Has this ever happened to you? You go to the library looking for one book, and suddenly that book turns into three, four, five, or this cry for help pictured here. Libraries are horrible simulacra for the joys of the consumer experience. Because the initial cost is zero, you tend to fill your bag with books thinking that it’s such a great bargain. Do you know how many books in that pile I actually finished? One. That white Seth Godin Book in the middle. All the while the books lie around the house, tripping you up because you thought, in your infinite wisdom, that if you put it out in the middle of the floor, you would remember to read it! My wife even got me a decorative basket in which to put these wayward books. Last night, I took this whole pile back to the library. Don’t let anybody tell you that free is the ultimate price for consumers. It just leads to hoarding.

Sara and I went to see Vancouver under the heady influence of the Winter Olympic Games. Unfortunately, it seems like everyone else had the same idea. Then again, in North America we have funny ideas about what “crowded” is. If this was Tokyo, this would pretty much be your average Saturday. A lot of the gridlocks had more to do with people not used to behaving in a crowd situation. I think we also could have benefited from the Japanese fervor for signage, too. The volunteers were fantastic at moving everyone along. If it weren’t for their upbeat attitudes,there is no way that the city could pull off something like this. Would I say that the games were worth it? If Vancouver can handle crowds like these, surely smaller events will be easier to organize in the future. So if this means there’s more stuff to do in Vancouver, then yes, the games were worth it. Click on the cut to see more pictures.

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Sara and I caught he last fifteen minutes of CBC doczone’s “hyper parents and coddled kids” and were promptly horrified by what we found. If the show was to be believed, people our age are in the habit of bringing parents in to salary negotiations, and getting them to phone our supervisors after we say things during performance reviews like “the only difference between me and you is age”. Would somebody tell me when we signed off on this kind of behavior? Do we officially have no shame?

I pray to God that this an urban legend propagated by a few hilarious anecdotes. It’s something to assure retiring baby boomers of their unassailable superiority. I love my Mom and Dad, but I would not have them putting up plants in my office, and my Mom’s quite the gardener. Then again, if people like the Brazen Careerist can make six figures telling people how to keep young workers, maybe there is something else at work here. If companies today are hiring their workers based on school performance alone,  those high grades could be attributed to intense parental involvement. The more these kids see helicopter parenting pay off through their grades, the more they are going to tolerate it. Along with this comes the idea that any advantage, no matter how ridiculous, should be exploited to its full potential. So in the end, we are looking at a very focused section of the work force. These are companies that are looking for the perfect transcript, and get workers who are good at school, but not as good at, say, cutting the umbilical cord.

Here’s how most industrial corporations work.  They use a combination of loans and investors to purchase land, machines, and labor. All this capital goes in to producing one or more consumer goods. The corporation then buys time and space on mass media (TV, Radio, and Newspapers) to promote their product. If everything goes according to plan, the product will sell. Unfortunately, this model does not work anymore. It has nothing to do with new government regulation or awareness about the evils of consumer culture. We are merely becoming immune to corporation’s calls for our attention and our money.

The immunity is by no means complete, but already we’re seeing a downward trend in the use and effectiveness of advertising. Ads have become so ubiquitous, that instead of brainwashing us into buying more, they have become easier to ignore. Think about it. When was the last time an ad consciously affected your purchasing decisions? Corporations are starting to realize this, and traditional media outlets have started hemmoraging money as a result. The recent Conan-Leno controversy is nothing more than NBC panicking because their medium simply can’t sell any more widgets.

This is not to say that people will stop buying consumer products. We will be well supplied by the infinite torrent of competitors provided by inexpensive and ubiquitous machine labor. The resources to start a business are now a fraction of what they were 10 years ago. This low barrier of entry will attract companies who actually care about the customers they are serving. If corporations make their mistakes through their apathy and callousness,  then every call bumped to voicemail, every eye-roll from a customer service rep creates a niche for another small competitor to squeeze through. Those competitors don’t have to clear every decision with the head office, and they don’t have a board of shareholders answer to. When they have good ideas, they can move faster and with more purpose than large corporations.

