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Last Word Blog
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Your correspondent can vouch that this Mayday Anti-Capitalism march was as crazy as it appears. Happy Loyalty Day!
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"G*dd*mn but that's a good one! -sky
Philip Pullman CBE, FRSL (born 19 October 1946) is a British writer born in Norwich. He is the author of severalbest-selling books, most notably the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials and the fictionalised biography of Jesus, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. In 2008, The Times named Pullman one of the "50 greatest British writerssince 1945".
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We miss you Rachel. Thanks for shelving books at Last Word for a couple days in our infancy, oh so long ago, whole worlds away from now. And thanks for your shadow work and activism and dedication and martyrdom. -s
Reposted from The Rachel Corrie Foundation's e-mail newsletter.
Contact info:info@rachelcorriefoundation.org
Dear Sky Today, April 10, 2013, marks Rachel Corrie's 34th birthday.Rachel wrote about the day she was born:
"...I have this image of that day that is made up of all the jagged fragments that my parents and my brother and sister...have told me. My mom is lying in her bedroom...with this splotchy, sleepy-eyed baby in her arms - only my mom's face is smoother and her hair is completely brown and long and it swirls around her on the floweredpillowcases. My sister is there, and she is small and chubby with huge, dark eyes that I have seen in thousands of old photographs. She sits on the floor under the window and stares at me, but refuses to touch the spotted little creature. And my brother is on the bed with his skinny legs bent and propped up on his elbows so that he can study me and stick out an index finger to stroke my damp head or touch my tiny curling hands. My dad opens the door and he is thinner and his hair is longer, and his glasses and clothes make him look like a Dazed and Confused stand-in." (From Let Me Stand Alone: the Journals of Rachel Corrie). As Rachel's family and friends remember on this day, and in her spirit, we ask you to join us in actions to bring justice for Palestinians and basic human rights for all closer to reality.
Consider honoring Rachel this year by agreeing to be arecurringdonor to the Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice, a taxdeductible501(c)3 donation.As little as $10 a month can help ensure that Rachel's work continues!We are deeply grateful for the dedicated group of friends who have made this monthly or quarterly donation commitment through ouronline donation pagewith Network for Good, as their donations sustain our small staff and basic operations.
A dozen Olympia Intercity Transit busescontinue this month to carry the message "Equal Rights for Palestinians - the Way to Peace."We're determined to continue this campaign with large exterior ads, too, but weneed your helpto do so. Remember Rachel's birthday with a donation to support this effort. These advertising efforts bring the basic issue of Palestine to the public. Let's keep doing our work visibly! Interested in bringing ads to your communities? Contact our partners - SeaMAC. Additionally, our friends Sami Al Jundi and Jen Marlowe have written Sami's story in The Hour of Sunlight: One Palestinian's Journey from Prisoner to Peacemaker. Yesterday, Jen Marlowe reflected on remembrances of both the April 9, 1948, Deir Yassin Massacre and the Holocaust and shared Sami's moving story of later working as a laborer in what had been his family's village until 1948. Read Made in Deir Yassinand share the stories. On April 17th, Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Organizationlaunches a global campaign calling on all of us to help "break...the silence on administrative detention". At the Rachel Corrie Foundation, we have followed from a distance the agonizing but courageous stories of prison hunger strikers putting their bodies on the line to make the case for the rights of those detained. In November, with an Interfaith Peace-Builders delegation to Gaza, Craig and Cindy Corrie met with prisoners released but exiled to Gaza (Hana Shalabi among them) and families of those not permitted to visit their relatives held in Israeli prisons. This past week, we have learned of the death from cancer of 63-year-old Maisara Abu Hamdiyeh and charges that he was not provided the medical treatment required - prompting Mustafa Barghouti of the Palestinian National Initiative, and others, to call for an international investigation. Addameer reports 4,743 Palestinians detained by Israel - 10 women, 193 children, and 178 under administrative detention (held indefinitely on secret information without charge). At its website, Addameer notes the international community's lack of effectiveness and commitment on this issue. Let's change that!Let's act this month on behalf of Palestinian administrative detainees and prisoners. Visit Addameer's websiteto learn about the letters we can write and the messages we can send to our own and to Israeli officials. Remember April 17th, Palestinian Prisoners Day, and plan for your own individual or community action! Special thanks to our monthly donors! This dedicated group of friends support the ongoing work of the Rachel Corrie Foundation with monthly donations through our online donation page at Network for Good, or through campaigns at their places of work. We are deeply gratefulfor these regular contributors and count on you each month to sustain our small staff and basic operations. Your support is essential! JOIN US IN PORTLAND, OR, APRIL 27-28
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Indie Bookstore Sales Of Kobo Ebooks Dwarf Google; Still Small
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Gaming is embedded in us as human beings. We've already seen the effects of applying game mechanics to individual marketing campaigns, to every loyalty program in existence, and to tons of Web sites where you might not think "game" at first glance. This is "gamification," and to make it work, there needs to be a focus on the very human benefits that make games successful: challenge, recognition, tracking, competition and cooperation.
