The Great Seduction

Dumbest comment of the week

And the award for the dumbest comment of the week unquestionably goes to Jonathan Littell, the Franco-American novelist. Littel, son of spy novelist Robert Littell, is the author of the acclaimed (at least in Europe) The Kindly Ones, an epic 900 page Holocaust novel which Michiko Kakutani found "odious" and "perverse". The North American rights rights for The Kindly Ones got acquired by Harper-Collins for a very tidy $1,000,000 advance and Littell was cleverly interviewed by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg in today's WSJ. The problem with Littell is that, in spite of his advance, he has refused to come to America to promote The Kindly Ones. Here's the particularly dumb comment that Trachtenberg extracted out of Littell:

WSJ: Will you come to the U.S. to promote your book?

Littell: No. I don't do that kind of thing. I don't consider it my job.

I DON"T CONSIDER IT MY JOB. What garbage. The job of an author is exactly THAT KIND OF THING. It is the promote oneself and one's work (which, like it or not, are often inseparable). Littell might not care for the publicity in the US, but it's the dream of almost every other European writer to come to the US to promote their new book. Not only does Littel have a responsibility to Harper-Collins (especially given the size of their advance), but it would also be a decent gesture toward his American readers who, with the exception of Michiko, would no doubt like to hear and meet him.

For writers, the great publishing transformation over the next few years has nothing to do with the Kindle 2 or anything other supposedly miraculous technological device. No, the real revolution will be in the way we writers can take advantage of all this new digital technology -- blogs, Twitter, interactive television, Internet radio etc etc -- to better promote ourselves and our work. All writers -- from $1,000,000 lottery-winners like Littel to the tens of thousands of professional writers like myself living off much smaller advances -- need to think of self-promotion, both in physical and digital form, as intrinsic to our value.

A shy writer in the 21st century is a starving writer. Diffidence is death. Littell should set a better example. Come to America, Jonathan, and tell us more about your epic Nazi book. It's actually surprisingly nice here.

twhirling with Loic

Back in the distant summer of 2003, I got sold the dream of real-time online video by Keith Teare, the co-founder of EasyNet and one of Britain’s most swashbuckling entrepreneurial exports to Silicon Valley. Keith had just taken over as CEO of VidiTel, a start-up company funded by venture capitalists Draper-Fisher that had developed a technology platform that enabled anyone with a webcam to have online video conversations. He wanted me to become the general manager of the service.  Real-time video is the future, he promised me, it’s going to change everything.

Keith was right. Real-time video was the future in 2003. The big question now is whether it still remains in the future in 2009.

In new media, of course, timing is everything.  Draper-Fisher invested in VidiTel at about the same time it invested in another real-time communications platform, the Internet telephony company Skype, which was later sold to EBay in October 2005 for $2.6 billion. VidiTel, in contrast, never caught on and Keith is now President of the photography start-up fotonauts while I’ve degenerated into an impecunious snark.

I have to admit that VidiTel crossed my mind more than once while talking yesterday to Loic Le Meur, the swashbuckling Gallic founder and CEO of Seesmic, a Silicon Valley start-up he described to me as a “real-time video platform”. To be fair to Le Meur, however, real-time video has come an awful long way since 2003, his start-up having pioneered technology that makes it incredibly easy to record and distribute personal videos over the Internet. Seesmic could indeed change everything on the Internet. Loic’s tiny company of eleven engineers might even have the potential to transform Twitter from a textual to a video social application.

Financed by $12 million of investment from blue chip angels like eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and Techcrunch heavyweight Michael Arrington, Seesmic has already built up an impressive list of media partners including the BBC, the Washington Post company, 20th Century Fox and LinkTV. Most intriguingly, Loic, who moved to Silicon Valley from Paris eighteen months ago to build Seesmic, acquired a desktop client software product called twhirl in April of last year. twhirl plus Seesmic might equal fame and fortune for Loic. What twhirl does is enable the Seesmic software to work on Twitter, thus enabling video on the micro-blogging platform. ”It's Youtube meets Twitter” as one twhirl enthusiast tweeted me late last night.

