Writers and Alcohol

Last winter I gave an interview to the NY Post about writers’ favorite cocktails. Looks like they finally ran the piece.

“Real writers don’t drink cocktails. Real writers drink straight liquor. You’ve got to be able to dose it properly. When I was a drinking writer, I would write with a bottle of sipping whisky with me. But very few of us are still drinking writers. Writing has been divorced from some of its essential chemicals…”

Testament is Complete

The complete Testament series, with annotation, is now available in four trade volumes from Vertigo/DC Comics. They’re in stock at most comics shops, and shipping from Amazon or other regular bookstores before the end of the week.

Testament 1: Akedah
Testament 2: West of Eden
Testament 3: Babel
Testament 4: Exodus

I’m delighted to see them all available at the same time, so that the whole story can be read and comprehended as a single experience. Yes, even the real Torah gets read mostly in weekly portions, but this story - which depicts a near-future plagued by a war over oil and a technologically enabled, viral global currency - definitely works better in book form than it did in individual pamphlets. Plus, DC let me add commentary, explanations, and references to these editions, which really do help readers use the story as a starting place and link to some important but relatively unknown material.

4 Degrees

“We begin to have to talk about ordered retreat from some areas of Britain because it becomes impossible to defend,” he said. “There’s no choice here between adaptation and mitigation, we have to do both.” That’s what Professor Bob Watson, UK chief adviser to the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs told the Guardian today.

He was hoping to look at scenarios closer to a rise of 2 degrees celsius, but realize that this was an unrealistically optimistic projection. In fact, the rise of 4 degrees would likely lead to a cascade of other factors and subsequent further increases. But even a modest rise of 4 degrees in the near future yields hundreds of millions of deaths and requires major movements of people, the abandonment of coastal cities, and more.

Once you start looking at the adaptation scenarios, adjusting the impact of a 4-degree increase starts to appear inhumane. Can we just write off such large segments of humanity and play ‘triage’ with the food supply? It may seem heartless, but without such planning, the casualties will be far worse. Does planning in this way amount to admission of defeat? Perhaps. So while a small number of government officials and private sector workers attend to the task of setting up our administrative capabilities for climate change disasters, the rest of us can work on containing it as best as possible.

Investing Into a Dep/recession

For months now, I’ve avoided giving what can be construed as investment advice - instead answering the many queries about “what to do with my savings?” with general commentary on the state of currency, property, local investment, commodities, and debt. This hasn’t stopped the queries for specific ideas on what to do with retirement savings, college savings plans, and other “real money” people are worried about.

Apocalypse scenarios aside, there are real, “traditional investing” things I believe people can still do with their (remaining) money to weather the continuing economic crisis. There’s two main goals to investing: capital appreciation (making money) and capital preservation (not losing money). And strategies for accomplishing these two things aren’t necessarily the same. Now that the economy is pretty sketchy, people’s homes are worth less, there’s less money to spend, businesses can’t borrow easily, and basic resources are costing more (because money is worth less), it’s one of those times when capital preservation might be more important than great winnings.

Still, there’s probably a few ways to win relative to others (which is the way our racetrack investment markets work). Here’s some of my ideas. I’m not a broker, and I’m not suggesting you do any of them.

1. Preferred stocks and similar bond-like corporate issues.
When big corporations want to raise money, they issue special shares and special bonds that are traded on the open stock exchanges - but they earn guaranteed dividends. Years ago, for example, GM issued a bunch of 25-dollar shares under the ticker symbol RGM, with an interest rate of 7.25%. As GM’s regular stock value has declined, so has the value of these bond-like shares (called “senior notes”). They’re now selling for under 10 bucks; but they still get the 7.25% interest based on the original 25 dollar price. This means that bought today, they earn over 17% interest. And this isn’t a dividend paid at management’s discretion; it’s a payment that can’t be cut unless GM goes bankrupt.