Where does this leave companies like Coca-Cola and Nestle? As we’re seeing with India and China, eventually developing countries turn into developed ones. Cell phone and computer networks are cheaper to implement than terrestrial television and radio. This means they’ll be more used to media they can talk back to, rather than the one-way monologue of traditional media. It’ll be hard to trust the alien and artificial machinations of Pepsi when you can get the same kind of communication from your own culture and community. If those large corporations want to stay in business, they’ll have to be present for their customers in a way that is unprecedented. God help them if they put another person on hold.

If you want to read more on the subject, I suggest picking up Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing or Linchpin. They inspired many of the ideas in the last two posts.

If Vancouver isn’t the anti-corporate capital of the world, it’s certainly in the running. Greenpeace and Adbusters both got started there. The city has repeatedly denied Wal-mart the right to build there, despite the company’s attempts to create an environmentally friendly building. There is a good reason to keep an eye on corporations. Nestle and Coca-cola’s actions in the third world are two examples from a very long list of literal wars, famines, and plagues that corporations have been involved in for the past 400 years. Still, I hate how anti-corporatism has become so trendy. If I told people that the batteries in the Chevy Volt were made from ground puppy livers, I have the feeling I’d be met with approving grunts and a donation check rather than someone with a straight jacket or some other sane response.

The problem I have with agreeing with most gaffes against corporations is that it assumes Comcast, Rogers or Microsoft is burning calories to get YOU. Yes, that OEM software agreement means that Steve Ballmer will hide in your closet and eat your bones if you’re not asleep by 8:30. Please. All my run-ins with corporations, be it through working for them or being on hold for their tech support, can be explained by one thing: Apathy. Throughout the industrial revolution, corporations worked well by having rigid sets of simple, repeatable rules that can be carried out by the cheapest and least skilled workers possible. Basically, if it’s not your job, don’t think about it. Nestle’s marketing of formula to developing countries was not part of some insane eugenics conspiracy. They were just repeating actions that had worked in North America and Europe. So if it’s not profitable for corporations to consider the consequences of their actions, what can we do? Write more legislation? I don’t think so. The business model is already dead. Find out why in tomorrow’s post.

“What’s your Passion?”

That has to be my least favorite job interview question. “What’s Your Passion?” It’s so loaded. If you are able to do your job, or even excel at it, why should passion be a factor? I don’t have to wonder where my next paycheck is coming from. That makes me feel passionate. What if my passion doesn’t directly relate to my job? For instance, I like to write, but I can think of a lot of reasons not to do it for money. What if the reason I have my passion is that it takes my mind off work?

Here’s another thing. It’s always passion. Singular. What if you have several? You might want to do programming 5 days of the week and go skiing for the other two. You can be passionate about the environment and small government budgets. I guess the thing I hate most about “What’s Your Passion” is that it makes it so obvious that the interviewer is only pretending to care about who you are as a person. Job interviews are commerce, plain and simple. To ignore that fact is nothing short of patronizing.

On Friday, February 12th, my wife watched as 188 grade sevens experienced their first Nerd Rage. The Percy Jackson movie was compromised beyond repair. The Greek mythology was messed with for no apparent reason. Some totally sweet battles from the book were cut out entirely. The suspected evil mastermind from the book was the actual evil mastermind in the movie, stripping away layers of complexity and character from the story like turpentine on a Monet.

How long does Disney, Sony or Dreamworks think they can keep bilking kids out of their allowance money this way? When the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potters of the world pack as much of the books as they can on celluloid and make billions in the process, how is it that film producers still believe they can make more money by appealing to a larger audience? Disney, like most of the corporate world, thinks they can get by with the factory approach to film-making. Create a product that will please the most people, because more people means more money. That approach worked in the days of Ma Bell and Johnny Carson, but we now live in a time where you can’t own all the media channels, and the equipment to make a movie can be bought with your average credit card. The market is completely open for a few true believers to take Disney’s customers away forever.