Human beings love games. If you look hard enough, you'll find game dynamics in everything we do, from education to careers to relationships. We're all about establishing rules, defining winners and losers, competing and cooperating. So while it's no surprise we see all of these things in marketing campaigns, it's also nothing new. For decades, loyalty campaigns that instill customer loyalty by awarding points and prizes have been a mainstay of establishing customer relationships. Now the rise of social media is bringing a different kind of gamesmanship to bear. Facebook is flooded with FarmVille and Mafia Wars achievement. Foursquare is turning everyone into the mayor of somewhere. And Twitter, though most are loath to admit it, is all about the accumulation of followers. Then there's Klout, which has managed to make a game of all these games, awarding badges and small gifts to those who are best at playing the social game.Brands want to play, too. And some are doing a good job of it. Pepsi, Starbucks, Hallmark and Nike are just a few examples of marketers who have gamified their customer experiences. "Gamification" -- the application of gaming principles, mechanics or concepts to efforts that aren't necessarily "games," has everyone talking. But games aren't all fun and, um, games. While they might appear to be a safe way to earn engagement for your brand, they must be integrated in an authentic way in order for consumers to want to participate. When considering the prospect of a program using these principles, it's important to focus on very human benefits that make games successful -- challenge, recognition, tracking, competition and cooperation. These five benefits are the lenses through which we're approaching any gamification effort: As marketers, we've been taught to make communication frictionless, easy and direct. But for games, that's a recipe for boring. The artful application of difficulty to games is what makes them fun, and there exists the same opportunity to create fun in marketing using this principle. Don't be afraid to challenge your audience but, of course, that's not the same as miring them in complexity. A lot of people go through life without being recognized very often -- that's one of the reasons we have birthdays and Facebook. Games can change that. They recognize achievement, scarcity and excellence in a context that matters to the player. Taking that understanding of context and what truly matters to a consumer creates a flood of creative marketing ideas. Badges, mayorships, little gifts -- they can all go a long way to make your consumers feel special. The notion of the Quantified Self has taken deep root in our culture. We're tracking more and more of our lives via sensors, apps and Web sites than ever before. Our workflows, diets and sleep schedules are all now quantifiable using the latest technology, but games have a long history of giving players feedback about their progress and when they'll finally reach the end. It's easier than ever before to harness data to enrich any experience and deepen the engagement one has with it, be it entertainment or marketing -- or both. Using games can help you help your consumers better understand their performance and help them improve. This is the most obvious lens to consider when applying game thinking, because games produce winners, losers and everything in between. The rub with marketing is making sure that the audience cares enough and that there are enough relevant rewards to warrant real competition. Throw "teams" into a competition and all of a sudden everything is more intense. As much as people like to compete, they like to achieve things together even more, and social games have taught us lessons about that fact for several years now. Marketers offer things consumers want -- making them participants in a gaming experience, and encouraging them to work together toward those wants can be a powerful motivator. Can gamification get in the way? Of course. But it can also be a profound tool in the marketer's toolbox. Consider adding game design to the marketing skill set -- and treat it like creativity, flexibility, tenacity and any other must-have in the marketing superpower set. Applying what we've learned from games to advertising creative, the tracking of marketing efforts and the brand itself is interesting. If it's also fun, then it becomes very interesting.
