stargeek
VIRAL MARKETINGVIRAL
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 ©2004 - The Caring Enterprise Coach
I've been approached by a major
US book publisher to write a book on New
Collaborative Enterprises, with the rather unwieldy working title
shown above, and
also by several universities to develop a Distance Learning program on
the same subject, based on my experience advising over 100
entrepreneurial businesses. Given my new priorities, I don't know
when,
or even if, this will get done, but in the meantime, I'm going to blog
on the subject from time to time. Recently I've written about Avoiding
Landmines and about Innovation,
two of the 15 steps in 'The Process'. Today's article is an overview
of
Viral Marketing, the principal way that successful entrepreneurs find
new customers.With every additional business scandal, the public becomes more cynical about advertising, PR and product claims. The concept of viral marketing is not new: Seven years ago Jeff Rayport of Fast Company introduced its six fundamental principles: Use stealth and subtlety to convey your message, give stuff away free up-front, exploit peer-to-peer networks to spread the message, make the message memorable and 'sticky', exploit the strength of weak ties, and work to reach a 'tipping point'. But last year Rayport's message caught fire when Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point became a best seller, provided more detailed evidence of how well and how broadly these six principles work, and gave detailed instructions on how to employ them. These two factors -- the increased distrust of corporate messages and the new recipe for 'doing' viral marketing, are taking viral marketing mainstream -- it's no longer just a technique for those that can't afford advertising, but a technique to replace advertising. Using these principles isn't difficult, risky, expensive or demanding of great patience or energy. In my earlier posts I explained that one of the biggest landmines for entrepreneurs is getting into 'copycat' businesses where it is next to impossible to differentiate your product or service from the next guy's, and also explained that the innovation process starts with listening to the (current or prospective) customer. So if you've done your research, and you have a small group of customers who agree that your product or service is innovative -- better or cheaper or faster or in some way significantly distinguishable from everyone else's, then all you need to do is to deliver to that group of customers, and let them be your marketing team. As Gladwell's Tipping Point describes, some of the most successful books and records, some of the most infectious ideas, and some of the fastest growing new products, like TiVo, basically found their market without a penny spent on advertising or promotion. Let's look at an example. I know two people who went into the same business -- plastic decking products -- one successfully and the other unsuccessfully. The unsuccessful guy started the business in the 1980s. He brought the technology from Europe, where it had been used in specialized military and other niche market applications, and knew that it had enormous potential in the consumer marketplace. But because he was an engineer, and more comfortable with the manufacturing process, he started with the product instead of the customer. He spent a lot of money perfecting the process and then tried to sell it to major hardware and home stores. He had no customers, no leverage to persuade the stores there was a market for the product. In fact, in those days plastic was considered a shoddy material, his product's light weight and simple assembly was a disadvantage in the minds of the purchasing managers he spoke to. The business never got off the ground. Now flash forward a few years. The successful guy started the business in the 1990s. He didn't know anything about how to engineer the product. What he did know was that there was now a need. The cost of wood products was soaring. People didn't have time to maintain wood fences any more. And there was a new scare: Creosote, the chemical mix wood was soaked in to preserve its life and reduce maintenance, was now considered a carcinogen, and was starting to be banned in children's playgrounds, so there was a new acceptance of the newer, more durable plastics in swing sets and other outdoor furniture for children. So our successful entrepreneur brought in from Europe small quantities of a new plastic decking material, and went and visited contractors, not retail stores. He resold the material at cost to the contractors, who were able to offer it to their customers at the same price as their heavier, higher-maintenance, carcinogenic products. Not surprisingly, they were a great success. Our entrepreneur brought in some larger quantities, and began talking with the European manufacturer about setting a plant in North America. He didn't make a single sales call -- the contractors spread the word for him, among themselves, and the end-customers also showed off their slick and unique new decks to their neighbours. By the time our intrepid entrepreneur went to visit the big hardware and home stores, they had already been besieged with requests for the product and no selling effort was needed. The European manufacturer helped the entrepreneur build the North American plant, the banks, already aware of the demand for the product, offered very low-cost financing for its construction, and all the entrepreneur had to pay was a small royalty on sales to the European company. This success is due entirely to innovation focused on recognizing and responding to a customer need, and on viral marketing. There was virtually no risk, no selling effort, and no out-of-pocket traditional marketing (advertising). Although you can get the impression from browsing the Internet that viral marketing is a Web-based advertising process, or even that it involves mass e-mailing. This is a misrepresentation of what viral marketing, as described by Jeff Rayport and Malcolm Gladwell, is all about. It is nothing more than spreading the word about your product or service by customer word-of-mouth. Talk to the most successful contractors you know, and you'll likely find they turn away excess business, and do no advertising or stuffing of mailboxes. Their new customers come entirely from referrals from existing satisfied customers. They do no selling and no marketing. This brings us to the most critical precondition for successful viral marketing: Reputation. Nothing will sabotage and choke off viral marketing success faster than a sudden reputation for poor quality or poor service. If our decking entrepreneur had used poor contractors to do the work, or had failed to correct any early product quality issues quickly, he would not have succeeded. Probably the most important of Rayport's six principles is the fourth one: making your 'message' memorable and 'sticky'. Viral marketing requires your product or service to come up in your customers' conversations with others. That means, like TiVo, there needs to be something about it that people will want to talk about. And a picture is worth a thousand words. That's why those amateur photos at Abu Ghraib have done so much more to turn public opinion against Bush's war than the much more dangerous Patriot Act, the abrogation of the Geneva Conventions, and all of the other more profound but less visceral evidence of executive deceit and abuse. And why the decks set up at the home shows, and on display in your neighbour's yard, are so much more compelling than the glossy brochures that tell you about the low maintenance and the safety of the product's composition. |
 If
you're a regular reader of this blog, you probably know that I'm
opposed to unregulated 'free' trade, very worried about the
extraterritoriality of the WTO, NAFTA, Davos and other corporatist