While twhirl is far from being the only desktop client for Twitter (there are now at least 30 clients and 200 applications -- and I personally use Tweetdeck as much as twhirl) it is definitely one of the most user friendly and reliable – both for its general functionality and its rich media applications. According to Twitter's API numbers, 6% of all Tweets are now sent using twhirl, with the free client having been downloaded more than a million times. I strongly advise Twitter users to twhirl. It really does enrich and simplify the Twitter experience.

Loic promised me that real-time video is the future of the Internet. Timing is indeed everything in the new media business. Almost six years after Keith Teare sold me on the same dream, I suspect that we might have finally caught up with the future.

Digital humanists

So The NYTimes headline tells us that in tough times, the humanities must justify their worth. Suggesting, perhaps, that in easy economic times there is no need for the humanities to justify their value. According to The Times' Patricia Cohen, university humanities departments are about to be hit by the economic meltdown:

But in this new era of lengthening unemployment lines and shrinking university endowments, questions about the importance of the humanities in a complex and technologically demanding world have taken on new urgency. Previous economic downturns have often led to decreased enrollment in the disciplines loosely grouped under the term “humanities” — which generally include languages, literature, the arts, history, cultural studies, philosophy and religion. Many in the field worry that in this current crisis those areas will be hit hardest.

But it's not just the current economic crisis that is undermining the value of the humanities in American universities. While most other professions -- from media to entertainment to business and even politics  -- has been hit by the tsunami of the digital revolution, humanity departments have remained ivory towers, aloof from the mayhem down below in the real world. So nothing much has changed in the last twenty years, except that most tenured humanity professors are getting more and more specialized, intellectually irrelevant and cut-off from everything outside the university.

And now the perfect storm of digital upheaval and economic meltdown is about to hit them head-on. The Times quotes Richard Freeland, who holds the Orwellian sounding position of "The Massachusetts commissioner of higher education". Anyway, Freeland wants to close the “chasm in higher education between the liberal arts and sciences and professional programs.” What the Commissioner really wants to do, of course, is dynamite the ivory tower and emphasize what The Times' Cohen calls "its practical and economic value".

Is this good or bad? I've no idea because I don't know how to quantify the economic value of the humanities. The Commissioner wants to end what he calls the "disjunction between the liberal arts and sciences and our role as citizens and professionals" (whatever that means). While the Times also quotes Andrew Delbanco, the director of American Studies at Columbia University who, yawn, wants to transform humanists into Barack Obama --  grand orators who can quote Shakespeare, Faulkner, Lincoln and W.E.B. Du Bois.

What I do know for sure, however, is that academic humanists -- especially the younger ones with a bit of life left in them -- better upgrade themselves before they get totally swept away by the digital revolution. Their traditional monopoly on wisdom, humanistic or otherwise, is being undermined by the communications revolution of blogs, Facebook & Twitter. Rather than learning to quote Shakespeare or W.E.B. Du Bois, I would advise aspiring humanities scholars to learn how to build their own intellectual brands and distribute their ideas more broadly and relevantly. Just as the death of newspapers is forcing smart young journalists to become self-employed entrepreneurs, so the imminent crisis of academic humanity departments, which will eventually do away with the archaic tenure system, offers a great opportunity to rethink what it means to be a professional educator in the 21st century.

Our persistent cultural tic

The more we know, the less we know. And, as Frank Rich suggests, the real question is whether "we really want to know." The knowledge in question is, of course, what Rich calls "the bad news" of the economic collapse. And, as he says, Americans excel, are true world-beaters, in their inability to absorb reality:

One of the most persistent cultural tics of the early 21st century is Americans’ reluctance to absorb, let alone prepare for, bad news. We are plugged into more information sources than anyone could have imagined even 15 years ago. The cruel ambush of 9/11 supposedly “changed everything,” slapping us back to reality. Yet we are constantly shocked, shocked by the foreseeable.

Shocked by the foreseeable. Exactly. So what accounts for our "persistent cultural tic"? And why, I wonder, is this condition so much more salient now, in the early 21st century, than it was during the Great Depression, when Americans were much more able to both absorb and prepare for bad news? The answer, I suspect, can be found in "Beyond Wisteria Lane", an excellent piece in this week's Economist which, borrowing from Herbert Gans' classic The Levittowners, compares the "changing mindset" of America's "new middle classes" with the working-class culture of the early 20th century.