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Stewart Brand, techno guru, counterculture impresario, inspects my ragtag clothes, spots the cotton long-underwear shirt I've layered beneath a fleece.
"Cotton is the stupidest thing you can wear on the mountain," he says matter-of-factly. We're hiking Mount Tamalpais, Marin County's highest peak, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge and not far from where Brand lives. Luckily, it's 45 degrees out, with little chance of hypothermia. "You could die," he tells me. We break for water sometime later, at a clearing overlooking the San Francisco Bay, which this morning is enveloped in a mossy blue fog. The 74-year-old Brand, who has long, angular features and in his safari hat resembles a craggier Crocodile Dundee, demonstrates in a blur of motion how fast he can shed his GoLite pack and draw a knife from a sheath on his right hip. Other hikers sometimes don't follow the rules, he explains, and let their dogs run off-leash. "Have you ever, you know, had to put one down?" I ask, curious to plumb the depths of Brand's practicality. It is no great shock that the editor and publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog- the atlas-size compendium of "tools" that Brand started in 1968, a publication Steve Jobs once called a "Google in paperback" and "one of the bibles of my generation" - would outfit himself with an array of useful instruments. But I didn't anticipate his wielding one with such martial purpose. Brand says a dog did charge him once, and - knees bent, his left arm crooked into a shield - he had reached with his right hand for the blade. But it came up empty. He had left the knife on his dresser. "The aggressive act was enough to show him who was alpha," he says. The dog slunk away, tail tucked. Brand first came to national attention in his twenties, promoting - and enjoying - the liberating powers of LSD as one of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters. Over the next half-century, Brand proved to be an endless purveyor of information and invention, a constant catalyst of activity and surprising assemblies. A Sixties icon, he has also shaped our culture in each successive decade. With the Whole Earth Catalog, which was filled with thousands of short appraisals covering everything from hydroponic farming practices to electronic music, stretching techniques, windmills, and even early personal computers, Brand defined a countercultural ethos that became what is now, essentially, the mainstream. Today, practically all the items covered in the Catalog are available at the click of a mouse; back then, it was an invaluable resource for the country's growing ranks of environmentalists, do-it-yourselfers, and back-to-the-landers. Maybe more revolutionary was that the Catalog combined ecological mindfulness with a belief in the transformative power of technology. In its pages, Brand showed that entrepreneurship and consumerism could also bring power to the people. After all, the kind of activities for which the Catalog provided in-depth instruction - building your own cabin or starting a commune - might just require the purchase of a few products, and that was going to take cash. "Whether you survive in those circumstances," Brand says, explaining his view of self-reliance, "very much depends on your understanding of money." The Catalog didn't simply ground the era's "turn on, tune in, drop out" ideals in the real world - it provided the millions whose minds had been blown open the practical tools to make that world anew. "What we were really was counter-counterculture," Brand says as we continue our ascent. There were always computer guys hanging out at the epochal Bay Area parties, drawn, no doubt, to the psychedelics but also to Brand. "That Stewart was so at home in the world of computers baffled us," says Brand's friend Gurney Norman, a former Merry Prankster as well as the 2010 Kentucky Poet Laureate. "The rest of us sat around trashing IBM and big business, believing computers symbolized something evil," he adds. "We were so dumb." Kevin Kelly, a founding editor of 'Wired' magazine, credits Brand with finally turning hippies on to the computer, showing it to be another human-scale tool, a better means than drugs to human augmentation and expanded consciousness. "Stewart brought together personal enlightenment and the personal computer," Kelly says. "Today, the Bay Area is all about the fusion of those two things. What seemed so contradictory in the Sixties is now so obviously complementary." In the 1990s, Brand helped create the Long Now Foundation, a think tank that adopts a 10,000-year outlook to foster responsible future behavior. The group continues to hold seminars each month, with talks by Silicon Valley executives, academics, futurists, and historians; the foundation is also developing an online archive of the world's 7,000 known human languages. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, is letting Brand build, on his West Texas estate, the "Clock of the Long Now" - which is, well, an actual 200-foot clock that will keep time and sound a unique chime in a different sequence each day for the next 10 millennia as a physical incarnation of the group's ideals. Brand believes that the 10,000-year time frame holds, perhaps, an unlikely appeal to the captains of dot-com industry. "These are the people surfing Moore's Law," he explains, citing the notion that computer processing power doubles every two years. "They're intensely convinced that things are moving faster and faster. So they feel the need to balance their lives and thoughts with something large-scale and long-frame." At 2,350 feet, we take a break beside the remnants of "The Crookedest Railroadin the World," a 19th-century train that once brought sightseers up the mountain's switchbacks to this very spot. By now, I expect Brand to wow me with yet another gadget. He does not disappoint, placing on a picnic table before us what looks like a miniature rocket launcher. He twists it onto a thermal mug rigged with a French press, fires up a tiny propane tank, and, minutes later, pours me a cup of coffee. As we sip our drinks, I bring out my notebook and read a question from a long list I've prepared. Brand raises his face to the sun and closes his eyes, remaining like that for nearly a half-minute without uttering a word. He looks so convincingly becalmed that I wonder if he's nodded off. I'm about to nudge him when Brand's eyes pop open, and he delivers a well-considered reply to my query, the subject of which I have by then forgotten. "I'm allergic to repeating myself," he says, by way of explaining his not-uncommon reflective silences. "I'm going to raise awareness about, say, the importance of nanotechnology, but I'm not going to be 'Mr. Nanotech' the rest of my life." Which makes sense. You don't amass a rsum befitting the most interesting man in the world by being consistent. Rather, Brand has abandoned successful projects, radically revised his opinions, and broken with orthodoxies he helped create. He stopped regularly publishing the Whole Earth Catalog in 1972, the same year he wrote one of the first articles in a national magazine on computer hackers - " Spacewar," for 'Rolling Stone.' He co-founded the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), a primordial dial-up internet-service provider and influential online forum for Deadheads, techies, reporters, and often a compelling mix of Bay Area freethinkers. He organized the first Hackers Conference, in 1984, bringing together MIT computer geeks, 1970s-era hardware freaks, and a new clique of hardcore gamers, whom Brand recognized as part of the same creative continuum. It was at this conference that he coined the phrase "information wants to be free." Prophetically, he said it also "wants to be expensive." From 1974 to 1984, he edited another eclectic publication, CoEvolution Quarterly, which introduced ideas many of his admirers must have found unconventional, if not outright heretical: cybernetics, space colonies, ecogenetics, even the flat tax. Since 1988, he has helped run Global Business Network, a scenario-planning consultancy (think risk assessment, forecasting models, and something called "visioning") that brings the futurist outlook to Bechtel, General Electric, Siemens Westinghouse, the Pentagon - clients one certainly wouldn't associate with the Whole Earth Catalog. Then, in 2009, Brand published 'W hole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto,' in which he declared nuclear energy, genetically modified foods, and increased urbanization essential "green" solutions to global warming. Needless to say, some of those who considered Brand a fellow environmental traveler found these "solutions" troubling. Amory Lovins, chairman of the Rocky Mountain Instituteand a longtime friend of Brand's, said the book's advocacy of nuclear energy ran contrary to "Stewart's reputation and prior contributions to clear thinking" and "can only worsen climate and security risks." Still, I searched and found no trail of bitter ex-associates who felt betrayed or abandoned by Brand. He has an uncanny way of consoling those who don't see eye to eye with him. He wants his mind changed and is without ideology or ego. The open-source software activist Tim O'Reilly describes Brand as an "intellectual Renaissance man, interested in all aspects of human knowledge." Larry Brilliant, an epidemiologist who founded the WELL with Brand and later went on to run several companies and major philanthropic organizations (Brilliant also helped eradicate polio in India and spent time living on Wavy Gravy's commune, the Hog Farm), says, "Stewart's gift, his genius, is that he has given birth from his fertile, polymath mind to a dozen different cultural phenomena that have shaped our times." The satirist Paul Krassner lived with Brand in the early 1970s, moving from New York to San Francisco to co-edit a supplement of the Catalog with Ken Kesey. Krassner