Impact Is What You Can Get Away With
Brands and organizations looking to make real social impact should go beyond the app to “do good” or “give back.” Impact isn’t an app, it’s an uprising. It’s not just a meme, it’s a movement. Warhol and McLuhan both said, “Art is what you can get away with.” Riffing on this provocation, we challenge social innovators to get away with more. What can change makers learn from artists? How do you channel cultural power to achieve deep structural change? How do you stimulate promiscuous participation? How do you turn social innovations into social movements? This session is for makers, thinkers, and doers looking to level up their understanding of the art of mass mobilization and achieving transformative impact. We will present from our experiences building 21st century movements at Purpose and engage in dialogue with fellow “movement entrepreneurs.”

Vote for our panel proposal. Thanks!

Haiku synopsis:

Tech helps us to share
Old impulses, New ideas
What is mine is yours

Co-authors Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers present a highly readable overview of the collaborative present and future of consumption as new technologies empower and amplify our basic human urge to share.  I was really excited to finally get my review copy of this book, since my masters thesis, SokoSquare, dealt with many of these issues of reclaiming and redefining community (and finding abundance) through collaboration and sharing. In particular, chapter 8, “Collaborative Design” was a particularly inspiring call to action for me as a designer to move beyond creating beautiful artifacts to creating systems and experiences that generate some sort of communal value.  The ethos of collaborative consumption doesn’t see technology and the internet as an end in itself, but instead a coordinating mechanism for enhancing robust communities.

I have also been thinking about these issues in my recent work with HelloElectric.org, a newly-launched social movement for the promotion of electric vehicles.  Widespread adoption of electric vehicles is only one part of the solving the climate and peak oil crises.  We must also change the way we own and use vehicles.  Botsman & Rogers quote Bill Ford, executive chairman of Ford:

The future of transportation will be a blend of things like Zipcar, public transportation, and private car ownership.  Not only do I not feat that, but I think it’s a great opportunity for us to participate in the changing nature of car ownership.

Amen to that.

What’s Mine Is Yours is part cultural critique, part aspirational document, and part survey of the current collaborative consumption scene.  Besides Zipcar, the book also explores the success of sites like eBay, craigslist, and CouchSurfing and offers an introduction to some interesting newcomers in the space.

If you like Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age or Douglas Rushkoff’s Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back, this is the book to read next.

Clay on the 2008 US Beef Protests in South Korea

Clay on lolcats

Clay on the Gneezy and Rustichini Haifa day care center study

Clay on the Grobanites for Charity

Cognitive Surplus on Amazon

Follow @cshirky on Twitter

Can a company really deliver happiness?  That is a question that Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh tries to answer in his new book, Delivering Happiness (out today!). He certainly delivered happiness to me as a blogger when I received a free review copy of the book a couple months ago.  With that disclosure taken care of, let me go into what I hope will be a fair review.

Delivering Happiness was a quick and easy read.  Hsieh writes in a casual conversational style and claims in the introduction that he did not employ a ghostwriter.  I finished the book the night I got in the mail.  Despite his own self-deprecation about his writing ability, I appreciate the conversational tone and the authenticity of his personal voice.  As far as books written by CEOs of successful companies go, Delivering Happiness is definitely not douchey.  I have to admit, I don’t usually read business management books, nor have I ever shopped at Zappos, but I was intrigued by the offer of a free book.

Hsieh delivers sage business advice in a simple and earnest way while interweaving it with his own personal narrative. As a brief aside, in the spirit of Hsieh’s personal narrative style, I’ll interweave some of my own personal narrative into this review.  Hsieh and I have a lot in common.  We are both the sons of Taiwanese immigrants who grew up in suburbia.  Both of our last names start with H.  And speaking of the letter “H”, to drop the H-bomb, we both went to Harvard. We were both forced (um, I mean, strongly encouraged) by our parents to learn piano and some sort of string instrument growing up (in Hsieh’s case the violin, in mine, the cello).  I have to admit, as someone who didn’t grow up with many Asian-American role models outside of my own family, these kinds of commonalities made me really identify with Hsieh’s story and personal journey.

Hsieh emphasizes the importance of building a strong and distinctive corporate culture as the path to business success.  He has done this at Zappos by maintaining transparency and a personal touch in management, and hiring and training employees in a way that infuses Zappos with its distinctive culture.  For example, Hsieh talks about how prospective employees are asked questions like “how weird are you?” and how Zappos offers new employees $2000 to quit after their training period just to make sure they are getting people who are really committed.