captives, strongly opposed to domestic corporations 'offshoring' jobs,
using influence with the Bush regime and other right-wing governments
to circumvent social and environmental laws and responsibilities, and
a
great believer in taking the pledge to buy local, and in community
self-sufficiency.At the same time, I'm a strong supporter of the UN and other multi-lateral NGOs, and I believe that we each have a responsibility for the well-being of all the people and creatures of this world. Some readers have said this view is inconsistent, and I wasn't quite sure how to respond to such charges. Fortunately, Peter Singer, in his recent book on global ethics, I'll have more to say next week about Bush's fraudulent and despicable Earth Day media blitz, and the major media's shameless lack of critical evaluation of the utter nonsense that his propaganda machine has been churning out this week on the environment -- newspeak of Orwellian proportions. The first part of Singer's book deals with environmental responsibility, and his prescription for increasing it -- immediate ratification of Kyoto by the US and other holdout countries, and introduction of an emissions trading mechanism to make the realization of Kyoto feasible (subject to the need for some oversight on the disposition of the proceeds of such trading when it involves autocratic governments). The second part of the book deals with the global economy, and Singer adroitly tears apart the Economist's (and other neocons') naive assertion that economic globalization somehow benefits both rich and poor countries. He then goes on to prescribe a substantial reform of the WTO and the GATT, which could actually lead to more equitable distribution of wealth and more efficient production of economic goods, while safeguarding human rights, labour and the environment. Unfortunately, the multi-national corporations and corporatists who hold sway in the WTO would never tolerate Singer's prescription, since it would entirely divert the benefits of economic globalization from their pockets to those of the world's poor. The third part of the book deals with international law, and Singer lashes out at Bush for his unconscionable refusal to ratify the International Court of Justice, and for the UN's continued hesitancy to accept a duty (not a right) to intervene in situations of genocide and other humanitarian crises, even within a single nation. Singer is sanguine about the limitations and dangers of 'global government', but supports strengthening the UN to enable it to act as a 'protector of last resort', and including in its mandate the responsibility to supervise elections in all member nations. The fourth and final part goes back to ethical principles and proposes that countries must, in this world where national boundaries no longer have any logistic meaning, set aside national interest and embrace, once and for all, global interest, impartially. That does not mean cultural homogenization, but imposes a responsibility for the reduction of inequality, both of economic resources and personal rights and freedoms. Always the pragmatist, Singer concludes by worrying out loud about how the responsibility for a global ethic could be managed: It
is widely believed that a world government would be, at best, an
unchecked bureaucratic behemoth that would make the bureaucracy of the
EU look lean and efficient. At worst, it would become a global
tyranny,
unchecked and unchallengeable. These thoughts have to be taken
seriously. How to prevent global bodies becoming either dangerous
tyrannies or self-aggrandizing bureaucracies, and instead make them
effective and responsive to the people whose lives they affect? It is
a
challenge that should not be beyond the best minds in the fields of
political science and public administration.
I'd like to believe that this was possible, because if it isn't, we're in serious trouble. We cannot expect national governments to set aside parochial interests, especially when this entails accepting a responsibility that would, for the richer nations, inevitably lead to a drastic redistribution of wealth to poorer nations and hence a sudden and sharp reduction in, at least, economic living standards (if not necessarily well-being). But as John Ralston Saul has so eloquently argued, larger organizations and institutions, whether public or private, are almost always, and inherently, less efficient, less agile, more resistant to change, more hierarchic, and less transparent than smaller organizations. So the challenge is to achieve the best of both worlds, having organizations of global scope and authority and responsibility, but broken up into sufficiently small, autonomous and dynamic units that they are sensitive, resilient, responsible and responsive to the people and communities they serve. We can only hope that "the best minds in the fields of political science and public administration", wherever they are, are up to the task. |
 Schadenfreude. It's a German word that literally means "joy from damage". It refers to the perverse pleasure we take in observing or hearing about the misfortunes of others. That pleasure seems to be enhanced by talking about it with others -- gossip would be empty without it, and when we hear about a disaster, like the horrendous catastrophe of this week's Asian earthquake and tsunami, we have an almost instinctive need to share the news with others. If you don't think it's pleasure we feel in these situations, here are some more examples:
Writer Valerie Weaver-Zercher suggests< /a> what may be behind this is our dual need to see others as needy (which plays to the nurturer in us) and to see ourselves as not needy (which plays to our egos, and our feelings of learned helplessness). She calls this the "head-shaking syndrome". Some writers say it reflects a subliminal (or not-so-subliminal) desire for revenge against those we feel have wronged us or shown us up in some way. I confess I'm like Calvin's Dad in the cartoon above: I don't get it, though I recognize it seems to drive an enormous amount of human behaviour and activity. I loathe reality TV and the plethora of programs and films that wallow in human misery and suffering. I love games, and play to win, but afterwards I feel badly for the 'losers', and it is the social and learning aspect, rather than the competitive aspect, that I enjoy: I would get as much, if not more, pleasure from a collaborative social activity that everybody 'won'. I find comedy that ridicules and humiliates people to be pathetic and exploitative, not funny at all. And although I have been predicting a growing cascade of social, economic and ecological catastrophes, I will get no pleasure from being proved correct. I change the station when news comes on about disasters, crimes, and the undoing of celebrities: If there's nothing I can do about these things, to me it seems merely morbid to dwell on them. Can someone please explain to me how these things are pleasurable, or even cathartic? What perverse joy can anyone get watching people eat worms, women screaming at the loss of a child, athletes and film stars humiliated, losers of card games groan, or stand-ups reveal grotesque embarrassments from their past? Taking joy from these things seems deranged to me, evidence of great mental distress and anguish, or at best a bizarre, reality-detached ennui. But I will admit to a strange desire to spread bad news about others (though only if I know the news to be true -- I don't traffic in rumour). I don't know what's behind this. Maybe it's my natural pessimism, an opportunity to say 'I told you so', to warn people: If John and Mary are breaking up, we should all be alarmed -- maybe all marriages are doomed, or maybe monogamy itself is unnatural, unsustainable, and Tom Robbins' warning of the staggering difficulty of 'making love last' needs to be heeded. If Frank lost his job, perhaps this shows that all business hierarchies are fragile, uncaring, poised to destroy the lives of those who rely on them and allow them to continue. If Bill took his own life, maybe he's the brave one, the harbinger of the future, the canary in the coal mineshaft. I love to learn, to attach meaning to things, and bad news seems to call out for explanation, for interpretation of meaning. Why would our amazing planet be designed to suddenly shudder, and drown millions of her creatures in a tidal wave of misery, and destroy the joyous lives of tens of millions of others? What possible reason could there be for such cruelty, such devastation? Someone, please, stop telling me how many died, and instead tell me why? |
