The (old) Alpha Mind

I’ve published the first episode of “Build a Better Podcast.” Enjoy!

the name in vain

with each croaked burst of the sweet word freedom
with each hoarse shout of what should be whispered with awe
(do you feel it?)
closer comes the day when it will be treason
(hush! what’s that on the stair?)
to speak of bringing back the republic

Pamela Jones of Groklaw gives her award for “The Stupidest Lawsuit Since the World Began,” which features a French bus company suing ten cleaning women and claiming damages of €2 million (over US$3million) because said ladies dared to form a car pool. Says Jones, the suit is not just the stupidest…

But also the meanest. When did business get so mean? And so stupid? I think it’s safe to say that those ten women will never use that bus service to get anywhere on planet earth again, no matter what happens in court. And frankly, if the only way to stay in business is to sue your departing customers, furious at them because they’ve found something better, it’s time to look at what you are offering.

I suspect business has been mean a long time. It sure isn’t new this year. Remember that in 2001 Bechtel sued the government of Bolivia for cancelling the contract by which Bechtel supplied water to the city of Cochabamba. Remember that the reason Bolivia cancelled was that it wasn’t willing to kill more than the one person who died in the crackdown that occurred when Cochabambans protested. Remember that the reason they protested was not only that their water bills had risen enormously, but that legislation accompanying the contract had made it illegal for these citizens to collect rainwater in their backyards.

Now, suing cleaning women for car-pooling is pretty outrageous. But forbidding the poor (and in Bolivia, poor is poor like we in the US can scarcely conceive of) to collect rainwater… well, I can only ask how many steps it is from there to simply stuffing people into ovens. I can’t see many. And Bechtel was suing the government of Bolivia because it balked at collecting that much blood on its hands.

Next to these lawsuits, it seems trivial to remember the Archie Comics organization suing a family for naming a website veronica.org, for their daughter of that ilk. Archie Comics had the good sense to drop the suit, but not before leaving a nasty taste in the mouths of many thousands who heard of and were outraged by the action.

The Veronica suit isn’t trivial only because it was dropped. Outrageous though it was, it lacked the common thread uniting Bechtel’s and the bus company’s suits (and the SCO lawsuit which is Groklaw’s actual subject): These suits all seek to make cooperation an actionable offense. (If this isn’t clear in the Bechtel case, perhaps I need to mention that the Cochabamba contract was the result of the World Bank’s insistence that water be privatized; the people had thought water ought to belong to the people.)

When the Cluetrain Manifesto was written in those dawning years of the blog-bound world community, its authors preached only at a poorly-defined entity called “companies,” urging that they recognize the inevitability of vast and powerful communities built on open conversation. Did these writers realize that the very existence of conversation, based as it is on cooperation, would come under threat in courtrooms? That someone, somewhere, would dare to stand before a judge and, without blushing, plead that cooperation, which is the foundation not only of conversation, but of everything good about human existence, ought to be punished?

It isn’t just amorphously defined “companies” that need to get on the cluetrain. It’s all of us. This isn’t about marketing any more. This is about our very lives.

When I started this blog I resolved not to blog about DRM, which is being done to death on an awful lot of blogs. 11 days later and already my resolve is broken. This article by Dennis M. Kennedy is mighty fine, short and sweet and with a message that ought to be heard.

Boing Boing has gotten nailed for some allegedly sloppy reporting. Scoble says it serves ‘em right.

I’d enjoy saying the same, I suppose. However, I don’t know that I know the truth of the matter any more than I did yesterday.

Is there a “blog of record” that I can really trust? One where, having read one story about a matter, I can trust that the facts I now think I know are facts indeed?

Those engaged in the debate about the relationship between blogging and journalism ought to be aware of how journalism came to be. Guttenberg’s invention didn’t bring it about. In fact, journalism as we now think of it didn’t emerge until less than 200 years ago. By “as we think of it,” I refer mostly to the division of labor within newspapers, which created the reporting profession and brought about the constant, usually creative tension between reporters and editors.

The editor is the most crucial element of journalism that is missing from the blogosphere. But that can’t last forever, and the Boing Boing debacle, if that is what it turns out to be, tells us why. Both reporters and editors need to understand libel law, but reporters must usually expend too much effort digging up news to exercise every precaution to ensure that the news they send in to the editor is factual. Even when the facts are fairly clear, it is not always prudent and in the public interest to print a story, and an editor should be expected to have a cooler head on that question than a reporter who has pursued the story with all the concentration, and presented it with all the pride, of a cat hauling home birds.

After a few bloggers face libel suits, many more will become properly cautious, and many others will become too shy to keep blogging. And it won’t be many more years before “properly cautious” means having one’s writing vetted by a cooler head. When that day comes, blogging will no longer be viewed as a great threat to journalism. Rather, having grown up, it will be journalism.

It’s a list of podcasts produced by businesses. On Constantin Basturea’s The New PR.

Well, I’ve learned just enough typo3 to be dangerous. I’ve built myself a shell of a web site. It is based on the only decently-functioning, free template I could find in the whole wide world. Many thanks to Gregory D. Remington at Mediatech for making his template a Creative Commons freebie.

For another few days, the blog is all the web site there will be on buildabetterpodcast. But it won’t be long before I have some serious content poured into the new site. I figure I’ll make it public by July 11, a week from today.

There’s so much to say about podcasting that I’ve built a new blog dedicated to just that.

I’ll continue to post about podcasting here, but the really meaty stuff will go there.

Okay, I confess. I like Better Bad News. And I like this week’s episode. Rife with sound effects. It takes surrealism to a new high… er, low… er, wide. Well, something. Yeah, wide, that’s it.

I was privileged to run the sound for BBN for the May 30 installment. I even got credit, the only time they’ve credited the crew.

Sweet!

But what if that used up 30 seconds of my 15 minutes of fame? Was it the best fame I could have gotten? Can I ask for it back?

Good to see Jude back.

Over the life of this blog, I’ll frequently mention lessons I’ve learned from the Religious Society of Friends, a.k.a. Quakers.

Friends have some very peculiar ways, among them their group decision-making process. Just to begin collecting my thoughts about what this way has to teach leaders, I’m posting a short essay on the subject by an insider, a prominent Friend of Philadelphia.

This article, “When Friends Attend to Business,” is a good place to begin learning about Quaker decision-making. The place to go deep-deep is Michael Sheeran’s book Beyond Majority Rule. Although the book is out of print, abebooks.com usually lists a few copies.

A subject I’ll need to take up in an essay is how Quaker process differs from secular forms of “consensus decision-making.” The differences are subtle, and even in Quaker meetings they sometimes disappear. But they’re important, and I’ll explain them as I develop essays on social organisms.

One note here, though: what the two decision-making processes have in common is that, when they are used well, they allow the best listeners to have enhanced influence.