In “The Levittowners”, Gans claimed that America’s new middle classes were thinking and acting very differently from the working-class communities in which most of them had grown up. Those traditional communities had been (to use terms popular at the time) “peer-group-directed”, taking their values and their outlook from people in their immediate circle, such as family and co-workers. By contrast, Gans argued, the middle classes were “other-directed”, taking their cues not only from family and friends but from managers in distant offices or from contemporaries they had heard about through other means, such as the mass media.

I also suspect that one reason Americans have become so bad at absorbing reality is that they are deriving "values" and "outlook" from people outside their immediate community, particularly from those in the mass media of television and the Internet. Bad news articulated through the mass is distant and malleable; the fragmentation of peer-group-directed communities, therefore, has undermined our ability to grasp reality. So is the peer-group revolution of social media a cure to our inability to digest bad news? Not according to leading British neuroscientist Baroness Susan Greenfield who, in a speech to the House of Lords, yesterday, argued that social media is actually compounding what Gans called "the other-directed" way in which we consume knowledge. As the Guardian reported Greenfield's speech:

She told the House of Lords that children's experiences on social networking sites "are devoid of cohesive narrative and long-term significance. As a consequence, the mid-21st century mind might almost be infantilised, characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity".

Greenfield, therefore, unravels the Frank Rich paradox (if paradoxes can indeed be unraveled) that the more plugged in we are, the less we are able to grasp reality. For Baroness Greenfield, social media is turning us all into  identity-lite unsympathetic infants with short attention spans and a predilection for sensationalism. Shocking, eh? And, I'm afraid, entirely foreseeable.

Twitter as the new Facebook

February 2009 might well go down as the month when the paradigm shifted and Twitter replaced Facebook as the hottest and coolest company in Silicon Valley. First, Twitter closed a $35 million round of venture capital investment at a valuation of around $250 million – not bad for a revenue-less start-up in the depths of the worst liquidity crisis since the Great Depression.  Secondly, research from Pew Internet and American Life Project revealed that a whopping 11% of Americans have used a micro-blogging service like Twitter. Thirdly, in a survey of 200 top digital marketing mavens, Abrams Research showed the upstart Twitter trounced the established Facebook in the all-important question of which social media service is the most effective financial investment for businesses  – Twitter getting 40% and Facebook only 15% of the vote.

The 29 person, two-year old Twitter, of course, is in that pre-adolescent stage of development when it can do no wrong in the eyes of the Silicon Valley cognoscenti. The aphoristic instant-messaging network has experienced phenomenal growth with active users growing 900% in the last year. Anyone who is anyone is on Twitter these days: Stephen Fry, Barack Obama, Shaquille O'Neal and Jonathan Ross, even an alter-kocker like myself. Best of all, the advertising free Twitter hasn’t had to worry about the inconvenience of revenue with the San Francisco based company only last month getting around to hiring its first head of sales.

The five-year old Facebook, on the other hand, has – to excuse the teenage metaphor – collided head-on with the pimples of adolescence. While Twitter was having a miraculous February, Facebook’s month has been gruesome. It all began when the Consumerist website, in an inflamatory post entitled "We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever" noted a number of significant changes in Facebook’s terms of service (TOS) and suggested that the company intended to keep the information of users who quit the network. “Facebook owns you!” cried tens of thousands of paranoid members, thereby forcing Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s 25-year old CEO, to publicly rescind the changes and limp back to his original TOS.

The storm is really about how the company transforms the information of Facebook’s current 175 million social networkers into dollars and cents. Having been valued at a ludicrously inflated $15 billion when Microsoft invested $240 million in the social network in October 2007, Facebook is now under immense pressure to prove that its free service can generate significant revenue. And given the huge premium paid by advertisers for personal information, it isn’t surprising that the real fear of the change in its TOS was about Facebook selling the data of its ex-members to the highest corporate bidder.

Ev Williams and Biz Stone, Twitter’s two young co-founders, should learn from Facebook’s growing pains. In a year or two, Twitter will have inherited all the uncomfortable growing pains of today’s Facebook. The micro-blogging site will have been replaced as the start-up darling of the Valley by a fresh-faced new new thing. It will probably also have to quell the digital rebellion of Bolshevik users who will claim “ownership” of the service. Most of all, Twitter will, in the not-too-distant future, have to prove to investors that the company has a viable strategy for transforming its millions upon millions of Tweets into hard cash.