 Two weeks ago I reported on the upcoming June 28 Canadian election, and predicted that there would be a Liberal minority government, with the NDP holding the balance of power. Since then, groupthink has taken hold, and the anger that many Canadians feel about the incompetence of the federal Liberals to detect either wasteful spending or the 'sponsorship' fraud by some government workers, plus the anger of many Ontarians about the new Provincial Liberal government's reneging on promises to avoid tax increases, has led another 8% of Canadians to vow not to re-elect them. This 8% swing has been predominantly older men in Ontario, who seem unwilling to believe that the Conservatives are as right-wing as Liberal Prime Minister Martin has portrayed them, and younger people, whose support for the Green Party has significantly increased. The province-by-province projections now stand as follows -- 155 of the 308 seats are needed for a majority:
Next week we'll hear the all-important leader debates, but they are likely to change nothing. The Conservatives are muzzling their own right-wing extremists, who are virulently anti-abortion, gay-hating, anti-gun control, anti-immigation, pro closer ties with the US, anti-Kyoto accord, and militaristic (Stephen Harper, the new Conservative leader and former head of a Western separatist party, wanted Canada in the Iraq war). The Conservative strategists are determined to portray Harper as a moderate, despite the fact that he is on record as having taken right-wing positions on many social, economic and environmental position. If this sounds a lot like Dubya, and the spin doctor white-washing of his extremism reminds you of 'compassionate conservatism' in 2000, it should, because the tactics are the same -- say anything to get elected, and then trot out the real agenda of the people who paid for the campaign. But it's even more frightening than that. Small-c conservatives make up only 30% of Canadians, and the capital-c Conservatives are already above that point, with some of their voters coming from angry liberals. But if the figures above don't change, the Conservatives will get 38% of the seats with 33% of the vote. And the Bloc Québecois, the Québec separatist party that runs candidates only in that province, will get 19% of the seats with only 11% of the vote. Add them together and you get a distortion almost identical to what happened in the US in 2000, where Dubya 'won' with only 46% of the popular vote. If the Conservatives and Bloc combine their seats in a strange-bedfellows anti-federalist coalition, they'll have 57% of the seats with only 44% of the votes, while liberal-centrist parties will have only 43% of the seats, even though they will have received 56% of the votes. There is no other coalition that would have enough seats to form a government. Problem is, this coalition won't hold for more than a few months. The Bloc is a left-wing, Francophone party, liberal on all social, economic and environmental issues. The Conservatives have diametrically-opposed views on every issue but one: their dislike of federalism. The cost of Bloc support would be to grant Québec limited sovereignty, kind of 'independence light'. The very idea of this is repugnant to core Western Conservatives. And the Bloc has already said that it would not support any Conservative government that tried to recriminalize abortion, and has made it clear that it would not tolerate abandoning Canada's support for the Kyoto Accord, or anti-gay laws, both of which are bedrock principles of the Western Conservatives. And Ontario Conservatives would quickly cross the floor to the Liberals to save their political skin if the Bush-style right-wing social agenda of the Western Conservatives was trotted out. The role of the media in the final two weeks of the campaign will be interesting. Conservative media are likely to present Harper as the 'heir-apparent', the surprise winner and a fresh new face for Canada. Liberal media will be torn over whether to simply relate the campaign stories as they are spun out by the parties, or to go behind the scenes and surface what Harper has said, in writing, in past, on many issues he is now trying to paint himself as moderate on. The current Liberal campaign has attempted to do just that, but it has backfired, being portrayed as negative 'US-style' electioneering, sour grapes or desperation politics, so the liberal media could be subject to similar admonishments if they get proccupied with the 'secret agenda' of the Conservatives. But media being what they are, expect Harper, the new frontrunner, to face increasing heat over unanswered questions from his decidedly non-moderate past. Not to mention some of his decidedly wacko neophyte candidates. So what do I think will happen? The Conservatives will win a small plurality, and have to either form a coalition with, or try to manage with the tacit support of, the Bloc Québecois. Paul Martin will resign right after the election, and the Liberals will choose a new leader not tainted by the recent scandals. The Conservatives will start to self-destruct right after the election, with hard-line right-wingers expelled or resigning, and moderates crossing the floor to the Liberals, especially after it selects a new leader. The new government will last 3-6 months, accomplish nothing, and fall when the Bloc Québecois withdraws its support. Then we'll have another election, and perhaps even a third, until the 70% of Canadians with moderate-to-liberal social and political views get a government they can live with. Ontario and Québec have 60% of Canada's population, and no party has ever successfully governed the country without healthy support from both provinces. Stephen Harper is on record as opposing bilingualism, although he is now waffling on what his precise position on this is, which makes him unelectable in Québec. And his previously stated positions on many other issues will, if they become widely known, make him unelectable anywhere. It's going to be messy, and stay that way for quite awhile. And if the Martin Liberals hadn't been so politically stupid, it could all have been avoided. Cartoon by Tom Cheney -- buy his stuff at Cartoon Bank. |
 In Beyond Civilization, Daniel Quinn
says:People will listen
when
they're ready to listen and not before. Probably, once upon a
time,
you weren't ready
to listen to an idea than now seems to you obvious, even urgent. Let
people
come to it in their own time. Nagging or bullying will only alienate
them.
Don't preach. Don't waste time with people who want to argue. They'll
keep
you immobilized forever. Look for people who are already open to
something
new.
When presenting a new
idea, you don't have to have all the answers. It's better to say 'I
don't know' than to fake it. Make people formulate their own
questions.
Don't take on the responsibility of figuring out what their difficulty
is. We each internalize information differently. If you don't
understand
a question, keep insisting they explain it until it's clear. Nine
times
out
of ten they'll supply the answer themselves.
Above all, listen.
Your close attention is sometimes more important than your
articulateness in winning converts. And learning is always a good
thing.
