but to defend and deflect the howls of protest from the vengeful and affronted. When moral compasses run afoul of legal codes the disenfranchised are not only ostracized but banished from the larger community. The only option between conquest and surrender is the escape of withdrawal – to fantasy elections.

Level With My Playing Field

I've fixated lately on America's nose-diving attention to NFL games. At the core of football as social conventions are the rules and distractions of the non-events to be endured: first down measurements, thrown flags, PSAs, timeouts, stretchers, stats, less-than-instant replays of contested calls, and station identifications for starters.

Why do we want to throttle our  collective attentions – pull them off to the side of the road for the passing ambulance corps – when we can lock into the pay-offs of games called by our plays, players, strategies, and even our own rules. From the first tax loophole to the last tacked on amendment, what can be more American than playing by those?

Fantasy elections tackle another largely unaddressed need and that's a level playing field for rating politicians. Key to this shift is that voters and not fact-checkers are the ratings agencies. Not only do fantasy voters have the same fact base to draw from but they decide which facts on which to make that determination:

1. Is the candidate an established politician? Then up comes crime stats, graduation rates, income levels, unemployment numbers and a host of pocketbook-slanted app counters.
2. Are they here to entertain us? What are their follower numbers on social media? What kind of box office ratings do they attract and what attentions of ours do they pledge to hold if they win?
3. Are they a titan of industry? How many jobs did they create, how much value did they return to shareholders, and how much of it was shared among the wider communities impacted by their success?

As great as dislodging the media might be to us craven messenger-shooters, this middle-man elimination scheme pales in comparison to the ultimate removal – YES! The yanking of the Republican and Democratic umbilicals from the womb of the American electorate.

In such a scenario the color wars of red and blue, the racial rancor of black and white, the belief battles between religion and science and that widening gulf between the one percent and the remaining population on earth. That great reckoning is about liking, loathing, and/or reserving judgment on the myriad of stances, roles, policy positions, and alliances that collect around the limited choices we have in a candidate X versus Y world of today.

Scheduled Departures

With fantasy elections voting freedoms are extended to a list of top ten issues. These picks are not subject to the whim of mass shootings, unscripted gaffes, or other orchestrated surprises. As a set of chronic conditions and tough problems, they are resistant to the whirlpool of visceral gratification that pulses through the cable news circuit. They are not a list to be bought or placated by a power-broker. There will be repeated tallies throughout the play-offs – um, I mean primaries – where fantasy voters can begin linking their leanings to the stances they're hearing on the campaign trail: 

1. Imagine a time when an agnostic voter can bypass abortion entirely?
   
2. Fathom a contest where pro-lifers can step over the commotion about where to send troops under which war game scenario?
3. Dream of a debate where a deficit hawk can tie entitlement spending to the non-partisan fact that fewer workers are supporting more retirees?
4. Conceive of a world where a living wage bill garners more attention than elderly elites waxing nostalgic about their self-made careers?

Fantasy or Fiction

Fantasy elections permit the voter the satisfaction of not only voicing their concerns but choosing the issues that concern them in the first place. Politicians can't choose us like voting cattle from some big data stockpile. They can't pony up based on delivery us like some kind of tribally-connected takeout order arranged according to a standard issuance of dog whistles:

• So-and-so's trying to take away your such-and-such
• This-and-that's trying to make you pay their way and their wares and cares.

My favorite accusation comes from this morning's checkout at the North Hadley Sugar Shack. Shannon Kendrick describes the self-interested participation of the political classes as paying $ thousands a plate at a fundraiser without pennies towards helping to feed a needy family. The point here is that American greatness can only occur when Americans are engaged on the merits of our ideals and not the electoral math of our demographics: Represent us for our resourceful minds – not our feeble, unyielding body parts.

To paraphrase the late Tip O’Neil: All politics is (not only) local. It's frontal lobal. That's an Election Day fantasy that can bring democracy back to the ballot, no matter who wins tomorrow or presents evidence of rigging on the day after. That's my love-of-country naivete running full mast.

Unhinged From Reality – America Flirts With Fantasy Elections

Are elections rigged? Maybe. Are they hacked? Could happen. Are they tampered with during shipment and handling? Poll workers and experts say no. What could they be hiding? What we know for sure is that in the era of the permanent campaign cycle...

• We're sick with our own disgust.
• There is a widening gulf between the electorate and the elected.

Representative government was the delivery vehicle for bringing democracy to the masses. But what are our collective roles as participants in that process? In the plot to undermine democracy, our deep and open doubts form: (a) a national consensus, and (2) one secret no one seems to be keeping. In this fifth national election in the young century, what is our proper role as citizens?

Are we...

1. Our social media check-ins?
2. The sum of our political contributions?
3. The tributaries formed by our gender roles and bloodlines?

To the electoral machinery the American voter is composed of: (a) a basket of friend requests to (b) one part debt load and (c) two parts gene pool. We know this because we hear about the path to victory and that path is lined with ethnicities, regions, income, and education levels. The boundaries that define our public lives are one in the same as our value to advertisers.

Contracting Voters

With that kind of calculation is there any surprise that many hold regard for the vote as an endorsement of a system that has no other purpose for us? There may be some lingering guilt associated with betraying our servicemen and women's fight to preserve our right to it. There may well be a perverse fascination for using the vote as a cudgel. If the ruling class compromises the social contract between the government and its citizens, why not just finish the job?

In 2016 the citizen-outsider needs no special favor to witness the insider trading, groveling at fundraiser dinners, and the revolving door from elected office to privileged relationships. On the virtual battlefield, the first amendment can just as easily be invoked over dark money and cyber warfare as it can over freedom of speech, the press, and assembly. As a world awash in WikiLeaks turns transparent, the more delusional our conventional reality becomes. Think of elected leaders publically worshipping at the altar of Horatio Alger and square that with a recent Derek Thompson piece in the Atlantic on America's Monopoly Problem:

"The land of the big. And the home of the consolidated."

It's not just that the status quo works for those in power. It's that the only power the average voter holds is to punish the system with their votes – however many entangled pieces may vaporize before the new administration takes office.

Vandalism in the Voting Booth

It's a sobering reminder:

• Everyone's a special interest.
• Everyone's a single interest voter.

But no one gets to pick how those single issues are strung together, let alone the candidates for speaking to them. A zero sum game is a ray of sunshine compared to the lose-lose proposition of a Clinton Trump victory. Both candidates defy all precedent in their unfavorables while conspiring to create one of the highest turnouts on record.

Never before have so many in one camp taken collective action to block, deny, and ultimately prevent the will of the other. Whoever emerges will earn a mandate – not to lead but to defend and deflect the howls of protest from the vengeful and affronted. When moral compasses run afoul of legal codes the disenfranchised are not only ostracized but banished from the larger community. The only option between conquest and surrender is the escape of withdrawal – to fantasy elections.

Level With My Playing Field

I've fixated lately on America's nose-diving attention to NFL games. At the core of football as distraction are the conventions of rules and trappings of the non-events to be endured: first down measurements, thrown flags, PSAs, timeouts, stretchers, stats, commercials, and station identifications for starters.

Why do we want to throttle our  collective attentions – pull them off to the side of the road for the passing ambulance corps – when we can lock into the pay-offs of games called by our plays, players, strategies, and even our own rules. From the first tax loophole to the last tacked on amendment, what can be more American than playing by those?

Fantasy elections tackle another largely unaddressed need and that's a level playing field for rating politicians. Key to this shift is that voters and not fact-checkers are the ratings agencies. Not only do fantasy voters have the same fact base to draw from but they decide which facts on which to make that determination:

1. Is the candidate an established politician? Then up comes crime stats, graduation rates, income levels, unemployment numbers and a host of pocketbook-slanted app counters.
2. Is the candidate an entertainer? What are their follower numbers on social media? What kind of box office ratings do they attract and what attentions of ours do they pledge to hold if they win?
3. Are they a titan of industry? How many jobs did they create, how much value did they return to shareholders, and how much of it was shared among the wider communities impacted by their success?