The Vertigo Years 2000-2014

In The Vertigo Years, Europe, 1900-1914, the Viennese historian Philipp Blom does a quite brilliant job describing the impact of cultural and technological change at the beginning of the 20th century. Blom focuses on the way in which the urban, industrial revolution altered the identity of turn of the century European men and women. Blom quotes Virginia Woolf who once said that "in and around December 1910 human character changed." And the central point of this amazing book is that human nature was fundamentally transformed by the invention of cinema, the camera, the newspaper and the other technologies of mass media.

Somebody needs to write The Vertigo Years, The World, 2000-2014. It's a natural sequel. All the social and cultural phenomena that Blom describes -- "the cult of the fast machine" (gasoline powered car), "People's Palaces" (movie theaters) etc etc -- is now being radically transformed, for better or worse, by the digital revolution. Just as the period between 1900 and 1914, shaped the rest of the 20th century, so what is happening now in media, culture and technology will caste a long shadow over the rest of the 21th century.

So what, exactly, will happen next? One clue: in 1914, there was a war to end all wars, the most destructive conflict in human history. If we are to believe the digital jihadis (Jarvis et al) we are on the verge of everlasting paradise -- a customer-centric century.  But I'm not so sure. Rather than liberating us from the old structures of power, this new technology is actually unmooring us from our traditional communities and identities. Just as in beginning of the 20th century, new technologies and media are making most of us increasingly anxious and isolated. We are back, I'm afraid, in the Vertigo Years. I just hope they end in a less bloody climax than they did a hundred years ago.

Afghanistan = Vietnam squared

And so Obama's America continues to slide into an appalling Afghan morass that is beginning to look more and more like the drip-drip of the Vietnam tragedy/crime. Today we are told that an Afghan surge is beginning in a "dangerous region" near Kabul. According to the AP's Jason Straziuso:

Close to 3,000 American soldiers who recently arrived in Afghanistan to secure two violent provinces near Kabul have begun operations in the field and already are seeing combat, the unit's spokesman said Monday. The new troops are the first wave of a surge of reinforcements expected this year. The process began to take shape under President George Bush but has been given impetus by President Barack Obama's call for an increased focus on Afghanistan.

An increased focus on Afghanistan, eh, with Obama giving "impetus" to Bush's failed war in the region. And why? What's the point of this "process"? It's all because of "militants", the spokesman of 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the 10th Mountain Division explained to Straziuso, who apparently "have attacked several patrols with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, including one ambush with 30 militants." These militants being the Taliban, whose militancy reflects a significant proportion of an Afghan population ravaged by invasion after invasion of foreign powers. And the Taliban, of course, are the supposed allies of Al-Qaeda -- even though none of the perpetrators of 9/11 were Afghani and the Taleban have never articulated any interest in bombing American targets outside their country.

So why is Obama, of all people, behaving like a fin de siecle European imperialist by sending more and more troops to a weak foreign country in which a mythological group of his enemies are supposedly hiding? It's because so much garbage is spoken in America about the "war on terror" that, to justify leaving Iraq, Obama has fallen into the Al-Qaeda trap of invading another Moslem country in the Clouseau-like hunt for Bin Laden (the Saudi version of the Pink Panther). Just as it was Kennedy, and not Johnson, who began American involvement in Vietnam, so a weak Obama is in danger of being sucked into another president's catastrophic foreign war.

But Afghanistan is not simply Vietnam 2.0. America is a much weaker and more vulnerable economic and political power now than it was in Sixties -- particularly in the post October 2008 Wall Street meltdown and its inevitable anti-American aftermath (previewed at Davos this year in the language of both Russian and Chinese leaders). As Emmanuel Todd, the author of the prescient After The Empire, wrote in 2002:

"After years of being perceived as the problem solver, the United States itself has become a problem for the rest of the world."