When I've talked to people about the ideas I've presented in this blog, I get the sense that maybe 10% really understand and appreciate what I'm saying. Perhaps another 40% are ready to listen and want to believe, but either my inarticulateness or their internalization mechanism garbles the message. After all, saving the world (or, as one recent commenter 'geo' put it more accurately "changing how humans live so we as a species can continue to survive") is not easy or obvious, or we'd all be busy doing it. This reading list is for that 40%, in the hope that better writers than I can convey more clearly and compellingly what we need to do and why. The remaining 50%, I suspect, are not ready. Five years ago someone gave me The Spell of the Sensuous and I gave up after five pages -- I just wasn't ready. Here's the list -- 56 books and articles that forever changed my worldview, and my purpose for living:: What Life was Really Like Before Civilization: Revisionist History
Radical Analysis, Radical
Solutions (these are the most important readings, but you
probably won't 'buy' their arguments unless you've first read much of
the material above)
Toolkit for Change: Knowledge We Can Use to Save the World
|
 Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) recently released its list of the ten most under-reported humanitarian events of 2003. The map above shows which countries these events occurred in. Although the MSF site is temporarily down, you can read the complete details of these stories here. The top 10 stories are:
Why aren't the media covering these stories? None of them is physically close to the West. None of them involves countries with resources of strategic importance to the West. Almost all of them are ongoing, so there is nothing 'new' to report each day. None of the people in these countries has resorted to terrorist attacks against the West to bring attention to our indifference to their plight. And all of them are intractible problems, and therefore issues that those of us in the West would rather not know about. |
| Well, thanks to readers much
more tech-savvy than I am, I think I may be able to get Google to
start
picking up my posts again, and, by tightening up the code of my
blogroll, also make the page load faster for those patient readers
with
dial-up access. So far I have moved the blogroll to the right hand
column, so Google will not get bogged down in the blogroll code and
give up before it gets to the actual posts. In the process I messed up
the masthead, so I've adopted a simple one-piece masthead
temporarily. If this post works properly, I'll then make an additional change to my blogroll, stripping out the table HTML and replacing it with a simple list separated by line breaks. Next post will report on the results of that. Keep your fingers crossed for me. |
 I've written twice before about suicide, and a new 'advice column' in Salon.com has provoked me to write about it again. The gist of my earlier articles:
Sentimentalizing
suicide only encourages others who, weak-minded, pained, lacking the
ability to see how foolish and wrong it is, might succeed all too well
in their feeble attempts. What fucking gall, Mr. Tennis -- and
such cruel and inflammatory language. Those who commit suicide are not
weak-minded, and if this 'advice columnist' had the faintest inkling
what it is like to live with suicidal depression he would know better.
And who the hell does he think he is to judge the actions of someone
he
has never met as 'foolish and wrong'? When they go by suicide, they leave us in an insult of dust. Mr. Tennis should also know that suicide is almost never an 'insult' to anyone. It is an act of desperation, usually after years of unimaginable suffering, to escape a living hell that the victim -- yes, victim -- can no longer bear. It usually has nothing to do with anyone else, so the last thing it is is an insult to others. To counsel people, especially people in pain after an unexpected and shocking loss, to hate and blame the deceased is an affront to human dignity, an abuse of trust, and an offense to the memory of someone who was a victim, not a 'murderer'. There is a perverse character flaw in some people to always assuage grief by transferring it to anger and blame. Grief is internal, and it can eat you alive. Anger and blame are externally focused. They are much easier emotions to handle. And in some cases -- like rechanneling the grief over 9/11 into anger at Osama bin Ladin -- such transferance is quite rational. But although the exploitative 'vengeance' religions would have you believe otherwise, when people suffer and die there is often no one to blame, no one to get angry at. And reaching closure, like dealing with grief, is an internal process. It is about personally coming to grips with loss, with the realization that the toxic 'what might have been' is irrelevant, a fiction, closed. It is a slow, painful healing process. And it is a process best undertaken honestly. Using some cheap trick like transferring the pain to anger and blame of a phony straw man merely perverts and delays the process, and stirs up inappropriate emotions that can only confuse and inflame, not heal. Some advice, we're better off without. |
 A
new Dutch government program called SeniorStart
"aims at stimulating successful entrepreneurship by older (45+) people
who have lost or left their jobs or are re-entering the workforce
after
an extended period, by
creating a dedicated (virtual) professionally-staffed National Service
Centre and supporting the
sharing of knowledge and experience between experienced senior
entrepreneurs and new startups through regional networks".The National Service Centre offers the following services.
The project is financed by the Taskforce on Older People and Employment, the GAK (Industrial Insurance Administration Office), the Ministry of Economic Affairs and the WISE (Working Network and Information Centre for Senior Entrepreneurs) Foundation. It was co-developed by WISE and MKB, an umbrella group of over 500 trade organizations and business associations. This is a wonderful initiative, one that deserves to be studied and emulated in other countries. Now, what I'd really like to see is a network that connects these older, experienced aspiring entrepreneurs with the other group that desperately needs advice on how to set up a new business -- young people just graduating from school and unwilling to enter into a lifelong contract of wage slavery as menial employees to pay off their student loans -- and then advises both groups on how to set up and operate a successful entrepreneurial business. |
 I love the work of photographer Dav id Lorenz Winston, so when I saw what looked to be an original oil painting by him entitled "Solitude", at an unbelievably low price, I couldn't believe my eyes. I was right not to -- it wasn't an oil, but a giclée print of a photograph on a textured gloss or surface-treated canvas, so it looked, at least to my untrained eye, like an original oil. It glimmers in the light and reflects light off the sides of the pigment as you move, just like hand-painted oil or acrylic. Giclée (invented by rocker Graham Nash) is like inkjet on steroids -- 12-colour hi-res inkjet copies produced one-off from a digital master. By contrast, most prints use lithography -- an upscale dot-matrix technology but with only four colours used and relatively poor resolution. The combination of giclée and gloss/surface treated canvas is a great example of innovation, and I commend the studio, Northland Art Company, for using it. The photo above (excuse the warp -- my lousy photography) is taken from the giclée-on-canvas print; a plain print by Winston from his website is below. You can get an idea by comparing them of the richness and three-dimensionality that this ultra-high-resolution colour and stippling effect adds.   Winston's