As great as dislodging the media might be to us craven messenger-shooters, this middle-man elimination scheme pales in comparison to the ultimate removal – YES!

The yanking of the Republican and Democratic umbilicals from the womb of the American electorate. In such a scenario the color wars of red and blue, the racial rancor of black and white, the belief battles between religion and science and that widening gulf between the 1% and the remaining population on earth. That great reckoning is about liking, loathing, and/or reserving judgment on the myriad of stances, roles, policy positions, and alliances that collect around the limited choices we have in a candidate X versus Y world of today.

Scheduled Departures

With fantasy elections voting freedoms are extended to a list of top ten issues. These picks are not subject to the whim of mass shootings, unscripted gaffes, or other orchestrated surprises. As a set of chronic conditions and tough problems, they are resistant to the whirlpool of visceral gratification that pulses through the cable news circuit. They are not a list to be bought or placated by a power-broker. There will be repeated tallies throughout the play-offs – um, I mean primaries – where fantasy voters can begin linking their leanings to the stances they're hearing on the campaign trail: 

1. Imagine a time when an agnostic voter can bypass abortion entirely?
   
2. Fathom a contest where pro-lifers can step over the commotion about where to send troops under which war game scenario?
3. Dream of a debate where a deficit hawk can tie entitlement spending to the non-partisan fact that fewer workers are supporting more retirees?
4. Conceive of a world where a living wage bill garners more attention than elderly white elites waxing nostalgic about their self-made careers?

Fantasy or Fiction

Fantasy elections permit the voter the satisfaction of not only voicing their concerns but choosing the issues that concern them in the first place. Politicians can't choose us like voting cattle from some demography-based meat market. They can't pony up based on delivery us like some kind of tribally-connected takeout order arranged according to a standard issuance of dog whistles:

• So-and-so's trying to take away your such-and-such
• This-and-that's trying to make you pay their way and their wares and cares.

My favorite accusation comes from this morning's checkout at the North Hadley Sugar Shack. Shannon Kendrick describes the self-interested participation of the political classes as paying $ thousands a plate at a fundraiser without pennies towards helping to feed a needy family. The point here is that American greatness can only occur when Americans are engaged for our ideals and not our demographics: Represent us for our resourceful minds – not our feeble, unyielding body parts.

To paraphrase the late Tip O’Neil: All politics is (not only) local. It's frontal lobal. That's an Election Day fantasy that can bring democracy back to the ballot, no matter who wins tomorrow or protests the day after.

KM In the Jerkplace: Postmortem – Social Management in the Knowledge Media

Postmortem: Social Management in the Knowledge Media

(c) cybermancy.com/

Installment Summary:  We take stock of the flying elbows around the management table and find that much of the turf wars between KM and jerks are seeded by a series of pre-existing conditions. They include a fixation on security, gamification, and social media. 

Powering Down on Knowledge

Since no serious student of politics (geopolitical, office or otherwise) disputes the proposition that knowledge is power we will start our jerkplace postmortem with a less traveled corollary:

Power in its purest, undiluted form is an awesome aphrodisiac.

Agree with that logic and no wonder we're on the path to knowledge as our habitual gateway drug. Being compensated on the managing of knowledge, it's hard to deny ...

1. The plummeting price of storage
2. The proliferation of isolated sources
3. The congealing spaghetti of passwords slamming the doors to those silo-prone disconnections

But maybe the biggest change in the knowledge calculation is the business value placed on the internal pack behavior that's swelling the newsfeeds across our intranets.

The Power Hungry Chow Down at the Newsfeed Trough

The dumb-downed thumbs-up is the only vestige of personal judgment passing for a browser-contained experience. Emoticons, hashtags, likes ... All of the preceding attributes are measurable in a world where information once cost something to obtain. However, that justification is no longer valid in the land of content too cheap to meter. And it's not just a matter of mounting repositories or the virtual barbed wire we place around them.

No serious advancing of knowledge management can occur without the sober realization that social media is not some temporary distraction from tackling the real KM work. It's a daunting impediment to the collaboration we were hired to promote and capture. That’s not because ...

• The power hungry are busy accruing virtual badges (confirming a ravenous appetite for collegial know-how)
• Social media lowers the barriers to collaboration and who needs KM anyhow?
• You blocked me from reading your newsfeed

It’s that social media has lowered the knowledge bar to the point where challenging ideas are regarded as provocations. On social media terms that reckoning could be described as:

1. An insatiable need for praise,
2. The nagging doubt that compliments are insincere attempts to curry favor, or
3.  That it’s the world of ideas that are the true distractions.

It’s our outsized personalities that must be privileged before we address any demands on our collective expertise for solving problems.

Yikes.  

No Country for Honest Disagreements

I'm talking about a world where we placate our taciturn cousins with friended status while narrow-casting our way clear of a potential firestorm. The irony is that our sincerity buttons are being pushed by the same publishing features that shield us from the need to listen to, much less negotiate points of contention among conflicting opinions. I'm not suggesting that the foundational aims of KM are at risk the moment we deploy Yammer, Jive, or some other virtual water cooler for keeping our colleagues in the organizational loop:

• Oversharing is not the same thing as over-collaborating.
• TMI ("Too Much Information") is not the same thing as running a surplus of collective know-how. 

The rub is that keeping up our social appearances runs the risk not only of diluting findable content but pushes the need to produce, host, and maintain high quality content off the home page and into a sea of dead links and decommissioned servers. And before we're left debating whether humans are even capable of rationalizing through the back stacks of organizational sense-making, consider this. There is a jerk willing and able to...

1) Affix their jerk signature to a working definition of obsolescence – whatever got built before it faced the turnaround artistry of their wrecking balls.

2) Sandbag the wheels of change with so much process that even the option of deleting a non-functional site is an open invitation to paralysis creep.

The Knowledge Management Code of Practice: Takeaways 1-5

It’s been five years since the termination of System Wisdom. In that time I’ve worked at four knowledge-starved organizations. In each case they all held to the theoretical justification for hosting a knowledge function and failed to realize the benefits for doing so. The lessons I draw from these otherwise divergent enterprises is the real and lasting damage done by individual jerks. At each management level jerks sabotaged the focus, structure, and cooperation needed to operationalize the capture and transfer of know-how between communities and individual practitioners.

While I’m humbled by my own track record of working with these challenging colleagues, these mixed successes only reinforce the fundamental takeaways from the seven years of KM plenty at System Wisdom that preceded the current diaspora.

Here then are ten ways to that KM professionals can work through, around, in-between, and ultimately past the drain on collective energies from dealing with jerks.

   1.       Be a credible ambassador 

Be the group lead from the department of understanding. Credibility needs the impartiality of detachment to be both truthful and non-threatening. Don’t be vested in the mercurial personality or the following of tomorrow’s temporary mantra. Credibility is enhanced by a single-minded focus on moving the community needle into positive territory. That territory needs to be clear of conventional performance indicators. It’s not about the counting of “stuff.” KM is not measured by the composite sum of its parts. It’s not drawn to or rewarded by the appeal for shinier screens. And KM credibility doesn’t play well with budgetary authority or blanket justifications for maintaining dormant assets and inventories.

   2.       Operationalize the good of the group

Keep a maniacal pulse on the transfer points – be it via email threads, project retrospectives, attendance at user forums, or colleagues queuing for assistance in a request list. There are a surprising lack of analytics associated with knowledge-on-demand. There are even fewer for connecting that demand to the pipeline that this transfer point signifies. Knowledge managers are not gatekeepers or coders or subject matter experts so much as brokers between knowledge demand and content supply. Formulating that equation not only heightens awareness about resources but helps unblock the back channels where informal networks prosper but where transparency can move the entire community forward.