And a pointless Afghan war, that will inevitably spill over in Pakistan, will only make American bullying of small countries a bigger headache for the rest of the world. Just as Obama is retreating from Iraq, so he should open peace negotiations with the Taliban and get the hell out of Afghanistan. In After The Empire, Todd correctly argues that picking on weak countries reveals a great power in decline. To remain a credible global power, Obama needs to walk away from Afghanistan. That would be the policy of a genuinely strong President. Unfortunately, he isn't strong and it is likely that Obama will simply shift the ludicrous "war on terror" from Iraq to Afghanistan.

Plastic is the new paper

Adieu print? On Monday, on the very same day that Amazon revealed its underwhelming Kindle 2, Plastic Logic, a UK-US technology start-up that is pioneering a portable plastic electronic screen, announced a series of deals with publishing companies that will, I suspect, be seen one day as the death knell of print magazines and newspapers.

While Amazon want to replace the physical book with their iPod sized Kindle, Plastic Logic have developed a physically larger and technologically more ambitious 8 ½ by 11 inch plastic screen – a bendable and fully portable e-reader that, according to Joe Eschbach, the company’s marketing VP, is lighter, more robust and cheaper to produce than a conventional glass electronic screen.

Eschbach rejected the idea, however, that Plastic Logic is a direct competitor to Amazon’s glass screened Kindle. “It’s a different type of product,” he told me, when we spoke on the telephone. Amazon are going after the reader of what he called “recreational books” like paperback novels, Eschbach explained, while Plastic Logic’s target is what he claims to be the ten times larger market of “business readers” of newspapers, magazines, PDF documents and even emails.

While Plastic Logic demonstrated a prototype at this week’s O’Reilly Tools of Change Publishing Conference (TOC) in New York City, their e-reader device won’t have what Eschbach described as “broad commercial availability” until 2010.  Last week’s announcements from Plastic Logic were, therefore, all about alliances or distribution deals with new media technology companies such as Zinio and Adobe, and newspaper publishers like the Financial Times, New York Times and USA Today.

As the insurrectionary Web 2.0 age fizzles out in a damp climax of superfluous social networking widgets, Plastic Logic might well be Silicon Valley’s new new thing. This plastic revolution-from-above represents an audacious attempt to finally kill off the already sickly print newspaper and magazine. Backed by both British and American venture capital, Plastic Logic, which owns over a hundred patents on its technology, employs three hundred people and is headed by ex Hewlett-Packard executive Richard Archuleta. With their R&D facility in Cambridge UK, their manufacturing center in Dresden, Germany and their sales and marketing HQ in Mountain View, California, the company’s unconventional organization reflects the audacity of its revolutionary plastic e-reader.

I suspect that Archuleta’s greatest challenge will be how to most effectively monetize his technology. With only 300 full-time staff spread across three countries and two continents, Plastic Logic might not quite have the human bandwidth to be simultaneously a next-generation publishing platform, a mass producer of branded hardware and a technology outsourcer. But Joe Eschbach is so confident about the commercial viability of Plastic Logic technology that he promises the product will “sell itself”. The 2010 launch of a Plastic Logic branded e-reader, he told me, will result in the company getting “big quick” with “hundreds of thousands or millions of sales” of an Internet enabled device he predicted would cost somewhere between $300 and $800. I hope Eschbach is right. Silicon Valley desperately needs a new new thing. Plastic may indeed be the new paper. By this time next year, you might even be reading this column on Plastic Logic rather than on glass or print.

The battle for local attention

The New York Times just published a series of short essays about the future of regional newspapers. Entitled "Battle Plans for Newspapers", it includes pieces by myself, Nicholas Lemann, Craig Newmark, Steven Brill and a number of other new media experts. It's a provocative collection of thoughts which should be read by anyone worried about the future of their local newspaper. While there are inevitable differences between the essayists (particularly between myself and Craig Newmark over the value of user-generated-content), what I think unites us all is a pessimism about the future of the traditional print local paper. The great unanswered question is what, exactly, is the purpose of the local paper in the digital age? As Nicholas Lemann argues in his piece:

What’s essential right now is that we be precise about the social function we need to strengthen, and creative and non-doctrinaire about how to strengthen it. Reporting does not happen automatically — it takes time, money, and training. It needs a support system. The best local newspapers have been a pretty good one for a generation or two. They may not be any longer.