work looks almost surreal, as if it were photoshopped, but the
giclée-on-canvas (close up sample at right) seems to restore
its
'authenticity', by psychologically transforming it from a photo (a
mechanical reproduction), to a painting (a man-made reproduction). When a photographer doctors his shot, unless it's very clever and artistic we're inclined to call it fraud. But when an artist uses paint or watercolour to portray something in a distorted, exaggerated or surreal way, whether it's real or imagined, we call it art. The distributor at Northland said the process can double the walk-by sales of a print. And the process can make a poor art collector look like an affluent collector of originals. Now I'm wondering if it would be possible to take some of my 'flat' prints and either surface-treat them, and/or re-print them onto textured canvas, so they look like the original watercolours, oils or acrylics instead of just prints. Any artists tell me if that's possible? And what are the ethical issues of re-printing (for personal use only) or surface-treating a signed print -- does this open up the same issues for the art world that digital copying and file-sharing have produced for musicians and film-makers? |
 Figure 1 Richard Manning's book Against the Grain is a remarkable work -- succinct, well-researched, solution-oriented and mind-altering. It's an absolute must-read. Please don't settle for the synopsis below, and don't assume that because it's about the history and economy of agriculture it's a dull read. It's riveting. The issues that Manning describes in the book were first raised in his Harper's Magazine article last winter called The Oil We Eat. But the book goes much further. In my earlier root-cause analysis of what 'caused' us to invent civilization, to abandon our joyful hunter-gatherer cultures, the cause-and-effect went like this:
 Figure 2 The 'discovery' of grain monoculture in areas of recurring natural catastrophe (like floodplains) was only possible where man was already settled, which only occurred in areas where fish were plentiful, which is where all agricultural cultures began (the birthplaces of civilization) before they expanded and merged into the single civilization culture we know today. Sedentary life, and soft grain gruels, also allowed a higher birth rate, since babies no longer had to be carried for four years until they were weaned -- and the population explosion began. The ability to store food also allowed the provisioning of armies, and the need to keep people from going back to their instinctive hunter-gatherer ways and abandon the farms required the use of force, which required hierarchy and government. The provisioned armies conquered the remaining hunter-gatherers (most notably in Africa and the Americas) and made them slaves on the farms. To keep unnatural hierarchy1 from crumbling, the governors bribed subordinates with extra resources, larger homes, and their own 'private' land, as long as the subordinates kept the slaves and peasants in line2. Wealth, and its inevitable partner poverty, were born. Dependence on monoculture, which failed often, gave rise to the first famines. Average human heights plummeted due to disease and poor, unvaried diet, bone deformities from constant stooping became commonplace, and grain monoculture and crowded villages allowed previously rare diseases to flourish: anemia, arthritis, malaria, syphilis, and tuberculosis, and, finally, plague, all of them unknown before agriculture. And the high-carb diet of grain monoculture also brought with it other new and unnatural phenomena: tooth decay, obesity, diabetes, lactose tolerance, and alcoholism, which devastated many hunter-gatherer cultures when they were suddenly exposed to this deadly and seductive diet. So agriculture was irresistible to man, the ultimate devil's bargain. By doing so, man threw in his lot with a host of life forms that co-evolved with man and grain monoculture: this 'coalition' included the rat, insect pests, weeds and parasites as well as the aforementioned diseases and a handful of animals suited to domestication, all of which thrive with monoculture. In fact much of the 'conquering' of the hunter-gatherer world by 'civilized' man was really accomplished by our coalition partners: it was our diseases, to which hunter-gatherers had no exposure and hence no resistance, that killed most of them, not our weapons or their years of subsequent slave labour. The introduction of our domestic animals likewise altered the New World's terrain, since these animals had few natural predators and exploded in population, literally eating the natural flora to extinction. Like us, these domestic animals paid the price of civilization -- they are smaller, sicker and poorer than their wild counterparts, but the ultimate test of evolution is endurance, and our unholy coalition has passed that test with flying colours. Humans, members of the six domestic animal groups and the big five monoculture grains, and the rodents, insects, weeds and disease parasites that come with them have all flourished, at least in numbers, together, and together they now constitute a huge and growing proportion of Earth's biomass, while the millions of non-coalition creatures almost all face extinction. Although our diseases did most of the dirty work, Manning argues that our civilization culture committed systematic genocide against every hunter-gatherer culture on the planet, from the Cro-Magnon man in Eastern Europe (whose language, intriguingly lives on only in the tiny Basque community whose culture is still under siege), to the First Nations of the Americas and Oceania. The result was what anthropologists have called "remarkable cultural homogeneity" and "pathological conventionality". Its sustained hallmark has been ever-increasing famines, the "very badge of civilization". The worst famine ever, and one of the most recent, in Mao's China, killed 80 million people. The second worst, in Russia, was also in the past century. Famine, a sudden and severe shortage of vital resources, breeds hunger, and that always breeds imperialism in turn. The alternative, common and legal in China for millennia until quite recently, is an invention called "Swapping Children / Making Food" -- in times of famine you exchange your children for your neighbour's, and then kill them and eat them and use their bones for fuel. Modern mythology would have us believe that famine is a political problem -- a consequence of bad distribution of food and bad government -- and while this is in part true, famine is ultimately an inevitable consequence of our fragile monoculture and massive overpopulation. This quote, describing one such famine in Ireland, where potato blight in one year eliminated 90% of the monoculture potato crop and hence 90% of the food, has given me nightmares: In the first hovel, six famished
and ghastly skeletons, to all appearances dead, were huddled in a
corner on some filthy straw, their sole covering what seemed a ragged
horsecloth, and their wretched legs hanging about, naked above the
knees. I approached with horror, and found by a low moaning that they
were alive, they were in fever -- four children, a woman, and what had
once been a man. It is impossible to go through the details. Suffice
it
to say that, in a few minutes, I was surrounded by at least 200 of
such
phantoms, such frightful specters as no words can describe.