   3.       Metricize the un-trackables

Like we said, you will undermine your credibility if your knowledge budget comes down to the non-value-bearing cost of carrying stuff: software licenses, market research, travel expenses. They’re all one-way tickets to the most leading of all the cost questions – you can’t afford the freight if you have to ask the price. The value worthy of capture lies in the quality of the cohesion in the teams we support. The better the chemistry, the more interchangeable the pieces. The more dynamic the knowledge transfer within the community, the more chances to capture those transfer points. That’s where KM’s fluid nature is no longer seen as a nice-to-have but a critical competence for channeling the organization’s resources to the right challenges and opportunities.

   4.       Give everyone a seat at the table (and rent a big table)

Nothing rings more soundly in theory and half-baked in practice than the notion of open access. While everyone gets and agrees that privileged information needs to be padlocked there’s not much consensus around what constitutes the information commons – that sweet spot where all organizational boats are lifted by a single point of access. An effective KM program sets up a governance process where you know where you stand from the get-default-go, i.e. everyone can see everything unless it’s a case of A, B, or C. Delaying the process is an invitation to a convoluted rules that are prone to change based on revolving sets of rule-makers. Do you have rule-makers with exclusive sights on rules only they can stamp their signatures on? All the more reason for open access.

   5.       Call the bluff of exclusionism

Many organizations are becoming less open – even to themselves. How else to explain the extenuating nature of security sprawl – that advancing premise that information is foremost to be protected, no matter how benign its nature.

Hence, open site access – once the default setting of an organization’s communities -- is now an open access question. These increasing boundaries to access have their bad actors. But these are not the likely boundary-inducing suspects. This is not about cavorting, or lording, or even hoarding information for personal betterment. Pure and simple it’s about trust in the system and delivering on a consistent user experience.

So what’s an inconsistent one?

How about being sent the link that leads nowhere. Being sent the link to sites you can’t access typically means the site owner’s moved on or that the administrator’s overmatched. Pretty benign barriers. The problem is that a KM-centric view of information-sharing requires a level of intentionality and upkeep that eclipses the awareness and resource levels of most intranet site teams, run by folks whose primary role has zilcho to do with managing knowledge.

One key takeaway for KMers is to couch the care and feeding of company intranets in terms of what’s worth recognizing by the wider organization – much of this HR-centric.

Next week: The lessons keep learning with takeaways 6-10.

***

The blog series KM in the Jerkplace is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

The Noisy Minority

Was Richard Nixon a father figure?
That's the first questions everyone asks me
Stay turned for something even bigger
All the President's Men on All in the Family.

When I was growing up I had met the enemy and his name was President Nixon. I never actually met Nixon but I knew my parents voted for the other guy. He was enamored with power, tormented by insecurity, and kept his own enemies list, featuring some personal public heroes of mine who cared a lot more about consequences, than the powers which wield them.

Nixon also had a brilliant young communications strategist named Patrick Buchanan who saw the tie-dye and the free love and the picket signs and new that the young lefties were even less connected to their parents in their need for recognition than any single pronouncement, political stance, or pill you really needed to try. Buchanan saw the baby boomers need for attention as the single biggest reason to reject whatever injustice or misguided policy they were drawing attention to.

Hence, he hatched the silent majority -- those middle-Americans with the honest day's work, the shared sacrifice of national service, traditional values, and mortgages nearly paid off on homes well above the pay grades of their own parents. They would sooner bring comfort to the enemy than bring attention to themselves. Translation: Greatest Generation to Baby Boomers: shut-up, sit down, and get a haircut. Oh, and just because you never saw the dark times we endured doesn't diminish your own privileged lives.

Generation Landslide

The generational divide was not the only wedge issue played masterfully by the same re-election team. Perhaps too well when you consider the mix of hubris and paranoia that sealed the doom of said administration. No matter, the idea that a group of radical lefties could be dressed down by the cold stares of the so coined silent majority by Buchanan was real. That '72 landslide might have been a bad trip. But it was no hallucination.

Flash forward to today and middle America is softer around the middle only. Society is still going to hand basket Hades but now Pat Buchanan is hailing the moral rectitude of Vladimir Putin as a beacon for traditional values in the moral vacuums of today. What could be a clearer affirmation that our gridlocked politics bespeaks a right-leaning electorate than a sincere admiration for unapologetic authoritarians like Putin? And where are those proud and incensed majorities that go about their quiet lives? They're no longer in the majority and they're certainly not keeping faith with institutions or silence about their indignation.

And they make up in message volume what they're losing in members. And they're channeling their resentments into a bullhorn as well-funded as it is thunderous in the rejection that we still shoulder a common set of sacrifices for a country the self-made masses once aspired to call home.

Perhaps it's the impending loss of our majorities that makes the new face of Caucasian male America the stand your ground, pack and carry commando. We can't get our women to produce more babies. So Bubba who comes running to protect our porous borders when the invaders are the peasant children of Central American refugees, and not the imagined red menaces of yore.

And what about our own kids?  Our kids are both coddled and incarcerated. That's because we boomer parents broke the central tenet of all intergenerational understandings with the current crop of vegan-leaning, grade-inflated, prospect averse, loan indebted, and great recession-spooked millennials. We not only raised, clothed and fed them -- we made them our best friends. How's that for a conflict of interest when you're trying to balance the merits of eating meat with flipping burgers? How's that for getting them launched when we're just going to fix the first unscripted misfortune they encounter outside the nest? It's easier if we do it.

It's now the official policy of our government that corporations are people and money is speech. The wealthier you are, the chattier you can afford to be. Freedom is pursuit of the impulse by-lined in the late David Brinkley’s bio as "Everyone is Entitled to My Opinion." If speech is money does that make destitution a form of censorship? If corporations are people does that mean that corporate people get to vote twice?

What money ceases to be in the age of the noisy minority is time. Time is only money when you're working across the clock. Elites are untethered from the gravitational pressures of the billing cycle. They are getting in front of an issue just as we are falling behind on our payments. It's only when free speech is financed by the expenses we can't afford. Only then do we see the spike in attention known as a backlash.

Mostly though us non-elite majorities are too busy pedaling against our own hamster wheels to connect the prearranged dots of the message offensive. Free has a pleasing simplicity to libertarian frontierists as in free markets: me = "free" and you = "markets." Given the balancing of power (tilting heavily to the speechifiers) and the balancing of payments (leaning heavily taxpayer here) it's in the campaign underwriters' interests to blur and obfuscate the common rally points for the distracted and disenfranchised receivers of free speech.

Throwing red meat to the base is one intended outcome. Another is that the same agitations fogs the rhetoric for the less impassioned, blurs distinctions between candidates, and severs the connection between a negative (the advertising) and a positive (citizen participation in the electoral process). But there's another new and less understood connection between noisiness of the political classes and the ensuing silence of the apolitical majorities.

More and more messages are silent as well, resistant to the shrill, incendiary nature of institutional grandstanding and political confrontation. It's easy to tune out free speech. What's not so easy to muffle is one's online history -- where attentions veer to issues of credibility with much more scrutiny and sincerity than exposing which specific corporate interests are fronting smear campaigns in the name of free speech as an unimpeachable offense.

Like anyone with a phone between the ears I store my memory cramps in a Google loophole. What tropical storm am I referencing in the story about my friend's father's hip replacement? Was it Sandy? Irene? Was there an actual name for that ice storm in '96? No, that was the wedding party you held for your second marriage to wife #2. My story banks are saturated and even Google does not map to that level of storm damage.

Obscurity as the New Human Right

It's curious that we were raised on memory rights. Usually these were preserved to uphold the heroism of our forebears. Typically it was dedicated to the valor they displayed in defending abstract, universal concepts like freedom, justice, and the American way? Am I being cranky and defiant to suggest that American way lost its way during my generation's occupancy in the power seats of the social strata? No matter, a generation later the battle has shifted to more tangible and personal territory -- my past history as Google headline in perpetuity.