My sense is that the real opportunity for local newspapers exists as a consequence of the radical redefinition of local information in the digital age. Web 2.0 websites like Yelp and Craigslist have introduced a wealth of local information hitherto unimaginable in the print age.  But what is sorely lacking from this economy is trust. The opportunity for new local online papers is to curate and manage this information in a way that people will trust. The opportunity and challenge for local publishers is to relearn the notion of trust and how they present their value to their online user-readers.

So what does this mean for the future of the traditional local reporter, the full-time journalist employed by a local paper to research original local news? It's not good news, I'm afraid. At best, innovative local online newspapers will introduce the GlobalPost model of paying a stipend to local writers in exchange for a few pieces each month. But, as a I argue in my Times piece, the internet is, if anything, compounding the value of local information. Indeed, the winners and losers in today's First World Media War will be determined by who wins the battle for local attention. The good news for next-generation local journalists/entrepreneurs is that this battle has barely started.

The groundswell isn't so (s)well

In Groundswell, Forrester analysts Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff argue that the great shift of the digital age is from the institution to the individual. It's the idea that "people have always rebelled against institutional power, in social movements like labor unions and political revolutions". Implicit in this assumption, of course, is that the rebellion of the people is a good thing -- that the people know what they are doing, that institutions don't serve individuals properly, that we can collectively right institutional wrongs.

But we are about to learn that the groundswell isn't so (s)well. Frank Rich -- who still seems to believe in the core principles of groundswell, writes about the people in "Slumdogs Unite":

The tsunami of populist rage coursing through America is bigger than Daschle’s overdue tax bill, bigger than John Thain’s trash can, bigger than any bailed-out C.E.O.’s bonus. It’s even bigger than the Obama phenomenon itself. It could maim the president’s best-laid plans and what remains of our economy if he doesn’t get in front of the mounting public anger.

Rich is describing the groundswell of "populist rage" against the political institutions of Washington DC. It's not so much the American slumdogs as the suburbandogs who are uniting against the government in their revulsion for American elites.  This could be a text book case of people's power from Li and Bernoff's Groundswell. Except, of course -- unlike examples in their book (like Jeff Jarvis' popular rebellion against Dell over a broken laptop)  --this "tsunami of populist rage" isn't going to end with a replacement laptop.

The problem is that the crisis in American is being treated -- by media, politicians and above all by the people -- as a crisis of morality when it is actually an economic crisis. Peggy Noonan correctly points out that "the national conversation on the economy is frozen." That's because nobody is really talking about the economy. Instead, they all see the problems in terms of blame -- blaming CEOs, Uncle Bernie, Wall Street, left-wing Democrats, bankers or mortgage brokers. But actually, as Niall Ferguson so brilliantly explains, it's a general crisis of indebtedness. We are all in this together, both in terms of our guilt and our innocence:

They need to grow up and face the harsh reality: The Western world is suffering a crisis of excessive indebtedness. Governments, corporations and households are groaning under unprecedented debt burdens. Average household debt has reached 141% of disposable income in the United States and 177% in Britain. Worst of all are the banks. Some of the best-known names in American and European finance have liabilities 40, 60 or even 100 times the amount of their capital.

Frank Rich is right to say that Obama needs to get "in front" of the tsunami of populist rage. But he needs to do it in the context of his belief in the principle of "responsibility". We all -- government, households, corporations, individuals -- have a responsibility to reduce debt. Otherwise, as Ferguson argues and the Economist warns, the world is going to disintegrate into a globalized version of Argentina.

Noonen tells us that we should "brace ourselves" for a very bumpy landing. Unlike the miracle on the Hudson, however, this may not be a perfect landing. Then what? Then the current morality show is going to get very very nasty. Alan Brinkley cheerfully tells us that railing against the rich is a great American tradition going back to Huey P. Long, Father Charles Coughlin and John Steinbeck. The difference, however, between the Great Depression and now is Li and Bernoff's groundswell, a populist tsunami empowered by the digital revolution. It's the mistaken assumption today -- peddled throughout the media, both old and new -- that the "people" can effectively rebel against institutional power. This is a dangerous lie and I'm afraid that it will cost us dearly. I'm bracing myself for a splash landing. Captain Sully in '12?