All of this because we threw ourselves out of the Garden of Eden, seduced by the lure of uniform plenty. Why and how did we get into this mess, and who is to blame? Manning recaps: "A population explosion generates the need to grow more food, but agriculture is the cause of that population explosion, and agriculture creates the need for government. The hierarchical, specialized societies that agriculture builds are wholly dependent on the smooth operation of their infrastructure, on transportation, on stability. Dams must be built, canals must flow, roads must be maintained and government must be established to order these tasks. Government leaders emerge from the social hierarchy that agriculture's wealth makes possible. Failures are human and inevitable. To hold agriculture blameless and government responsible for famine is like holding a lion blameless for a child's death on the grounds that it was the lion's teeth that did the damage. Poverty, government and famine are co-evolved species, every bit as integral to catastrophic agriculture as wheat, bluegrass, smallpox and rats." Our solution, of course, was not to blame agriculture, but to try to make it more efficient. Although we now produce a massively excess amount of monoculture food, famines, starvation and poverty remain commonplace. So lately we developed the Green Revolution to increase efficiency of grain production, to increase yields and edible mass per acre and per plant. The theory was that these high-yield crops could be grown closer to the starving. But fifty years later this has not solved the problem, and it has in fact increased the fragility of the system. Plants are now patented, and GM now threatens existing plant species and diversity and their utter homogeneity exposes them to new vulnerabilities as nature evolves new pests and diseases to try to bring back into balance this massive, ecologically unsustainable and undifferentiated surplus. And these higher yields come with a huge price tag. Whereas a calorie of your home-grown carrots requires less than a calorie of non-photosynthetic energy to produce, a calorie of grain requires ten calories of energy to produce3, mostly in the form of Mideast-oil-based, highly processed nitrogen fertilizers poured onto severely and evermore soil- and nutrient-depleted land. Ironically, that fertilizer replaces animal manure, which is no longer economical to truck from the new concentration-camp factory farms (also developed to improve 'efficiency'). So most of the oil-based fertilizer runs off into the water supply, along with massive amounts of pesticides, herbicides, antibiotics and other by-products of 'efficient' agriculture and the mountains of shit from the factory farms, which no longer has commercial 'value'. And if the smell of that shit makes living in the area unbearable, that's fine, too, because Archer Daniels Midland and the other handful of companies that run this entire system can then buy up and concentrate the farms more cheaply. Besides, we don't want nosy 'eco-terrorists' and news media poking around and seeing what really goes on in those factory farms anyway. The cost of this is so phenomenally high that government subsidies now exceed the entire 'commercial value' of the food produced. It's a massive corporate welfare scheme originally designed to keep families on farms and now accruing primarily to the few corporations that control the industry. Taxpayers pay for these corporations to produce and process an absurd excess of bad food and to finance governments who pursue Middle Eastern wars to get the oil needed for fertilizer. And in return the taxpayers get cheap, tasteless, unhealthy, polluted food, monstrous animal cruelty, massive pollution of the air and water, heart disease, obesity, diabetes, tooth decay, alcoholism, ruined land, and unemployment. And still there is famine. So what are we to do? Manning starts by pointing out what not to do -- try to get government to change the system. "The political system cannot be counted on to reform agriculture because the political system is a creation of agriculture, a co-evolved entity". Of course we should try to end agricultural subsidies, but Manning says we are unlikely to succeed. Vegetarianism can help, but not much: As long as the vegetables come from the same commodity system, they're still causing massive environmental and social damage and animal cruelty. And we couldn't go back to hunter-gatherer culture, at least not in our current numbers, even if we wanted to. But reducing human population is a necessary condition: "I do not take human population as a given; if we accept six billion as inevitable, we are doomed". Beyond that, Manning's solution is the same one that a rising chorus of radicals and revolutionaries is calling for: A walking away from this system and its products, and the creation of a new, healthy culture and economy. To Manning, focused on the food economy, this means:
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All great ideas are
dangerous, wrote
Oscar Wilde. And someone else said that every great idea is initially
ridiculed as absurd or reviled as heresy. Philosopher Glenn Parton,
whose essay The Machine In Our Heads
I recommended
recently, has a new, great and dangerous idea. It builds somewhat
on the ideas in James W. Prescott's paper I wrote
about
earlier, that human violence stems from a combination of childhood
neglect and adolescent sexual repression. Glenn has given me the
honour
of allowing me to publish his essay on it first on this blog. Although
this may be hard to believe, Glenn's idea is more radical than
anything
I have ever written, perhaps even more radical than anything I have
ever dared think. It will probably trouble you, as it did me.
Please take the time to read this essay in its entirety -- it will requre an hour's investment. The first two sections are below, and the link at the bottom will take you to the whole essay. If it seems overly long, bear with it -- it has a lot of well-entrenched preconceptions about our culture to challenge before what he proposes will seem at all acceptable to most readers. And if it seems overly preoccupied with the sexual aspect of relationships, substitute the words 'love' and 'emotional' for 'sex' and 'sexual' respectively, and plug on. You may have some deep misgivings about what Glenn has to say, but if this article affects you as it did me, you will not be the same person when you finish reading it as when you began. Please let me know what you think. I'll add my own comments either in the comments thread below or in a follow-up article. I'm sure Glenn will be interested as well. LOVE POLITICS: A Case Against Monogamy by Glenn Parton  Introduction Let's shift the focus from the question, what is to be done? to the question, Why can't people see the obvious? If people could see what is self-evident to the rational mind, then appropriate action would soon follow. That Americans do not see the obvious truth is amply demonstrated by the popularity of George W. Bush. Outline of a strategy for human renewal: One: Americans cannot think deeply because the heart is closed. When the heart is closed, then Reason, the mind, becomes a calculator, an instrument, a machine that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. It is hard-hearted people who are unknowingly supporting world-disaster. True knowledge, wisdom, must be informed by sympathy, feelings, and heart. Two: The American heart has turned to stone due to sexual repression, stretching back to our Puritan beginning. Everyone in this culture is, as a manner of upbringing, sexually wounded, resulting in fear, shame, guilt, and resentment. The wound festers; self-doubt and self-hatred prevent us from loving others. Generosity, the opening of the heart, begins with the ability to experience sex as a gift. If you cannot do this, then all your good deeds will be wrapped in resentment. The Christian concept of love, which desexualizes it (Agape instead of Eros), leaves the person sick and suffering at the core. Three: To open the heart so we can think deeply it is necessary to search and find our erotic nature, accept it, and freely express it. This is not something that can be done alone -- through Yoga, Tantra, for example -- but requires a new man/woman relationship. The old relationship -- namely, monogamy (whose first historical form was patriarchy, but which is now co-dependency or co-ownership) is unnecessarily restrictive, a bedrock value, an unquestioned premise, the ideological basis of State Monopoly Capitalism which is destroying this planet. In short, we will not think deeply unless we love, and we will not love unless we practice a free sexuality. Dare to love more than one person! It's a simple idea that's hard to