Now that’s a possibility, for sure. GM could go bankrupt. But even though oil may be over, automobiles probably aren’t. As electric vehicles and battery exchange stations replace gas guzzlers and gas stations, GM will still likely producing vehicles. And even if you hate GM and what they represent, buying these shares doesn’t give GM any money - they already got the 25/share when they first sold them. (You will have to like GM enough to hope they don’t go out of business, though. If that’s too much love for the corporation, find another similar out-of-favor high-paying instrument.)

There’s a bunch of these kinds of ’senior notes’ and ‘preferred shares’ out there. All you need to do is pick one with a really crazily high rate, but from a company you think will not go bankrupt. The company does not need to do well at all over the next decade. They just need so survive - and you get 15% interest or better. Once the storm has passed, the price of the shares should go up, as well. If you know of reasons why these investments truly suck, please post below. I am longing to hear the ‘catch’ that I’m missing about this too-good-to-be-true investment.

2 - Gold. The recent 20% decline in the price of gold probably represents a good opportunity to pick some up. The easiest way is an exchange traded fund that buys gold, like GLD. This would be more a “preservation” play than an “appreciation” play.

3 - Water. The trick here is invest in companies helping making the water supply cleaner and more accessible - not companies profiting off starving developing nations of their rights to their own water. And this is harder to figure out than it looks. So far, of the water funds I’ve researched, the Claymore Global Water (CGW) seems the most invested in companies that are doing exploration, research, desalination, sewage treatment, and other activity to improve global water resources. Some of the other funds are more involved in activities you probably wouldn’t want to be supporting.

4 - Alternative Energy. T Boone Pickens and GE are both staking their futures on alternative energy. It’s really hard to pick individual companies to invest in, though, because you never know exactly which solar panel and windmill strategy will turn out to be the most efficient. Better to support the entire industry I think, especially in hopes of an Obama administration that prefers wind and solar over nuclear (plutonium and uranium are limited resources, themselves) and pointless off-shore drilling. I found an exchange-traded fund called WilderHill Clean Energy (PBW) which has done abysmally of late - but that might just mean this is a good moment to buy in. Other ideas?

5 - Currency. This one is hard, and I’m not doing it myself. The idea I had was that even if all money is becoming less valuable compared with real things, different currencies are probably descending at different rates. So you should be able to make money going to a site like Forex.com and investing in currency ratios, say, USD/NZD. In the short term, the US dollar is strengthening relative to the NZ dollar, which has had a good run for the past year or so. So if you owned an instrument like USD/NZD, it would increase in value as long as NZD got weaker faster than the USD.

But currencies are deeply strange, and moved around by people looking to exploit interest rates of different countries. The reason why the NZD went up so much is that Japanese (who get basically no interest on their savings) were investing in NZD bank accounts in order to earn some interest. This only works for so long before the currency shifts. In short, it’s really hard to know what currencies are going to do, and betting on their movements is tricky.

6 - Debt arbitrage.
Now Suze Ormond might disagree, and this is probably irresponsible. But if I had a mortgage at a good rate, I probably wouldn’t want to pay it down with savings. I’d be better off earning 10 or 15% on a good bond and paying 5 or 6% on the mortgage. This is profit of 10% just for doing nothing - which is the way capitalism works for people with capital. If someone is in that position, and leveraged with a low-rate mortgage (instead of a high rate credit card) I’d think they’d want to use the money they were allowed borrow at a great rate, rather than pay it all back.

My personal advice is to do whatever you’re going to do and get over it. Unless you’re going to be a professional trader, just get back to work doing the thing you really do.

Of course, you’re welcome to post your own ideas to the comments below. Nothing I’ve said (or that you say) should be construed as professional investing advice. We’re just real people sharing our thoughts on how to save for our kids’ educations.

Real Social

Just three or four years ago, when I had just published my “business” book Get Back in the Box, most organizations still thought of the Internet as a distraction from their core competency. They saw interactive media as a marketing opportunity, and little more. At the time, I could only conclude that on some level businesspeople understood that engaging with the Internet in any real way would force an openness for which they were still unprepared. Competency on the American business landscape is down; any form of transparency would just expose the dearth of expertise at the company’s core. Most real processes had already been outsourced to the lowest bidder, so the only way companies had of distinguishing themselves was marketing.