could recall only one incident in which the roomies had any real tension, a conflict prompted by Krassner and his girlfriend "borrowing" Brand's bed. Not only did the woman in question turn out to have her period, but the two of them breakfasted on the sheets, leaving the bed, as Krassner put it, "bloody and granola-y." Brand was pissed when he returned home, but peace and understanding were restored through the use of a tool advertised in the Catalog: The two men brandished foam bats called "boffers" and harmlessly thrashed each other. As Brand dries our REI coffee mugs with a Lycra headband he has been wearing around his neck, I ask him about the moments in his life when he felt he had a clear sense of the future. He does another one of his reflective pauses and then finally says, "An interesting question to ask is what predictions have I been wrong about in my lifetime." These would include, among others, Fuller domes, the geodesic shelters designed by futurist Buckminster Fuller, whose work inspired the first Whole Earth Catalog. "They leaked and made terrible homes," Brand says. The "no hope without dope" thing, he says with a laugh, seemed promising back when he was hanging with Ken Kesey and Jerry Garcia, but turned out to be a dead end. There was the Whole Earth Software Catalog, which was almost wholly obsolete by the time it reached publication. Brand predicted that he'd live to see space colonies and nuclear fusion (he remains hopeful about the latter). He opposed the adoption of the metric system. More recently, the Long Now Foundation launched something called Long Bets, an online venue where people can wager on the accuracy of opposing viewpoints. In 2008, Warren Buffett used the site to bet a group of hedge-fund traders $1 million that the S&P would outperform their picks over a 10-year period. Brand thought Long Bets would take off, becoming a locus for the big debates of our time. "I don't get it," he says, sounding still surprised. "The site is totally lame and half-assed." After our hike, Brand takes me to Sausalito, where he lives on a refurbished tugboat with his wife of 28 years, Ryan Phelan. (Brand has a grown son from an earlier relationship.) He describes Phelan as a "serial entrepreneur," which he means as a term of ardent endearment. The two bought the 100-year-old boat, the Mirene, in 1982 for $8,000. It now has a fresh coat of black-and-white paint with shiny red trim and sits in Richardson Bay amid 400 other houseboats. A low-rider bicycle covered in shaggy fur is tied up on the dock. It's a relic from Burning Man, the annual gathering in the Nevada desert that Brand describes, accurately, as a grandchild of the experiments in community that he organized. "Life on a boat is environmentally sound," Brand says. "In California, it better protects you from earthquakes, wildfires, and mudslides. It even will buffer you from global warming's rising tides." The Whole Earth Catalog used to keep its offices just off the dock here, and Brand shows me the area where he and the staff played volleyball every day at noon. (The entire Googleplex/tech-start-up notion that a hard-driving workplace should also be a source of merrymaking and healthful recreation owes a debt to Brand as well.) When he lived across the bay, in Belvedere, he rowed to work each day. He now keeps two offices nearby, one in a cramped prefabricated building and another on a rickety fishing boat propped up on land. Farther down is a small industrial-design shop, where guys Brand has known since they were kids are building marine-radar systems and robotically navigated submarine vessels that map the ocean floor. At the Mexican diner a block away, where we eat lunch, Brand simply tells the owner, "I'll have the usual." Brand served in the Army as an officer from 1960 to 1963. I'm initially puzzled by how early and often in our conversations Brand praises his time in the military, but I come to see how much this period in his life defines him. He credits the Army with teaching him how to judge character, how to accomplish goals. "I learned how to back the fuck off and let the 'sergeants' do their work," he says. Although in some respects a flower child, Brand never grew a beard or long hair, last dropped acid in 1969, calls Zen boring, and dismisses the New Left activists of his youth as all talk and no action - a failing Brand clearly cannot abide. In ' The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,' Tom Wolfe's book on the psychedelic peregrinations of Kesey and his hippie companions, Brand is identified as the "restrained, reflective wing of the Merry Pranksters." (Krassner describes his time rooming with Brand as "a New Age Odd Couple," with Brand as Felix.) It was Brand who organized the Merry Pranksters' famous Trips Festival, a music-and-light show attended by 10,000 people, many of whom saw their first (of many) Grateful Dead shows there. Maybe most famously, during an LSD-induced vision in 1966, Brand wrote in his