Just so I don’t come across as a total fanboy, the last paragraph will be critical. There were a few awkward bits in the book.  One is just a slightly typography technicality, but my designer side can’t help it.  There are several fonts used in the book, but the one used for quoting the Zappos Core Values Document (page 159), was a bit hard to read for such a long excerpt (maybe they have changed that for the final publication version though).  In terms of content, the part about Hsieh’s first experience with rave culture could have been shorter, and might have been a bit self-indulgent, but once again, I appreciate the personal, almost naive candor and honesty, and very much jive with Hsieh’s persona as a “hip, iconoclastic CEO” (I got that one from the book cover).  At the same time, the side note about how much Hsieh loves Red Bull was just plain weird (tacky product plug, or just an over-enthusiastic fanboy?).  Then again, if I ever get the chance to write a book about myself, I would welcome gladly the sponsorship of any of my uppers of choice (any matcha or yerba mate producers out there reading this?).

Don’t take my word for it though.  Delivering Happiness is a breezy entertaining read for anyone interested in building different kind of corporate culture, that optimizes both financial success and, well, happiness.  I’m happy I read the book and happy that you made it all the way through my review.  Have a nice day!

Delivering Happiness Official Homepage

Buy Delivering Happiness on Amazon

Donate to LIVESTRONG and receive a FREE copy of Delivering Happiness

Follow Delivering Happiness on Twitter

Sue-Shi, former vocalist/percussionist for Hepnova/The Ronald Raygun just published a werewolf-themed erotic novel, Pack of Lies.  Now available as an ebook for only $4.99.  Check it out!

While on the topic of Sue-Shi, check out some of her greatest hits!
Sex Power
Money (That’s What I Want) – Cover
Sexy Friends

More press for I RIDE FOR LIVESTRONG, an online interactive experience I worked on at Purpose:

TechPresident: Avaaz Co-Founders Seek Purpose Driven Consumer Life

Huffington Post: Julia Moulden on How to Use Technology to Change the World

Cool Hunting: This Week’s Picks

PSFK: Online Game I RIDE FOR LIVESTRONG Raises Funds, Awareness, and Social Empowerment

Previous post: I RIDE FOR LIVESTRONG in the NY Times

TXTTONE is my final project for Live Web.  It’s a web browser and SMS-based collaborative musical instrument that is meant to be performed in a room full of people with laptops and cellphones.  I wanted to create an interactive and collaborative musical experienced based on the ubiquitous technologies that we normally have with us at all times.  I was also interested in the play between the synchronous and asynchronous and explore the phase effects that result from TXTTONE being played on multiple computers simultaneously.  TXTTONE is programmed in AJAX/PHP, with SMS support by TextMarks.   I did the sound design in Logic Pro; I was going for “wind chimes meets dial tone.”

Check it out here.

Here are a couple “brotastic” pics from birthday party last night at XR Bar.  Photos courtesy of Catherine White, who co-hosted the party, and whose real birthday is in January.

In other news, the SokoSquare team has made it on to the Semi-Finals of the 2009-2010 NYU Stern Business Plan Competition.  A wonderful birthday present indeed.

Monkey Think
Monkeys often evokes a strong emotional response among people. Monkeys as symbols are also charged with social and political meaning.  We often anthropomorphize monkeys and project our own human anxieties onto them. Monkeys drive us bananas. They are Curious George one minute and the next minute they are giving you Ebola or AIDS or ripping off your face. Horror lies just under the surface of cute. 

I worked this week with Kristin Loeb on Monkeys Watching Monkeys, a streaming web video installation that deals with the mediated gaze, reflections and narcissism as they relate to how people look at monkeys, and how we think monkeys look at people and how monkeys look at each other.

More monkeys / This is is really disturbing / WHOA!

Monkey Do
We started with the Conference.as code that Shawn gave us in class, but we came across some mysterious problems. For some reason the compiled SWFs only worked part of the time on Kristin’s computer and never actually worked on mine. (Does Snow Leopard hate Monkeys or what?) So we moved on to some off-the-shelf solutions, trying first iChat, then Skype, and finally USTREAM.tv to create a series of simian scenarios. The goal was to position webcams and screens in a way to create an “infinity effect” of primate viewing pleasure.