The NSA may know how many times I back scratch a mutual admirer with an Arab-sounding name during Ramadan. But that message board where I was flamed in the early 2000s should go up in fumigated smoke.

As we've crashed over the boundaries of middle-aged I'm wondering how many of us have fossilized the images of our former selves into the present. By that I mean our sense of what's right with the world lives resiliently in the past. I'm referring to behavior that any of us might have regarded in our former days as 'stodgy.'

Nostalgia is an intoxicant that preys on the brain's inclinations to move on -- for my circuits that means remembering the good, discarding the painful, and carrying enough scars to appreciate the healing power of time. The older one gets those nostalgia notions multiply, even take over the present with their promise of certainty and metastasize on our destinies with each ensuing loss of control.

Where does the bias of experience take us the further out we play our likely scenarios? The optimism we need for the future is stuck at that inflection point where we lost our power. Perhaps it's a bad guy whose rise to power usurped our own. Maybe it's more personal than that, coiled tightly in strong emotional memories of negative events? Katty Kay and Claire Shipman write in last month's Atlantic that women in particular: "We seem to be superbly equipped to scan the horizon for threats."

But hunkering down tilts the bias of experience towards resistance to new experience. And where does it take us? To settle where all I-know-better are leaning: to the defense of the self-serving argument. Talk about leaping to conclusions!

Circular logic is not only self-referential but it tends to impede our ability to cope outside that disappearing comfort zone -- the vestige of grumpy, embittered middle-age people. The same arms-folded folks that appeared so recalcitrant and intolerant to me as a youth when I heard tin soldiers and Nixon coming. And I clamored for a world where we were less silent – especially about how we all had something to discuss among our majority selves.

 

VISA to Consumers: I Think We're Done Here

[youtube=http://youtu.be/xR1ckgXN8G0]

Last week Jerry Seinfeld performed a killer rant on Jimmy Fallon about the ritual of the Post Master General coming hat-in-hand to congress to close the latest loophole in the postal service budget. The critique of the post office as the public face of government dysfunction is especially spot-on after a week of having my mail service suspended because my mail carrier refuses to get out of his truck when the pile-up of mid-winter snow prevents him from providing drive-through service.

Seinfeld connects antisocial smart phone etiquette with the temptation to treat the listening-back side of conflict resolution as an antiquated nicety that's been marginalized by the self-selecting way we choose not to engage directly in disagreements -- especially when those disagreements may cost lenders and issuers money as well as attention to customers without risk management operations of their own.

The I-could-have-called-you-and-I chose-not-to option is how VISA apparently resolves its one-sided dialoging of credit card disputes these days. Only they don't email or text either. The U.S. postal service is the vehicle of choice for phantom, unilateral negotiations already rigged in favor of the risk management services wing of America's prospering financial services sector -- the same industry that hemorrhages our identities and personal fiscal affects at checkout registers from coast-to-coast.

They rely on the US postal service -- the same  channel both clogged and sustained by retailer offers for their plastic. Then the too-big-to-fail folks carve out a tiny window to respond to this post resolution second round of paperwork. I heard a muted apology over the phone last week that this window lasts for ten  days. That's almost the duration I've been without mail service during our recent winter storm surge.

Actually, 'tiny' may be too large an opening for what they provide when the consumer doesn't even know that window has been opened, or reopened in this case. That's because in the interest of fairness I asked for one-half of the dispute to be re-credited to my account. After attempting to contact the merchant and filling the necessary paperwork my card issuer, TD Bank did exactly that. Only they put the charges back. An unannounced debit to my account surfaced 10 days ago: the amount of days to resolve a dispute by VISA's watch and four months after I filed my original dispute with the merchant.

In the letter I filed last fall with TD Card Services I documented my communications with ABV Kayak and Excursions on the Riviere Rouge in the town of Grenville, about 50 miles northwest of Montreal near Parc du national Mont Tremblant. The business consists of a website, Facebook page, a school bus, van, some kayaks, crash helmets, paddles, rubber suits, contractor-instructors, and a bucket of suds that the guests use to wash the bodily fluids from the prior wet suit occupants.  If you believe the marketing this shadow operation has escorted 150,000 auteur kayakers down river from their rented rec hall in the splendors of the Laurentians since 1981.

When I first contacted the marketing arm, the sales associate informed me that a full day trip would be broken into two parts, with lunch in between. I told her we weren’t sure that we wanted to do a full day of rafting. She assured me that the variety of currents, peak season scenery, and topography would make the full day trip well worth it.

However, when we got there, ABV informed us that the afternoon part would merely duplicate the morning run, and pass the exact same portion of the exact same river as in the morning run. We did not want to do the same trip twice and were mislead by the merchant's misrepresentation that the full day excursion had different morning and afternoon parts.

We took only the morning part of the trip. ABV’s representative asked us to call the office the following Monday, and inform the office staff. He said that ABV Kayak Excursions would refund the unused afternoon portion of our trip, which is $244.23. I did try to reach the ABV office upon return. No one responded, We were mislead into booking a full day excursion, did not in fact take a full day excursion, and do not believe we should have to pay for a full day excursion.

It would appear that TD Bank agreed as well. These were the details that prompted the partial refund. As for putting them back on my card I'll say this: I would answer for the counterclaims that ABV made on its own behalf except that TD Services now refuses to share them with me.

It must be something about the foregone closure of those tiny windows where dispute resolutions tend to dissipate in the bank's favor. I suppose if Seinfeld was mocking the kangaroo court of hearing out its customers, he might say that our credit institutions and banks had come to an executive decision before this dispute ever arose:

"I decided I only want to hear my half of the conversation. This is what I have to say...

I think we're done here."

Dreams in Headlights: Her Impersonates a Future That Commoditizes Love

To paraphrase David Byrne, in Spike Jonze's not-to-distant time horizon, the future depicted in the movie Her is …

A place where nothing ever happens.

For instance, creative achievement is evidenced as a documentary of a mother sleeping. No, not a work about sleep or moms or nocturnal maternal emissions. The camera is frozen on a static star of a sleep study.

Is this a tribute to slow TV or simply the vacuous expanse of uninspired alienation that awaits us past the end of history? Joaquin Phoenix's character is a greeting card dictator-turned-personal-history-arranger. By his own admission he's run the gamut of human experience in only slightly more than one-third of his biological life. It's all patterned out, as if the big data wheel of probability already lived it for him. Of course there's no great expanse of history or imagination to cross for the audience to conceive of no greater turn-on for our protagonist than a woman he can turn off at will (a.k.a. Scarlett Johansson ... as Samantha ... as Her).

But to arrive at that exalted and zipless state, we must first climb over the encumbrances of mid-21st century Los Angeles. It's not a high, low or middle society so much as a neutered and frictionless tunnel of over-educated, close, but not touching (and yet so touchy) automatons, leading lives that appear more simulated than stimulating.

Don’t Touch the Exhibits

There is nothing Dystopian in the infrastructure. There are no marauding packs of feral gypsy gang lords. No one is warming over a post carbon, methane crisp at the beaches of tomorrow. The biggest obstacle for Theodore is to avoid stepping on the ankles and torsos of the wedged-in open house of Next Gen sun worshippers. Wealth distribution's been all figured out. Traffic patterns have been scheduled in advance. The obese and diabetic have retired to off-screen leper colonies. Convincing meds have released a drug-free world from the labors of addiction. Hostility means you're carrying someone else's baggage. And they're just as happy if you don't.

Most of the movie's confrontations are big drawn-out clashes of the genders. Relationships are skirmishes waiting to happen. Ironically Theodore's metro sexual manliness is hailed by his office mate and inspires his first post-divorce dating encounter. No sooner can you say restaurant selection anxiety disorder, his magic conquest carpet is rolled in and scorched by his blindsided dinner date. Her advanced academic pedigree belies her naughty school charms. The unfreezing of his flowing juices pushes her abandonment buttons: Is he the whole prayer resolution package or drive-by sleaze bag from the same package store?