do. Consult your daydreams! Beginning The integration of politics and sexuality is the best way to build a social movement for resolving the ecological crisis which is threatening to bring Life on this planet to a crash in probably one or two generations, perhaps sooner? Traditional politics, party-politics, and protest-politics, are necessary for postponing world disaster, for providing time and space for fundamental lifestyle changes, but is not sufficient to heal us from the ground up, according to the original-natural order of things. For this task we need to mobilize a different kind of energy, not negative energy, but positive energy, the energy of Eros. Sexual love is the prototype of all human happiness. If we let this joy, instead of conscience or duty or protest be the source of our community building, it would bring together and hold together aware people. Necessity alone, the advantages of work in common, even the primary work of saving the planet and ourselves, will not hold us together because the psychological damage in America is too great. Americans have a defensive ego-structure -- a system of self-deceptions, projections and prejudices that distort our perception of the world -- the cost of survival in this harsh and grossly unfair society. This makes us, “as we are”, incapable of forming enduring political communities for social transformation, which is precisely what we must do in order to avoid eco-catastrophe. We cannot get along well enough with one another for long enough to do the things that must be done. All our sincere and noble efforts self-destruct, but we can no longer afford to fail, for now the planet as a whole is in jeopardy. What will bring us and hold us together for world transformation? Erotic love is the last remaining force in the modern world capable of mobilizing, sustaining, and perfecting us for this long and difficult task. But not if the erotic life-force is damned by monogamy. A transforming political community of monogamous couples is impossible because monogamous love places itself first and everyone else second; it produces separation and tension between lovers and everyone else, couples and society. However, by refusing monogamy in favor of a highly discerning free love, there is a chance of knitting a community that will not easily unravel. The pairing process, as far as I can see, will remain the basis of the social structure, but we could all work more easily and much better in a network of loving relationships, pairing without exclusivity, opening lines of deep communication that are presently jammed by jealousy, competition, mistrust, fear and arrogance. The key is not to abolish one-to-one love, but to multiply it. There is already a manifest hostility between the sexes, which is going to get worse. Much of it is a result of a false morality that prohibits us from knowing one another. Each man is "allowed" to intimately know only one woman, and vice versa. How can we expect to find and work out answers to the critical problems we face, if a vital point of discovery, wisdom and sustainability -- love between men and women -- is so limited! The age of discovery and togetherness between the sexes has not yet begun, so let it begin now with a few individuals who defy the sacred cow of conventional morality -- namely, monogamy-- in favor of political love, which means loving the “highest” in oneself and others, making one's political destiny with a lover clear and binding, creating diverse relationships, loving communities, in which women draw out the best in men (infusing men's minds with love), and men draw out the best in women (inspiring them with intellectual theory and global political priorities). Real love is transcendence, beyond the mutual validation of empirical egos, toward a shared commitment or vow, not just between two people, but to a new commonwealth. The function of these erotic-political inter-relationships is to accelerate evolution, nature's effort to become aware of itself as a whole, before an eco-catastrophe resets it back to the stage of the cockroach. Why not affirm sexual love as a vehicle for progressive social change; it is presently misused for every moneymaking purpose imaginable -- with great success. That should tell us something. This retail culture would collapse if people tasted real happiness, instead of being locked in monogamous relationships that cannot satisfy the mass of humanity for a lifetime (even if a few simpletons stick to a single spouse), driving people elsewhere for satisfaction, finding everything but the real thing. When material circumstances are ripe, an idea, Learn to love more than one person, can be a decisive force in history. It depends on a handful of living examples that prove the reality of the concept, and then thousands and tens of thousands will spontaneously respond to it. Today, the information and organs of communication for world transformation are in place: it is the inner readiness for widening the domain of love that is lacking, as Lewis Mumford said. That is our challenge, for without a positive concentration on love, understood as the integration of sexual desire and political awareness, we will not be able to rescue the planet and its creatures from the growing forces of hate and violence. Did everyone who is dissatisfied with his or her love life make the wrong choice, or could there be something inherently wrong with monogamy? The American way is to always want to solve every problem with a new and improved technique, rather than consider a bold, new reorganization of life. The solution of the sexual problem, however, takes us to the core of human nature, and demands that we come to terms with the human role in the greater scheme of reality, our place in the cosmos. According to the German philosopher, Maik Hosang, the logos of love can save us: evolution occurs through qualitative leaps, from matter to life to human life. Love among the parts sets the stage for the emergence of higher reality. The gravitational order of the celestial bodies generated life, and the balance and harmony of living beings gave rise to humankind. A just and peaceful world-order is the next step forward, but we need to untie the knot of monogamy and let the whole of evolution flow through a new and free man/woman relationship, creating loving and lasting human communities, which will rationally regulate our relations with nature. Frederick Engels' book, The Origin Of The Family, Private Property And The State, argues that "group marriage" is characteristic of hunter-gatherers, whereas horticultural people prefer "pairing marriage." The later is more hedged around with restrictions, but is not based on any assumption of sexual exclusiveness for either partner. Pre-European America, according to Lewis Morgan on whose empirical research Engels based his theory, is the classic soil of the pairing family. The Iroquois, for example, simply dissolved relationships at will by going back home, and held festivals every year when tribes came together for the purpose of wider sexual enjoyment and cultural enrichment. According to Engels, “monogamous marriage”, the third historical stage of the man/woman relationship, results from the influence of private property (beginning with the domestication of animals). Its express purpose being to produce children of undisputed paternity (so women cannot be permitted to have sex with other men), which later come into their father's property as his natural heirs. Engels shows what a small part individual sex love played in the rise of monogamy. It has an economic origin. And along with permanent monogamy there soon appeared prostitution (for men) and adultery (for women), with no cure for either one. According to Engels, women brought about the transition from group marriage to pairing marriage, with its greater equality and joy, but men introduced strict monogamy -- though indeed only for women. In her introduction to Engels’ great book, Eleanor Leacock argues that it is crucial for women to understand that the monogamous family as an economic unit is basic to their subjugation, calling it, quoting Engels, “the world historical defeat of the female sex.” Monogamous marriage, characteristic of modern people, imposes too heavy a weight on human beings. It is not the natural form of human association that corresponds best to human nature; it was a wrong turn, a historical mistake, perhaps facilitated by natural selfishness, but the important point is that it is not irreversible. We need to recapture the freedom and happiness of pre-monogamous tribal love relationships. L. Morgan, after studying the American Indians, came to the conclusion in his book, Ancient Society, that the advanced forms of civilization “will be a repetition, but on a higher level of the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity which characterized the ancient gens.” Love Politics is the idea that sex, the oldest force in the world for building community, when linked throughout to emancipatory consciousness, is still the basis for building a political community that puts us on the path towards a good society. The way to make us strong enough, wide enough, and deep enough to carry out the required socio-economic changes is to make the entire process an erotic adventure. A group of monogamous couples is a boring place, dead spirit, because you cannot stifle the erotic basis of community and hope to keep it alive and well. Gatherings and meetings of any kind do not work. Politics is bleak in America; we have come down to the primal energy of Eros as the source for a genuine political revival. Only by allowing sexual energy to flow more openly, as in aboriginal societies, can aware people create and sustain enough human cohesiveness and solidarity to make a true beginning... Read the whole essay (includes the above extract; scroll to the third section of the essay, entitled "Family", to continue reading where the above extract leaves off). ©2004 Glenn Parton |