Outsourcing scandals, economic tightening, a long hard war, and a declining currency have forced everyone to reconsider this strategy. Though the shift has been motivated by tough times, I’ve been glad to see so many companies, organizations, and even political campaigns attempting to embrace the “real” Internet and cultures making it up. Instead of just buying banner ads or conducting new forms of computerized market research, many of these players are coming to understand that the Internet is a social phenomenon - not a content revolution - and that it offers the opportunity to connect to a real culture and its most competent members in a real way.

At the same time, most of them either fail to recognize the full impact that an Internet community can have on their ethos and operations, or they do recognize it and fear it. That’s understandable. When the Obama campaign says it’s here to listen and enact the will of its constituency (”we are the change”), they get a constituency prepared to have its will enacted. This is a great thing, but it also presses their hand. When BP announces it wants a conversation with environmentalists about how to get “beyond petroleum” (also a great thing) the green press accuses the company of “greenwashing,” while its shareholders (another constituency) get up in arms. When Apple asks its users to consider themselves part of the Jobs family, all these brothers and sisters get upset when Jobs doesn’t tell them that he’s struggling with a disease. This is not to say that the initial efforts to engage broader constituencies in honest conversation is wrong - it’s quite right. But it demands a level of honesty and breadth of participation foreign to companies used to doing public relations in a traditional and controlled fashion. So most companies either abandon their efforts, or limit them to superficial displays of Internet savvy that they hope will get covered in secondary media.

Going “social” online means more than hiring a company to create a ‘white label’ version of Facebook for your organization to chat with customers, employees, shareholders, and others. It means understanding the real value of creating a “transparent” company; it means understanding why sharing and collaborating beat hiding and competing; it means learning to work with unfamiliar measures of success - like how many new unsolicited resumes from people looking to join you come over the transom, instead of just how many “unnecessary” jobs could be cut.

Becoming a truly interactive company goes deeper and wider than starting up a new server, which is why I’m glad an old friend of mine, Jeff Dachis, is starting up a new company dedicated to helping organizations of all kinds implement an interactive communications infrastructure, and helping them understand just what everyone has to gain. As I’m arguing in the book I’m currently working on, organizations have for too long looked to generate value by extracting energy and resources from the periphery. And this bias has been supported by an economic model and currency system based in scarcity.

Embracing the social means embracing the abundant - and emphasizing instead the way an organization might actually help people on the periphery generate value for themselves. Google AdSense, eBay, Paypal and Amazon associates are just the first primitive nudges in that direction - conducted by almost completely ‘virtual’ companies who still have little understanding of the cultural forces they’re playing with. Once traditional, non-internet companies begin to realize they’ve been social enterprises all along, things will start to get truly interesting.

Jeff told me that his approach to social networking that he hopes to spread was inspired - at least in part - by some of what I wrote in Get Back in the Box. And he asked if I’d like the chance to help him put some of those ideas into practice. Like raising my child using the principles I outlined in Playing the Future, it’s something of a challenge: to put my theories into practice with living people instead of just pondering them in the ultimately safe realm of non-fiction writing.

So I’m taking him up on the challenge, and going to start engaging with some of the organizations he gets to the table. This should be an interesting opportunity to effect some change - or at the very least learn more about what prevents it. I’ll keep you posted on what transpires.

Quick Update

Wife and child at the town pool. I’ve got time for a brief update.

I just finished the first draft of my next book, now tentatively called “Life Incorporated” (and before that called “Corporatized.”) Now I’m working full time and hard on an overdue graphic novel for Vertigo, to be announced shortly.

The fourth and final volume of my comic series Testament will be out the second week of August. That same week, I’ll be speaking in Las Vegas at a meta-meeting about meetings.