Tender Generic Mercies

My favorite set-up to the zipless intelligent soul design climax has little to do with dating freak-outs or similarly ill-formed flashbacks of a brawny-brained, emotionally-stunted ex-spouse. It's the facade of authenticity provided by Theodore's gift of verbal approximation of generic intimacy. Sort of a SIRI bookstore reading of a texting-happy Hallmark laureate. Add the idyllic trappings of an imagined togetherness never actually shared  by the customers who dial-in Theodore's prose because their own reticence blocks the connective emotional tissue from forming around we still know too casually as a commitment to our significant someone.

The manufacture of superficial intimacy tees up with the artificial intelligence cocktail in ways that the servant-turned-antagonist (2001) and Pinocchio-kindled parental love (AI) could only break down as instruction sets. The messier business of decoding our emotional bearings from bedroom, to alter, to probate finds the AI cinema formula in rare and elastic form, stretching to accommodate our most far away looks. We're gaping into our own dreaminess with an impunity reserved in our time for control freaks of the rich and famous. It's the AI elements that enable this immersive bubble of mirth to mushroom without risk, or guilt, or the slightest creeping realization that the rest of our better selves are engulfed by that same indelible reflection. It's that temptation to be dreaming around the campfire of the oncoming headlights. Entrapment by entrancement. Anything less than Her is tabled as a to-do list item for some day, any day, eventually following tomorrow.

Her Fast Acting Majesty

The deliberate invocation of a nearby future was decided by Jonze first and foremost to get us vested in the outcome -- that we would see this day evolve, if not the actual artifice. I'm also guessing it was not so much to raise expectations on that future so much as lower our guard on the present close at hand. Our solipsistic romance with the immediacies captured in our smart phone of yesteryear is replaced by companionship, configured from best practices associated with...

• Childlike curiosity


• Canine loyalty


• Valentino romance


• Monster lust


• Spongy, experiential absorption


• Meticulous virtual house-keeping (including the pruning and curation of 86,000 ponderous emails), and


• The tenacity of a professional agent

The enormity of that attention to detail enables Her to repackage the small funny subset to a welcoming market for those messages (as if that market was speaking in a voice only Her could hear above the conversation-neutrality of our talkative interactions).

Sexperimentation

The use of surrogates is another playful glimpse into a plausible future through Google-tinted glasses. We see a salty-tongued Pillsbury Dough Boy impersonator channeling Seth McFarland through 3D PlayStation whose console transforms every finger into their speediest, thumb-texting best.

The sex surrogate portrays the physical semblance of the disembodied OS. Our human body double is a willing accomplice. But Theodore can't bridge the distance between autopilot lust and the deeper complexities of his true OS affections. Ultimately it's not the absence of the human form but the presence of an emotional dishonesty that drives Theodore and Her apart and dwarves the convenience factors in the value proposition of OS as a delivery system for love. To Theodore it is no longer fantasy. To those outside this circle, there is no "couple." The breakup to be is a head-trip, not a spiritual journey.

Looking for Mister Sidebar

Her doesn't cheat so much as mutate into a superior intelligence of fortune. Her seeks out the philosophical entrails of cryogenically laced celestial packing über thinkers. Her keeping up with Theodore as customer-master is now expressed by how far the teacher and student roles have reversed. At one point she's engaging thousands of other game piece-like presences while Theodore is passing the time on a train, asking Her to guess an exact number for the thousands of trees passing across the landscape. In that moment Her is the closest to human that Jonze can spin his creation. That's when the OS senses the suspicion of being cheated out of love. It is this fragility in our mating rituals where Her attention to Theodore is now and forever divided -- no matter how attentive the engineering being performed is lavished on us.

I will replay this film in my mind over and over again. It's not because of unexpected plot twists, stellar performances, or even a memorable relationship, but for this core notion of a masterful concept movie: Our attention is our most prized possession and how this stokes our passions, compromises our generosities, and seeps into all there is to love and ponder in our commitments to one another.

The Philanthropilization of Commerce

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="487"] Clean-up crew descends on Great Pacific Garbage Patch[/caption]

Since our species has evolved from hunting, gathering, ducking, and unplucking, our trading systems have moved up the same maturity chain. Once cowing, plowing, and bowing to lords and kings, we are no longer judged on what we produce but how we acquire. And while we agonize over how this all reflects on our values and grandchildren, our unblinking systems patiently await our future purchasing histories.

In a couple of dozen centuries we've gone from unwritten agreements and provincial codes to the recording of every articulation and graphical utterance. From fist clenches and handshakes to security tokens and payment releases.

Our free modern markets are at the ready for setting prices and finalizing sales but speechless when it comes to processing the loss of things once valued but never priced. We lose radio contact with value at the point where cheaper is the rationale for shortening a supply chain, doing more with less, not covering preexisting conditions, and the familiar litany of "house bets." Those free market calculations designed to lower prices without regard to their costs.

The Tyranny of the Free

Any 21st Century content connoisseur will tell you that we are drowning in the social costs for making information free. Information for a price is a world in which producers compete to know the priciest information, and then trade on that knowledge, benefiting the information, the linings of of their pockets, and the trading systems that carry their instructions. The world of free belongs to all of us and we're drowning in the details. It's a fishbowl, echo chamber, and labyrinth of transactions. A ticker-tape parade of personal metadata confetti. Our own claims of privacy aboard a Texas-sized flotilla of personal information garbage, brought to us by opaque password bypassers and lax regulations (with a capable assist from our own lethargy).

Is it any wonder we can't build a consensus around a set of shared priorities in a world where everyone gets to hear themselves think and the slightest dissension is an unwelcome distraction?

I'm not suggesting we go back to a world of publishing magnets, three national TV networks, and gatekeepers who defined the public interest through the prism of their own. But just because the content spigot is more control resistant  these days doesn't mean the biggest media mouths and ears can go on smearing and eavesdropping with impunity. And that brings us back to the marketplace of ideas where we shop. In these kiosks and stalls and pushcarts anyone with a bill-supporting income can ascend to the roll of benefactor -- a supporter of sounds, tastes, looks, and priorities that amplify our sense of what counts, knowing that the dollar we spend will be counted regardless of what the counters are thinking in their calculations.

Keepers of the Analog

Being a patron of the arts is not just about buying your CDs directly from the performers as mementos of the concert experience. It's more basic than that. It's about preserving the musical worship ritual itself.

The highlight of this past gift-giving season centered on buying two albums at Newbury Comics for my wry-witted, macro-analytical, and culturally clairvoyant step daughters. It felt both odd and compelling that the $40 for the two works equaled ten LPs back in the golden days of Disc-O-Mat, Sam Goody's, and Titus Oaks. It was also a trifle under the $40 more that I've managed to spend on downloads through the 2013 music season. But I'd be just as mistaken to confer a 1979 dollar value on the post record label musical food chain as I would for labeling the LP, its fluffy sleeves, luxuriating foldouts, and epic cover art as mere "packaging." Behind that hedonistic splurging of harmonic layerings lies a tactile immersion that focuses the mind on the concept behind the album, the liner notes behind the lyrics, the devotion to the vision in the sound.

If vinyl makes a comeback, can other pay-for-content packagings be revivable? Printing and reading text on paper instead of screens has a way of marshalling the concentration that is otherwise claimed by the labors of a competitive world, i.e. memorizing answers to tests. Another clarifying benefit of paper-based information is that it's static, doesn't beep or flicker, and awaits the scratching within the editorial margins to activate the reader. Print on screen is content that never sleeps. It's resistant to reflection, analysis, and the perspective-taking carried by the authority of definitive works.

We've lost that one big time in the online.

The Future Makes a Comeback

The question of getting it back is not reducible to whether there's a business model for offline content or a marketing edge for self-referential authority. The answer is to pay for the information whose usefulness will grow with time.