Documentation outtakes on Flickr

Finally, we created the be beginnings of the Monkey Show, a webpage featuring two USTREAM channels and a Twitter widget that displays the latest tweets with the work “monkey” in them. We hope to trick this page out with more live monkey media in the near future.

Monkey Learn
Bandwidth is an issue
There are mysterious bugs in the system
Even off-the-shelf solutions have their limitations
This installation would probably work better and be more aesthetically pleasing with just cameras and monitors (with the laptops hidden)
The installation would probably have worked better with analog video
Lighting and camera placement are tricky
If only our monkey talent were this well trained:

13.4 million Americans watch some form of mobile video each month, and of those 13.4 million people, each watched an average of 3.5 hours of mobile video per month.  By comparison, the average American watches 153 hours of TV per month.  (Nielsen via Mashable, May 2009)

Also from Nielsen:

Except for the teenage years, viewing of traditional television increases with age; the use of video on the Internet peaks among young adults while viewing mobile video is highest in the teen years.

Men continue to watch video on mobile phones more than women, and women continue to watch video on the Internet and TV more than men.

In a 2007 international survey, a majority of all respondents agreed that “recommendations from friends had the most impact on the type of content they viewed over celebrity, amateur and professional endorsements.” (IBM via REELSEO)

According to a 2008 comScore study: on-demand video was the most popular mobile video format (compared to mobile broadcast), with 3.6 million viewers in the US. The report also gave a breakdown of the kinds of content mobile video users consumed:

See also:
Eyes Wide Open: Video Usage Up, More Watch Cross-Platform
Nielsen: Mobile Video Use Lags Behind

Textbooks have not gone the way of the scroll yet, but many educators say that it will not be long before they are replaced by digital versions — or supplanted altogether by lessons assembled from the wealth of free courseware, educational games, videos and projects on the Web.

[...]

In California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger this summer announced an initiative that would replace some high school science and math texts with free, “open source” digital versions.

With California in dire straits, the governor hopes free textbooks could save hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Among the article’s interviewees is Neeru Khosla, co-founder of the non-profit group CK-12 Foundation, which develops “flexbooks” that can be adapted to state educational standards.  (Khosla has also been featured on OpenEd and on the Creative Commons blog.) Khosla explains the virtues of the flexbooks:

You can use them online, you can download them onto a disk, you can print them, you can customize them, you can embed video. When people get over the mind-set issue, they’ll see that there’s no reason to pay $100 a pop for a textbook, when you can have the content you want free.

The article uses terms like “digital textbooks,” “free courseware,” “open source,” and “open-content,” but what exactly do these terms mean? While there is reference to the adaptability and customization digital texts, the article does not explicitly mention copyright.  While digital delivery of educational materials may solve some of the cost barriers of education, without an explicit understanding of terms like “open” and “free,” legal and social barriers remain.  As far as I am concerned, government-funded “digital textbooks” or “free courseware” should be as free as possible from copyright restrictions (licensed under Creative Commons BY Attribution license, the least restrictive of CC licenses) or in the public domain.  Only then will they be truly available for sharing, collaboration and reuse.  The fact that they are simply “digital” or “available on the Internet” alone is not enough.

The road to a digital future for education is not without its bumps.  Lewin brings up the issue of a the digital divide: “Not every student has access to a computer, a Kindle electronic reader device or a smartphone, and few districts are wealthy enough to provide them. So digital textbooks could widen the gap between rich and poor.”

The increasing adoption of digital textbooks may save on some costs, but will also require additional investment in computer hardware.  But the real issue at stake is not just the economic costs of education, but instead the need to focus on increasing the accessibility of knowledge.  In order for learning resources to be truly accessible, the issue is not just online vs. offline, digital vs. print.  To reach their maximum social and educational potential, learning materials in the digital future  will need to free from excessive copyright constraints (with clear open licensing like CC-BY or public domain declaration) in order to allow teachers and students the maximum freedom to legally share, modify, and improve upon them.

Also check out Jane Park of ccLearn’s post from last September: “Back to School: Open Textbooks Gaining in Popularity.”