I am going to teach one course in the Fall at NYU/ITP, but it’s only open to ITP students and it’s already filled. In October, though, I should be teaching another online course at MaybeLogicAcademy, looking at the issues in my new book and what to do about them. That course will then, hopefully, spill over once it’s done onto the “corporatized” bbs on this site.

I’m doing a big lecture in NYC, for free, at the Princeton Club, on November 14. It’s the annual Korzybski Lecture for the Institute of General Semantics (a big name for a lot of the stuff we talk about here: awareness, agency, communication, coercive language and systems). It’s pretty far out in the future, but there’s a symposium of some kind the next day that I’ll be at - and there’s not so many free events where I get to speak and interact with people to this extent. So it might be worth the trip and I wanted to give some advance notice.

A text version of my recent talk, below, at the Personal Democracy Forum is now available at TheEdge.

Okay - back to work.

Personal Democracy Forum Speech

Here it is: http://blip.tv/file/1047324

It’s the opening ‘invocation’ I did for the Personal Democracy Forum last week, and a preview of some of the concepts coming in my next book, “Corporatized.” The talk looks and feels a little freeform to me; I’m developing the chain of logic as I go along. But I’m so immersed in this line of thought right now that I think it does make sense.

Still, as an example of what I look like when I’m teaching, check it out.

Here’s the mp3 audio file of the same talk. Opening Invocation, Personal Democracy Forum, mp3 New York, June 24, 2008.

Arthur Magazine

I’ve been on break from my column at Arthur Magazine, mostly because I simply have to finish my book. Meanwhile, I’ve learned that Arthur is in the midst of a true financial crisis. Whether or not the market can keep a project like Arthur alive by itself is a conversation we’ll have to have later. In the meantime, I’m posting a link to the Arthur Magazine site and its plea for donations. The content in the magazine - as well as most of its realworld events - have been created as freeware, but maybe a shareware model will prove more sustainable.

I’m sure Jay Babcock, the editor, is also interested in whether anyone cares to invest in the project.

I made what turned out to be a pretty good speech at the Personal Democracy Forum yesterday. I’ll post a copy once I have a spare minute.

PDF 2008

I’m speaking at the Personal Democracy Forum 2008 on Tuesday morning, bright and early. I’ve only got 12 minutes, so I’ll try to say just one thing: democracy as we know it was built around the notion of the individual. Democracy as an open source phenomenon needs to be something else entirely - and it may look and feel strange to those of us raised on Enlightenment ideals of individual rights and possession of property. It’s a collective phenomenon that requires intelligence, participation, knowledge, and collaboration.

In other words, it carries on long after a new name is successfully put in office.

Are we ready for that? I’m not sure.

I don’t know yet whether the conference is simulcast online. I have a feeling it’s not, or it would be easier to see that from the conference website. I’ll keep you updated from here if I find out more.

Beyond Brand Obama

Nothing against Barack Obama, but we’d be mistaken to consider his politics a complete break from the past, a renaissance in participatory government, or the realization of an Internet-enabled “open source†democracy. He’s pretty damn good, don’t get me wrong, and he may just represent the closest thing yet to a GenX, post-boomer, anti-sentimental and a-mythic candidate for president. But there are a few ways in which his candidacy also reinforces some of the branded, celebrity-based, and charismatic techniques of traditional politics. To make the most of his candidacy and, hopefully, his presidency, we’ll have to distinguish one from the other.

When Obama was first emerging into national awareness, he showed both promise and predictability. I watched his speech to the Democratic Convention in 2004, and saw pretty much what the Democratic party wanted me to see: a hopeful young politician who appealed to people beyond their classic demographic divisions. He spoke of a “one America†beyond blue-state/red-state classifications. Like Mario Cuomo’s convention keynote speech of a decade earlier, he cast the Democratic Party as the party of higher ideals, greater compassion, and a more united people.

Obama’s speech was also calculated, however, to neutralize the “hot-button†politics of the right. Karl Rove and other right-wing strategists had by then almost perfected the technique of micro-casting specific, emotionally charged messages to the people whom they wanted to hear them. Their direct mail experts sent letters to fundamentalists explaining that John Kerry wanted to make the Bible illegal. They sent others to southerners who owned pickups threatening the banning of the Confederate flag. This inspired many of them to hold protests side-by-side with white supremacists and Nazis.