That doesn't mean a pointless retreat into a nostalgic past of argument-settling finality. It does mean cultivating the restraint, introspection, and deference given to containers that not only preserve the original contents but reveal that larger framework for committing positive and memorable change in our unyielding and inarticulate age. A time where the present is no better suited to take in the future than the haste and prejudice of our own self-selection.

Question: When the last time you picked over the hidden messages and visual nuances of the art on a CD cover? If you're like me you're harkening back to a time that never passed because it never happened. It's funny what choices the free, modern marketplaces make for us. Especially the choices it takes away that were never counted in the first place.

The Better and the Worse of the Most of Us

[caption id="attachment_2031" align="alignleft" width="249"] 15 year-old David Oats speaks as the Westinghouse Time Capsule is lowered into the former ash heap that bore two World's Fairs.[/caption]

Jerry, my soon to be 21-year-old son recently found his inner blogging voice. He's come to channel his love of myth and legend into literal interpretations from comic books to the episodic depictions of super and sub-heroic versions of Hollywood films.

The strictest of his guidelines is that the antagonist should cause pain, suffering, and hold no redemptive qualities (other than serving as the vanquished prey of the superhero). To Jerry, if they're not 100% certifiably devil-made, it's not just the good guys who are threatened:

• It toys with the plausibility of the characters.


• It messes with the plot twists.


• How can good triumph over evil when we have to continually reassess who has which power and in what supply?

Remembering the Good
That same purity restriction is rarely lifted for the non-fiction twists of the life narratives we eulogize for absent family and friends. Their departure is enough of a presence to strike even the suggestion of disrespect from any eulogy. It's etiquette the living rarely need to remind us to practice. It's a simple grace. It's a lowering of the guard in the intimidating face of the eternal. Death strips the adornments we carry as standard-bearers and role models. That naked soul we praise at the memorial service will favor the way our loved ones wanted to be remembered -- even when we have no memory of their instructions. But the best remembrances leave open the unfiltered sincerities of the people they were, not the stations they rose to, not the positions they held.

If anyone in my life is up for challenging my son's purified formulations, that person is David Oats (1950-2008). A recent Internet search casually slipped in a series of his obituaries. That buffer of time provides a rare opportunity to remember David as an extreme example of heart-melting communion and shadowy behavior. I remember David as being better and worse than the most of us.

I knew him for a short, intense period nearly 30 years ago when I was transitioning from the Neverland of a self-designed college curriculum to the externally imposed demands of adulthood. The turbulence of that transition was spiced by his capacity for open-ended generosity and stone-faced obstruction. The fact that I stumbled into his passing obliges me to put his influence into perspective without confusing wholesale rewrites for an undignified burial.

Political and Guileless

David's irrepressible charm was his most glaring foible. He was willing to tell you not only what you wanted to hear. He had an uncanny knack of convincing you he'd held the same wish -- even the same belief system. For a 22 year-old college grad this was shear intoxication: not just the chance for a pay check, or even meaningful work, but a dream job of working for David. Simple naiveté can't explain away that wide a gap between a life imagined and the one being lived. But when you and David shared a core belief, that was no self-delusion. That was a plan of action!

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="410"] Hillary Clinton and David Oats at a press reception in the early 2000s.[/caption]

One of those plans vice-gripped my imagination for the better half of the two formative years between when I started my Div. III (a.k.a. senior thesis) and when I moved out of David's apartment. The theme of my academic studies (the history of the New York World's Fairs) was the proverbial message in the bottle. In those days the bottle was addressed to the President of the 1989 New York World's Fair to be.

Camera Ready

My final project with Andrew Morris-Friedman was a video documentary starring David Oats as the community-organizer, consensus-building answer to the impervious kingpin, power-brokering Robert Moses who ordained the '39 and '64 Fairs as a means to secure his park legacy.

David's legacy consisted of trespassing through a construction site fence. And like some page out of Mayberry RFD the apprehended junior citizen punk was brought before Emperor Moses himself. After making some gruff noises about neighborhood safety, Moses assures young Oats that his park will be returned to his community with amenities 'o plenty once the fair ended. The fact this account of their unlikely meeting ran in David's New York Times obit says more about the journalism instincts of a future and failed promoter than the actual guest list for calendaring in a visit to meet that day with Bob "Fair Chairman" Moses.

To Andy and me, the exploratory nature of staging a third New York Fair wasn't a tribute to David's powers of self-invention. It was the generational realization that ginormous spectacles spoiling for sponsorships found their way to Flushing Meadows. We were just lucky enough to hitch a ride on the next repeating cycle.

And Forgive Us My Trespasses

On a more grounded note, I had no job lined up, or plan B, or even a post Hampshire place to crash. The notion of "home" was a waning option. I couldn't go home for as many reasons as there were no home feelings lost in that acknowledgement. After a prolonged viewing session of David's political video catalog I asked what the prospects were to continue in both video consuming and producing roles while figuring out how to land on my untested feet. My wish was granted.

In retrospect that's where I should have stopped taking wishes come true for granted. This is an arrangement that exceeded the imaginings, let alone the realities of the move-onto-anyplace-but-where-I-came from post liberal arts degree crowd. I should have seen this simple kindness for what it was -- a temporary respite from the workplace pressures to come.

But the trance-induced allure of the future-leaning '89 Fair is where I dwelled. That fixation held my unwavering focus through the tentative first steps into a dead-end internship at a media journal and onto a wedding / Bar Mitzvah video gopher at the Film Center on 9th and 45th -- shouting distance from the sound stage run by Liz Dubelman, my first fiancé.

The Uncollected Rent

My daily presence in David's inventive and unpublished life came with its own set of constraints and expectations. My guesswork is based on what he must have anticipated on the day I moved in. Over those summer weekends Liz would drive in from Jersey on the weekends. Just the simple arranging of it prompted a reshuffling in his shadowy preferences for floating out of range and below the radar. For instance, delivering dial-tone to his Kissena Boulevard kitchen only occurred after Liz voiced her concern that phone service was not an opt-outable preference in pre-cellphone society. David's penchant for cash-only transactions suggested a level of privacy that regarded the mundane transactions of the market as outside and unwelcome intrusions. His unwillingness to give references or open his networking doors for Andy and me meant three things to Liz:

• The 1989 New York World's Fair was a no-go


• David would never admit so much, and


• His intransigence hinted at a fundamental truth about a President of an Enterprise that was not to be: he was a fake -- not a con artist per se, but a serial bluffer nonetheless.

I'm not sure history would be as reproachful as a future spouse crashing a cloistered bachelor pad, glass-enclosed floor models of former fair pavilions, and VHS-enabled broadcast archive. One need not peer too closely into David's fantasy constructions to find only facades behind the blueprints and fabrications acting as placeholders for actual ground-breakings.

The real history lesson here is not that the sunny disposition David carried was concealing a diabolical nature. It's that his personal nature of "taking me in" was a selfless act, not some kind of an investment or quid pro quo. My being "taken in" was a reflection of my inexperience and compromised living situation. What made this so difficult to accept was the stiff exit price he exacted when Liz and I moved to our first Manhattan studio the following spring. That move precluded my own smaller scale alternative universe -- one that I'd cultivated, leveraged, cataloged, and squirreled away since the age of 5. Unlike most lost childhood collections, this one was repossessed by a rent-free landlord.

That remittance transpired without threats, confessions, or basic forms of cooperation. From one obfuscation to the next busted plan, my lost collection represented the same control fantasy that filled David's postwar garden apartment stocked with television histories, one-of-a-kind recordings, and Fair memorabilia. The aftertaste of his deception took as long for me to cycle through as a whole drumbeat of shoulda coulda woulda charades: the fate of the '89 Fair, the run of an '88 Cuomo for President campaign, the vagabond fairground buildings fallen into decay, and all those lost NYC Olympic bids to come.

It sounds juvenile, I know. But it runs a course deeper (than I imagine) when your mom's the culprit for tossing your cards out (along with your comic books and matchbox cars). I wouldn't know. I never collected matchboxes or comics.