Today my wife is going to take her class to see the film version of Percy Jackson and the Olympians. It’s part of their novel study of the book of the same name. The kids have high hopes for this movie (and so does their teacher). When Disney takes on a film, it’s always a crap shoot whether they can keep their corporate bureaucracy out of the production. In their rush to reach a wider market, they may try to make Percy Jackson into something it’s not: An American Harry Potter.

Having read all five Percy Jackson books myself, I can tell you that while there are similarities, the two series are completely different. While Harry was studious and accommodating, Percy is impulsive and defiant. His ADHD makes him a poor student (while at the same time makes him an accomplished soldier), and he will actually go out of his way to provoke magical beings that can end his existence with a thought. It goes without saying that Percy would have never stood for the Dursley’s shenanigans if they ever had the misfortune of meeting him. Like most of the demi-gods at camp half-blood, Percy has led a hard life because of his lineage. It’s going to take more than a summer camp with dryads dancing around to make up for being hunted by monsters and used as a pawn in the sibling rivalry of the gods. At many points in his adventures, Percy has to make choices between his duty to the gods and his duty to his friends and his own happiness. In Potter’s world, the goals of protecting the world from Voldemort and protecting Ron and Hermione were always one and the same. The only hard choice Harry had to make was whether the Death Eaters got to him at Hogwarts or at the Dursleys’ house.

If you need any proof that the Percy Jackson movie deserves to do well, you don’t need to look further than my wife’s grade seven class. People excuse the worst excesses of Harry Potter and the Twilight series by saying that it at least gets kids to read. Sara’s class, with full access to both Twilight and Harry Potter, has finished all their missing homework assignments to see this movie. Students would ask for the sequels from their parents for Christmas and then trade the books amongst themselves to read. Some of them have said, without hyperbole, that The Lightning Thief was the first chapter book that a teacher didn’t have to force them to read. It’s the books that convert non-readers that mean the most to literacy rates. Even if the movie is compromised beyond repair, if you enjoyed the Potter series at first, but were left high and dry by the end of it, do yourself a favour and pick up Percy Jackson.

The nature of knowledge has become an interesting question lately. Knowledge used to take up space in the form of printed books. Now, a simple thumb drive can hold an entire library inside its RAM chips. MIT now posts course notes online for free, whereas before students would have to pay thousands just for the privilege of taking such notes. Many of the world’s websites are powered by Linux, an operating system that is free to download and completely open to anyone brave enough take a look inside its inner workings. If you want to be a knowledge worker, it’s not enough to have specialized knowledge. You must demonstrate that knowledge through blogs or collaborative websites like github.

If you ask me, I think that trade secrets are about to become obsolete. The idea that information can be controlled by legislation or ill-conceived software protection will soon be considered nonsense. Fortunately, this will not put an end to knowledge workers. While the human brain can never store as much data as a computer can, the ability to combine that data and use it to solve a problem is still the sole province of the good old wet noodle. It doesn’t matter that any knowledge, be it legal, medical, or mechanical, can be accessed from any computer anywhere in the world. It still takes time to learn the information well enough for it to be useful. Humans can also categorize and prioritize all the right observations that correlate to the right kind of knowledge. Computers can only work with the data they are given. Even as computers get more complex, humans are still necessary to make sure the computer is solving the right kinds of problems. If or when human-like AI is invented, hopefully we’ll have a whole different set of problems to work with, like the coming robot revolution.

Fast Company posted an article on some revealing statistics about facebook users. While the total number of links, videos, and content are going up, the number of users actually sharing that content is going down. This should come as no surprise, since many online communities go through these kinds of usage curves (see The 90-9-1 Rule).

So once again, a social network has been taken over by a core contingent of oversharers. And farmville. Don’t forget farmville. If this is a stage that all web 2.0 sites go through, why do we bother with them in the first place? With the price of hosting going down every year, what’s to stop people who want to share links with their numerous friends from taking market share from these social media giants with sites of their own?