If the Republican party would be the part of divisions, the Democrats would – at least officially – be the party of unification. The less factions saw themselves as special interests in competition with one another, the less those emotionally charged, hot-button issues could be made to work. The Democratic party would be about transcending division, while the Republicans could keep fighting in the gutter. Problem was, at least in ’04, most of America was still angry and desperate enough to choose division and self-interest over any other possibility.

The primary season pitted unifiers against factionalists again – so far, with different results. While Huckabee ran for the religious right and Romney ran for the wealthy conservatives, McCain ran as a guy with ideas he thinks are good for the country. Although not explicitly a unifier, he’s not particularly tied to any of the special interests that make for good hot-button politics. That’s why the conservatives hate him: he’s not strong enough on abortion or gun control or Jesus for them to make convincing and polarizing arguments over these issues. In if they’re not sufficiently activated, the crazies may just stay home.

Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, ran a similarly divisive campaign against Obama. It’s probably why the two of them ended up surviving the longest: she best represented the politics of splinter demographics, while he best represented the ethos of united-we-stand. While Clinton broke down the party into Hispanics, whites-who-really-work, and even caucus vs. primary states, Obama sought to address everyone at once. Clinton most effectively thwarted Obama by recasting the electorate as a set of separate tribes with mutually exclusive goals.

Her argument for maintaining this stance was that the real world is a combative and terrible place. In a dog-eat-dog world, only a mean dog can lead. This is why she ended up selling herself as a “fighter.†She would fight against Obama and the Republicans, and thus prove her ability to fight against the bad guys out there in the Arab countries or even Europe.

That Obama represents an alternative to this divisive, target-marketed pandering is certainly a step in a great direction. That the American electorate is capable of seriously considering him as a viable candidate and leader is a leap in the same one. Both McCain and Clinton pose “you’re either with us or against us†dualities. McCain does it because he’s promoting a neoconservative ideology dependent on simple black and white dichotomies. Clinton did it in a cynical effort to pander to the people she believes are stupid and angry enough to respond to divisive, faux-populist rhetoric.

Obama alone (well, actually he, Kucinich, and Biden) presents a more complex understanding of the challenges facing America. It’s a “GenX†sensibility, really, that depends less on emotionality and choosing sides than on a post-ideological clarity, and an ability to embrace seeming paradoxes. One can disagree with certain things Reverend Wright says while still embracing his message and influence. To the post-boomer audience, this is not weakness but strength. The alternative, as outlined by right-wing extremists such as Sean Hannity, is that candidate Obama Hussein secretly agrees with Wright, Farrakhan, and black militants which is why he cannot condemn the preacher. He hopes to turn over America to the Muslims. But if Obama were involved in such a secret agreement, then wouldn’t he have just condemned Reverend Wright from the beginning?

In all these respects, Obama does offer a non-polarizing and inclusive alternative to traditional political engineering, and we must embrace the possibility that America is ready to engage with itself and the rest of the world in this way. True, it would make it more difficult for us to drop bombs on other countries because we might see them as real people. But it might also make it less necessary to drop bombs on them, or even to kill or starve them in other ways. This is all good.

Where the Obama effort has always disturbed me, however, is in how branded it all feels. From the beginning of his candidacy, I felt as if the Obama name and image represented a new way of doing things more than it exemplified it. My own sense of cynicism reached a peak when Oprah Winfrey began campaigning for him. I’ve watched her similarly enthused by fakers from Tom Cruise to the founders of The Secret. Oprah’s “energy,†if you will, is that of national branding. Oprah + (insert your product here) = MegaBrand. Using Oprah to push Obama feels a bit like using rock to push religion. But it’s not fair to criticize Obama for letting a powerful media celebrity attempt to teach her followers why he’d be good for the country, is it? He needs to get elected, after all.