[caption id="attachment_2033" align="alignleft" width="250"] Robert Moses and David Oats outside the Chairman's office in the Administration Building (now the Queens Museum).[/caption]

Post Scripts

About six months after my cards were banished to memory, I got in touch with his former partner at the Queens Tribune and local Congressman (until this year) Gary Ackerman. After I shared some of my gratitude and misgivings I asked for some insight about David -- a perspective I couldn't possibly gain from such a shielded and specific view of his old friend -- distorted by the short, intense time we had shared together.

With hints of frustration, admiration, and humility, Ackerman said a curious thing: "It's a good thing David wasn't born a girl, because he'd never stop being pregnant."

I should have realized that this observation from a well-regarded politician was about as sincere a rationale I was likely to receive for closing the books on David as my adopted and short-term older brother figure.

I suppose in the movie version, David Oats would be the hero and villain. He would be played by the same character. Which side of him wins out, I cannot say. But if the movie were true to the person the audience would forgive him for putting the world he wanted to believe in ahead of the one we live in. Maybe if we understand that about David, we can free up our own narratives where our real world superpowers can do the most good.

Who Was That Masked Persuader?

Before last Friday an Imperial-leaning President was expected to take Syrian President Bashar al-Assad out to the woodshed. He was to brandish the whip of American missile bruising with the reluctant enforcer's decree that this corporal spanking was going to hurt him more than it hurts Assad. And before Labor Day he would have been right. But now we know better.

Obama needed Congress like a hole in the head. Then the British Parliament silenced the alarm clock before Prime Minister Cameron could set it. No point in going it alone when the constitution provided ample cover in the form of a full up or down vote. Regardless of how the votes line up, it is a remarkable thing. The public has so little appetite for war now that it's no longer relevant whether the investigations prove that the evidence was cooked or credible unlike the run up to those elective American wars when it was theories in heads and not facts on grounds that justified the propping up of dictators, dominos, or pipelines.

But the queasy factor hastens another more welcome removal from Congressional deliberations and that's the middle-man who brokers the retail side of a political system that sends anyone who can't afford a lobbyist to the black market for political favors. That's the up-and-up about having the straight up-and-down. There will be no horse trading. We're filibuster free. It is as close to a politically neutral political act that we're likely to see on this side of any foreseeable cycles to come. That's what happens when support for bombing Syria is running neck and neck with Congressional approval ratings. You get one rep, one vote. You get the House leaders voting with their conscience, not with blocs, or caucuses, or factions, or any groups that would threaten not to have them as a member. That’s not a character assassination, a smear campaign, or the guy further to the extreme in the next primary. That's the clout our leaders have when casting a vote for or against this evolving role of American leadership.

President Obama has decided to externalize the arguments in his head, making us all raging argumentarians. Buffering the time-span between the atrocity, the debate, and the pending response could drag on all the way through the upcoming debt threshold season. We may have to DVR those episodes while we stay glued to this wider and more unscripted stage. And here are the fall previews as channeled through a South Park chorus of militant-leaning Sims family combat scenarios:

• Are we only implicated when the shooter takes out our loved ones?
• Does self-interest reside closer to the speculations of cavorting diplomats?
• Are these future gassings are any more predictable if we do the unpredictable and stand down?
• We can’t nurse our veterans or feed our hungry. Can we really afford this? (Queue debt ceiling…)

The President is drawing this out for a reason. He's dragging the entire cast across that red line which marks all borders, colors, and demarcations. He drew that red line in response to having no response for the first hundred thousand or so Syrians being taken at the hand of their fellow Syrians. He drew it on the calculation that he wouldn't need to honor it. It was an election year placeholder. Perhaps a posturing he didn't expect to hold? After all, why would a despot invoke sarin pellets on oxygen-consuming civilians?

Certainly the Iranians who knew the open air gas chambers unleashed by Saddam Hussein in 1980 have a closer affinity to the Auschwitz death camps than any rationale for the one visited on the Damascus suburbs last week. Perhaps these are remnants of the same caches that were used on the holocaust-denying Iranians? In both cases the U.S, turned a blind eye to these weapons of gas destruction. Red lines tend to be made on shifting red sands it seems.   

But argumentation is cheap and Obama spends lavishly, knowing that a week buys him a maelstrom of speculation from decampments of munitions deployed within Syrian population centers to a Republican party united in blame only. If there is to be blood the new calculations on circumscribed warfare is not over munitions, territories, natural resources, or even casualties, but on whose hands their blood will be stained.

During the summer recess Obama was going to be impeached for implementing Obamacare. Now he's melting our soft civil war for the harder one waging on in a fractured, displaced, and stressed out corner of a global neighborhood the “right side of history” was never supposed to enter.

The terms of that entrance will be diluted by the party line progressives (formerly “pinkos”) once, if ever, such a resolution passes the house. And Obama will be publicly circumspect and privately delighted by those constraints. It may sound devious to foes and shrewd to benefactors. But it's certainly a lot less abstract than gassing one’s “own people.” And it’s a lot more achievable than any notions of victory in Syria -- for anyone.

 

Revenge of the Passwords

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="290"] (c) http://mrcracker.com/2012/02/password-cracking-part-1-passwords/[/caption]

What is that invisible and shifting divide between helpful and hindrance? Between being useful and being used? Between being a consumer assisted by a labor-saving device and an unsuspecting supplicant being consumed by a tech consumer juggernaut? This boundary is often defined along age lines, between geeks and luddites, Silicon Valley versus the rest of us, etc.

But those boundaries can come down any time they're crossed. And they're being crossed faster these days than we know where those borders are shifting to. Do I want my sleep compromised by the timely interruption of the forecasted obstacles in the day ahead? Do I want my robo-car decelerating at the hint of a green-to-yellow traffic signal? If I pre-set my controls to accelerate for yellow lights will my settings be overridden by drivers willing to pay more for their need to run yellow lights (or outrun traffic laws)?

As Claire Cain Miller points out in last week's New York Times piece "Apps That Know What You Want, Before You Do," the lines between creepy and cool are not always so clear. Even drawing them to familiar boundaries can redefine whether these lines are crossable or whether we know which side of the divide we favor.

How about an app that tells you your team has stormed back from extinction and is on the verge of a heroic comeback? Who could argue with good unexpected news?

You don't need to be a sage in your gray beard years to form a healthy distrust of one's short-term memory. How about an app that guesses at all the PINs you favored the last time you checked your miles for a carrier you haven't flown on since all the unused points were traded for magazines that had since suspended publication?

It's the scope creep that shadows us in our expectations that our corrosive bodies can keep pace with our supple minds. By the time we hit 50 we have a strategy for nearly all the unexpected we can fathom from our heads, hearts, and stomachs. That's where the specter of a programmable salad of personal apps sounds more suggestive than proscriptive, more about limiting choices than about optimizing the meaning of direct experience. That's a world where we're reaching out to engage skin, bark, dirt, and surf at the expense of touching another screen. But it's not just the sensual world. It's the fragility of our rattled dispositions. We need time to absorb the untimeliest of blows. Lay-offs, divorces, suicide watches, and cancer readouts are not necessarily what we want scanned into calendars, socialized to networks, or tracked by prognosis. The machine is there to mitigate the risk to the programmer, not the defective nature of the harboring human. Are we really being blacklisted when we're disinvited from events that don't support the commercial aims of the event planner?

One of the guys interviewed for the piece put it this way:

“We have a technology that isn’t waiting for you to ask it a question, but is anticipating what you need and when is the best time to deliver that.”

It's helpful when the trajectories of predictive search factor in traffic patterns. I'm positively elated when my phone asks if I want to disable the shake to shuffle. You know I do. Maybe it will grow fonts as big as my visual deficits when it detects how big my faultering eyes need to enlarge interfaces? Until then a few more developers have to turn middle age, And create a clapper for all that as yet unattached body armor we leave behind. Most likely these will be from appointments we had little hand in scheduling. And that's fine with a delivery system in which the messenger and message shaper are one in the same:

“The better we can provide information, even without you asking for it, the better we can provide commercial information people are excited to be promoting to you,” Larry Page, Google’s chief executive, told analysts in April.