 Global Footprint Stress Index: Extreme (purple, >10), High (orange 3-10), Moderate (yellow 1-3), Low (white <1) Last month I wrote an article suggesting that a propensity for war-mongering and civil violence, i.e. the tendency to take hasty and extreme action rather than a reasoned and responsible response to a crisis, might be attributable to what Edward Hall describes as population stress, the adrenaline-driven aggressive/panic stress response that all creatures exhibit when their population greatly exceeds sustainable carrying capacity. Hall explains that this is nature's 'last resort' method of bringing the population of the species quickly back into balance with the rest of the ecosystem, when the species fails to manage its own numbers and when opportunistic diseases don't do the trick. Earlier I had calculated< /a> a simple Population Stress Index (PSI), which was computed by multiplying density per arable square mile by population growth rate, and I compared it to an astonishingly similar map by another blogger, Matthew White, showing violent death rate by country. As I explained in last month's post, the PSI is an imperfect stress index. It does not show the very different levels of consumption and demand on local resources of people in different countries (which has as much to do with sustainability as population). So I have now computed a Footprint Stress Index (FSI), plotted on the map above, which is computed as follows:
Resource Use Index: Sample
Countries
Footprint Stress Index: Sample
Countries
The US, China, Congo, Colombia, Venezuela, and several Mid-Eastern nations all have FSIs in excess of 10. These are all countries embroiled in war, imperialistic or regional or civil, except for China where dissent is ruthlessly suppressed. These are the countries that are suffering enormous anxiety because not only are they consuming vastly more resources than what they have available domestically, their populations or industrial capacities are also growing rapidly, meaning they will need to find ever more resources outside the country to feed the soaring need. Japan, South Korea and most European nations have very high Resource Use Indices, but because their populations are growing slowly and because they are mostly very aware of conservation, their EFs are not increasing. As a result, their FSIs are more moderate. Because they all depend so heavily (90% or more) on imports of other countries' natural resources, however, as these resources get depleted and as exporting countries realize how cheaply they are giving them away, these nations' unsustainable resource demands will not be able to be met, and that will drive their Footprint Stress Indices way up. Once these scarcities become endemic, there will no longer be any option to increase resource use, and at that point the Resource Use Index itself will become the Footprint Stress Index. What will the world be like when dozens of nations, whose economies are using resources at more than ten times the rate they can sustain them from domestic supplies, suddenly find the price of these supplies quadrupling, or that these supplies are not available at any price? Colour all the countries on the left side of the Resource Use Index table above purple on the map at the top of this article and you'll get the idea. We're talking about a world war for increasingly scarce resources. And all of the countries on the right side of that table then become invasion targets. We all know what we have to do. Immediate massive taxes on resources to finance the development of technologies that conserve or don't require natural resources. Shut-down of corporations that waste resources, that pollute, and that produce non-essential products. An end to subsidies, so that we can begin to realize the true cost of our profligate deficit spending. The pay-down of government debts to reduce the risk of economic collapse when interest and inflation rates spike. Incentives for having no children, or maybe one. Of course, we have no appetite for these draconian solutions. The corporatist Frankenstein monster is perpetuating the waste and madness that is producing this crisis, and they accept no responsibility for the ultimate Tragedy of the Commons that will hit us with colossal force once we simply run out of resources to consume to keep civilization's engine running. The hydrogen economy simply won't occur fast enough to stave off disaster. Our best hope is, ironically, that some crisis will shock us into collective action before the real crunch hits. We learned nothing from the oil line-ups a generation ago, but perhaps it is not too late. If the first crisis to hit is manageable, we may be motivated to combine three massive human efforts: Voluntary negative population growth, global large-scale conservation, and an unprecedented investment in innovation and new low-footprint technologies, that could prevent a social, economic and ecological collapse. We survived a Great Depression three quarters of a century ago by exactly this type of huge, collective intervention. That's what we need now. The 'market' isn't going to fix this mess. |
| Four
years ago I wrote a well-received paper entitled A Prescription for Business Innovation:
Creating
Technologies that Solve Basic Human Needs. I've updated it,
broken it into three manageable pieces, and present the third part
below. The first part, which reviewed the history of human innovation
and technology, is here,
the second part, which described the current environment for
innovation, is here. Six: Prescription for an Innovative Organization  The
first four years of the century have seen some serious setbacks in
business innovation. The corporatist-backed Bush administration has
introduced legislation to reduce corporate liability to consumers, and
has been extremely lax in enforcing social and environmental laws.
Organizations like the RIAA and Nike have showed that the courts will
allow large corporations great latitude to sue customers (including
infringing on their privacy rights) and to lie to customers in their
advertising (about sweatshop operations, offshoring etc.) Corporations
like Enron have abused public trust and destroyed thousands of
families' livelihoods and life savings. And massive defense and
security expenditures have siphoned off funds that might have been
invested in innovation, and have made corporations and lenders nervous
about any investment while governments and corporations are so
seriously overextended and exposed to interest rate fluctuations. The
result is a climate of great animosity between corporations and
customers, and unprecedented risk aversion.At the same time, recent surveys indicate a growing corporate awareness that "you cannot cut (or offshore) your way to greatness", that the limit to improving profitability by reducing costs and margins has now more or less been reached, and that innovation must again move to the forefront if corporations are to have any hope of sustaining that profitability. So corporations are looking for low-cost, effective ways to develop new products, new processes, new delivery channels and new technologies that will meet important human needs, provide real value to customers, and be affordable by those customers. This challenge occurs at a time when the distribution of wealth among customers is massively skewed, both within and between nations, towards a tiny elite, when many governments and most corporations and individuals are buried under a crushing debt load, and when the need for inno |
I've now finished Jim
Merkel's book