Then there’s Obama’s efforts to reach out to new audiences online. And for sure, Obama’s Facebook/YouTube/website representation is far beyond anything Howard Dean and his folks did last time out. Where Dean’s people inserted their stock candidate into an online fund-raising campaign, Obama’s message and media are more organically related to one another. His message is about invigorating bottom-up, grass-roots, community organizing – and the Internet is that, if anything.

Still, a closer look at Obama’s online effort reveals many opportunities for work, and few opportunities for what I consider to be intelligent participation. We can sign up to make phone calls, send emails, volunteer in the streets, or become precinct captains. But where’s the participatory democracy wiki? Where do we get involved in the conversations that help shape his policy positions? How is he incorporating the massive intelligence of his support network into his philosophy of governance? BarackObama.com is a great example of crowd-sourcing, but it’s a far cry from even a fledgling effort at open source democracy.

Then again, by the very design and scale of national politics, no presidential campaign could offer more than a wink and a nod to true participatory politics. Activism isn’t something that happens on TV for a general viewing audience, but at home with real people who aren’t watching the tube at all. While a president can provide some inspiration – Oprah-style, if need be - for a whole lot of people, the executive isn’t the locus from which real change occurs. As president, Obama could enact policies that make activism easier to accomplish, jobs easier to create, and corporations more easy to resist – but this activity itself would have to come from us.

Brands were invented primarily to replace local commerce and social activity with mass produced goods and corporate-provided services. Brand mythologies alienate people from one another and insert themselves in the place of real relationships. Instead of buying meat, corn, drugs, or soap from local producers, we buy them from A&P, Green Giant, Wal-Mart or P&G. These national brands have great mythologies, but serve to disconnect us from one another, and distribute power to those with capital and away from people who actually do work.

The danger in Brand Obama is that our focus on a heroic or mythic presidency could easily distract us from the hard work and reality of creating change ourselves. “Hard working†democrats loved listening to Hilary Clinton talk about how hard she was going to work for them because it made it seem like the president is in position to stay up all night and, through the extra effort, get food on our tables or money in our bank accounts. It just doesn’t work that way, and Obama’s refusal to, say, cut gas taxes over the summer to cater to this mentality speaks volumes.

The best thing about Obama is what appears to so many people to be his hesitancy. For many, it tarnishes his brand. As I see it, this is not lack of resolve at all but his greatest strength. He stutters and stumbles – but usually because he’s trying to answer a question in a way that doesn’t make himself out to be the answer to an abstract and collective problem. He understands that the presidency is itself a social construction, and that agreeing to “play†president is a mutual agreement – not a genuine ascendance. TV’s West Wing may have done more damage to the Left than we know. It gave us undeserved solace during the darkest Right wing presidency in history, and created false hope of how much the White House could accomplish with the right leader in the Oval Office.

Those of us hoping to build communities, improve our schools, invigorate our local economies, restructure our land use, or reduce our energy dependence mustn’t equate a presidential campaign with substantive change. Obama may be a convenient conceptual placeholder for these concerns, as well as a person capable of dismantling a good amount of America’s more fascistic and militaristic infrastructure. But the only way he’ll even have the latitude to behave in a slightly more enlightened manner than his predecessors will be if we, the actual people on the ground, have chosen to live more consistently with those goals. If he’s president of a nation of fast-food-eating, bigoted, and selfish SUV drivers, he’ll prove as powerless as Cheney was malicious. And the results will be the same.

Obama can help legislate some of the structural changes that will make it easier for us to renegotiate our civic, social, and commercial relationships with one another. But the job of actually changing society and its priorities will happen from the bottom up. He can help write laws that make it easier for us to build transportation alternatives, but we have to actually go do it. That’s how representative democracy works; they represent our interests, but we do the actual stuff.

Yes, I’ll be voting for Obama and, assuming enough votes are counted, will be happy to see him as our next president. But I’ll also remember that this will only mark the beginning, not the conclusion, of my participation in the democratic process.