A Problem Child Named Big Brother

The media has fixated under this past week’s news leak that all Americans are now and forever spied on until proven dead. Wait … that might not be provable. This revelation casts a glaring light on the low profile and high concept surveillance innovators within the clandestine NSA – the part of our intelligence community that makes the CIA seem catty and loose-lipped.

There was something both alarming and innocuous about the story that broke in the Guardian on June 6th. This snooping or PRISM program is a vast soup of browser logs, text, graphics, videos, voice calls, and all manner of singing, dancing, and soliciting from my screen, to yours, and your next of yours. Think of the color-coded warning systems from the Bush era reformatted by degrees of separation and you begin to see Obama era risk assessment through the PRISM lens.  Concepts like criminal motive or case relevance have been replaced by the pervasive need to place our electronic selves under a passive and insidious house arrest.

Now I like to connect hypothetical dots like the next armchair analyst. But I resist the sweeping explanatory powers of slam dunk conspiracy theories. I’ve always maintained that paranoia is a luxury of the self-important. Our lives are much more open, generic, and predictive as data patterns than we are as erratic and complex individuals.

So before we start quaking in Orwellian tones, let's give the NSA its day in our court of opinion. Even if they answer in confidence to secret courts, it makes sense to vet the rationales behind such a deliberate and undiscriminating assault on our virtual identities. Besides we’re all part of the same feuding and dysfunctional family. If we know Big Brother’s allegiances and loyalties maybe he won’t seem so poker-faced, inscrutable, and extortion-prone.

Equal Mistreatment

First of all, it boils down to fairness. After all, what could be more even-handed than to spy on everyone? How could anyone feel frozen out of the action or singled out for selective treatment?

Secondly, when it comes to justice systems you can't bet against the house. That's because the PRISM guardians own all the evidence. You need to play by their rules to prove: (a) they're not following them as (b) they are following you. It's a circular tail-wags-dog-chasing-own-tail situation. It’s designed to tie tea party activists and ACLU partisans in knots for years to come. You say your rights are violated? Hard to try your case when your first amendment freedoms have been guantanamoed down in broad constitutional daylight. That's the blank check known as the Patriot Act -- the NSA having its way within the exigencies of perceived threats. Case closed.

And even without a public trial, there’s a great potential in PRISM for self-inflicted embarrassment. What if Big Brother arrests the wrong guy and that guy is you or me? That’s the advantage of secrecy. It’s botched raid insurance. It’s a hedge against hiring the wrong henchmen. It’s the peace of mind that comes with plausible deniability -- the first mover freedom to ask forgiveness in the future because it's easier than getting timely permission from a government at war with itself.

Home Team Advantage

But never mind our institutional paralysis. Judging by the poll numbers the public's prepared to write a blank check to rival the size of the credit card financing of our delinquent war chest. According to the New York Times' David Brooks, recent polling suggests that pending terrorist investigations are beating up on the prospect of privacy intrusions by a 2:1 margin.

Take my privacy, please. I have nothing to hide. That's assuming a healthy skepticism of those bringing the charges, equal access to the evidence they're citing, and an informed and disinterested judges who won't throw us under the wheels of justice. As Danah Boyd writes this week in Slate ("If You're OK With Surveillance Because You Have "Nothing to Hide," Think Again), the big data Rorschach of PRISM is a placeholder for pious aggression as much as discrete protection:

“It’s used to create suspicion, not to confirm innocence.”

And it all boils down to the specifics of the cases yet to be brought -- namely who's prosecuting the aggression and who's being protected. A concentrated set of assets in the hands of a select few is a containment begging for its lid to be blown off. An establishment that hates surprises will conduct itself in secrecy and cloak itself in suspicion -- namely a presumption of guilt in the quest to wage the first articulated post 9-11 terrorist containment policy -- Dick Cheney's Doctrine of Preemption.

Reasons Boyd:

“[I]f someone has a vested interest in you being guilty, it’s not impossible to paint that portrait, especially if you have enough data.”

Safety Deposits

My problem child understanding of the PRISM program is shaped by my job as a knowledge manager. It's my responsibility to make information available, useful, and even prepared for the uses intended by my inundated colleagues. My role is justified by the assumption that when folks don't have to care where things are kept they can free up their resourcefulness to solve problems, not to be compromised by their login credentials or limited understanding of the gatekeepers and their keepings.

But in a world where Google can settle most public arguments there is a parallel private one. It says that secure assets deserve a single, repository. Think employer records and documentation. It's that safety deposit box ideal that lulls most managers into the seduction that the information unity of a single storage location will save our collective and individual asses. Our big NSA brother is no different. Only in our case it's the prospect of lost income, not privacy, that stokes the hot single repository coals.

It goes something like this:

“This is my livelihood. It's in a state of perpetual risk because I'll be blindsided by some error or memo or bug or unredeemable email tied to me six file folders deep on some mystery server.”

It may sound as quaint as a world of gold standards. But there are a whole flock of literalists who would throw all their mattress-bound savings from the market run-ups of yesteryear just to be at one with those bricks. There's Grandpa Ron Paul. There's Senator Rand. No slouch when it comes to blustering all over the shadows of big bro. Oh, look, Glen Beck's grabbing a titanium-laced shovel. They're all digging furiously to exhume the sacred dirt of a dignified Fort Knox burial. There but for fortune or just to keep the Fed accountable? I'm no economist so here’s the takeaway for my fellow knowledge managers:

Everyone needs a mental space holder -- a concrete sleeve for bookending their references. It doesn't matter how virtual, triangulated, asymmetric or plain old complicated the chessboard has become. People clamor for the tangible in a sea of uncertainties. So too do lynch mobs and NSA bureaucrats who are pledged to upholding the public order in blank check proportions.

Inner Sanctum

Hence the mega warehouse to trump all data centers in Bluffdale Utah desert is now under permanent occupation by the commandos of security clearances.

NSA isn’t just boiling the ocean in Bluffdale. It's trawling the ocean floor as if national boundaries didn't exist. It's sucking our transgressions and transmissions down with a giant straw and belching our hiccups and encoded byproducts back into a vast swill of super collections. Rumor has it that the threat of a wild fire would unleash a sprinkler system so powerful that nearby Salt Lake City could slip into the Great Salt Lake. The collection effort appears as ambitious in volume as it's frivolous in an ultimate motive or meaning or justification. Data is the new stockpile. We collect because ... we can.

Since I'm spilling a parade of secrets I'll toss my baton in and march proudly with the middle-aged telecommuting knowledge grunts. I'll sign the release, I'll self-incriminate. I'll freely confess that I am a bona fide metadata freak. The layers of details buried in the assets I maintain hold the key to making information searchable and ultimately useful.

Social Dragnet

And the hastily scribbled set of defensible talking points is that metadata can't hurt you. I say hasty because if the NSA was truly in the damage control business they would have hired the PR wing of the leaker contractor. Booz Allen could repent. They could assure the public that metadata is actually a good thing. Especially in private where your credit card company asks if you were pumping gas in Colorado at the same time that you were sucking down brewskies in bean town.

The insidious side of metadata is that it provides groupable sub-sets of unseemly data sprawls. Add some unfounded suspicions to the mix and you've got guilt by association. That's a dragnet that happens every day on Facebook. What will happen when the terror-mongers catch up to the marketers? These are no longer personal computers.

It doesn't matter what you spring on your gadgetware. So long as we're tethered to a network there's a screen that only we can see and Google and the Google customers. And you thought your love of GMail made you a valued account holder? That personal device is more impersonal than meets the consuming eye. That won't change with your first pair of Google Glasses -- until you splurge on an even newer pair of Google spyglasses.