journal, "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?" The first space launch was more than a decade old, and Brand believed the image would transform how humans conceived of the planet. He began distributing buttons displaying his question - they quickly became popular in the Haight, in Oakland, and eventually at NASA. Photographs from space were released in 1968 and soon appeared on the covers of both the first Whole Earth Catalog and 'Life' magazine (and later on your Mac screen), providing just the jolt to environmental consciousness that Brand had envisioned. Two years later, more than 20 million Americans attended rallies for the inaugural Earth Day. One night, I go with Brand and his wife to the Castro Theatre in San Francisco for one of the Long Now Foundation's seminars on long-term thinking. The speakers at these events can range wildly, everyone from Michael Pollan to Brian Eno, with many points in between. As the theater fills to capacity, Brand notes that Long Now doesn't attract only Silicon Valley folk. It draws in a younger, less established crowd as well. "The 10,000-year clock gives them a sense of - a belief in - a better future," he says. I think about how the younger people in the audience perceive Brand, as he takes the stage that night. He is not cool in any conventional sense, nor is he slick in presentation or attire, like some Timothy Ferriss type. Nor does he possess the laid-back vibe of, say, Steve Jobs, with his faded Levi's and mock turtles. Brand has dressed that evening in a moisture-wicking, triple-stitched 5.11 tactical shirt with a half-dozen pockets, including ones hidden along the chest that are specifically marketed as just right for a small backup piece. Brand informs me that he has 10 of these shirts, presumably all in tan, gray, or pea green, the only colors I see him wearing. Two knives hang conspicuously from Brand's belt - not just a practical Swiss Army but also his "dress knife," an ornate specimen reserved for formal occasions. "If there's a rumble," a guy seated behind me remarks, "I'm sticking with him." A woman in her twenties, her hair emerging from a modish hat in several long braids, tells me Stewart Brand is one of the reasons she moved to the Bay Area. It's a statement one could have heard almost verbatim in San Francisco back in the 1960s, or really in any decade since. I mention Brand to a recent Reed College graduate at the seminar, and he suddenly dashes off, returning moments later holding a hardbound copy of his senior thesis, partly written about Brand, which he had stashed in the movie house's recesses. He thought about returning to San Antonio after college, he says, but realized he needed to be here, among people dedicated to the same dreams. "Brand showed us that technology wasn't a malevolent or necessarily a positive force," the Reed guy tells me. "Like Steve Jobs, he demonstrated that it's another tool in the toolbox." Michael Phillips, a MasterCard company creator, helped Brand run the foundation that seeded out the earnings from the Whole Earth Catalog. "Underlying everything Stewart does is an optimism and experimentation," Phillips says. "He's always testing radical alternatives, believing that the best ideas will win out and lead to a better future." Brand is still seeking new ways to bring people together, to shape what lies ahead. His latest venture: using genetics to re-create extinct species. There's the passenger pigeon for starters, the mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger. Brand says the technology to reconstitute these animals is already rushing forward, and he hopes to ensure that the process is carried out responsibly. The project is a suitable one for a person who apparently transcends time. All of us dinosaurs fossilized in our own pursuits - Stewart Brand will show us the way. He may even help undo a bit of the ecological havoc we've wreaked on the planet, never mind that some will consider it, as Brand puts it, "the ultimate trespass on the natural world." "When you think and act long-term, you keep your options open for the future," he says. "You open up the past and the present."
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Beware Bay Area denizens as Last Word descends upon you for the 2013 Anarchist Bookfair. We'll be set up Saturday and Sunday slinging books. Look for us and our booth packed to the gills with everything we could shove into the hold of our ship. You have been warned!
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If you're wondering what I, KC, have been doing in the past two months, you should head over to www.marxish.wordpress.com. We're creating a non-institutional, radical political-economy seminar in Seattle, which is open to everyone (except assholes and liars).
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Frantically working away assembling the various pieces of the Writer's Handbook by David Water. It'll be done soon and available for sale.
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