1. Washington Post writer Ian Shapira writes an article about business coach/’generational consultant’ Anne Loehr: Speaking to Generation Nexus: Guru Explains Gens X, Y, Boomer To One Another
2. Gawker blogger Hamilton Nolan picks up the story: ‘Generational Consultant’ Holds America’s Fakest Job
3. Shapira complains that Gawker stole his story: The Death of Journalism (Gawker Edition)

My take

Shapira’s claim that Gawker did not properly attribute him are unfounded.  The Gawker post links to the original article and to Loeher’s generational cheat sheet.  Hyperlinks are the footnotes and citations of our generation (as Loeher would probably say). I’m giving my advice for free: my generation thinks that generational business coaches are B$.  We live in a cut and paste culture; computers lower the barrier to making derivative works, as the next section of this post will demonstrate.  The subject of the original article was pretty ridiculous to begin with, as if it were tailor-made for Gawker fodder.  Gawker added value to the original with its snarky commentary. (Ms. Loeher, is snark a characteristic of my generation too?)

If Oscar Wilde were alive today, he would probably say, “the only thing worse than being blogged about is NOT being blogged about.”  While we are on aphorisms, let me give you some more free (useless) advice about my generation, courtesy of Descartes, updated for our times: Blogito ergo sum. “I blog, therefore I am.”

I don’t think Gawker is so much ruining journalism as Shapira claims as much as it is Maybe the WaPo should stick to actual news coverage and investigative reporting (after all, this is the newspaper that exposed the Watergate scandal, but “old media” can’t just rest on its past laurels).  “New media” like Gizmodo is going to give newspapers a run for their money in terms of business model.  Newspapers can either adapt their business models and learn to compete with the supposed “pirates” (“piracy is just another business model“), or they can fail.  They can revamp their content and delivery models, or they can streamline and specialize in what they do best.  But here’s a hint for being hip with the kids: complaining about the death of journalism is old news and kind of played out.

Or, in a move of desperation, they can throw down the gauntlet and start an Internet turf war like Shapira has done, which is actually a very Gawker-esque thing to do.  (What would Anne Loeher say about how that reflects on Shapira’s generational values?) It certainly has succeeded in getting people’s attention, but I hope this is not the sustainable business model the WaPo has in mind.

Commentary from the blogosphere AKA aggregation adds value

Stowe Boyd: As Media Economics Shift, Old Media Can’t See The Forest, Only Trees

So, at core, the issue here is something larger. Who owns the world of discourse? Who is allowed to profit, and in what way, from the actions of participants in this web sphere?

Various arguments could be made about fanciful mechanisms.

• Imagine a world where people are paid to read stories, basically getting a kickback from publishers from ad revenue. (Hasn’t caught on.)
• We could weigh the value of every link pointing to or away a piece on the web, and a complex, Google-pagerank-ish algorithm could figure out to six decimal points how much everyone owes each other each week. (Impossible to implement, I bet.)
• Authors could attempt to demand that no one should link to their pieces, or clip any information from them without permission or recompense. (Counter to fair use provisions of copyright and free speech protections.)
• Companies like the Washington Post can put everything behind a paywall. (Good luck.)

These mechanisms hinge on old thinking about value.

The web is a place where connection trumps content: content isn’t king, context in a web of meaning is king.

Rachel Sklar: Did Gawker Rip Off The Washington Post? Yep.

The blogosphere has done something weird to the media industry: Now, the imprimatur of having contributed something is not the original byline, but whether your piece was “picked up.” Pickup provides that extra stamp of relevance, that what you did is worthy of inclusion by the all-important aggregators — the outlets which determine the days need-to-know stories, so busy people with no time to read any of it will at least know what’s up. Yes, yes, congratulations on getting your little article published in a top national newspaper — but a Drudge/Romenesko/HuffPo/Gawker link? Awesome!

It’s not just about traffic, it’s about affirmation: You’re on to something. You’re relevant.

Zachary M. Seward: Gawker and The Washington Post: A case study in fair use

Words in Post article: 1,527
Words from Post article quoted in Gawker post: 226 (15%)
Original words in Gawker post: 204
Labor devoted to Post article: about 2 days
Labor devoted to Gawker post: 30-60 minutes
Cost of Post article: roughly $750
Cost of Gawker post: roughly $20
Revenue generated from Post article: unknown
Revenue generated from Gawker post: roughly $200
Blog links to Post article: 7
Blog links to Gawker post: 4
Rank of Gawker post among referrers to Post article: 2nd
Rank of Post article in Google search for profile subject: 3rd
Rank of Gawker post in Google search for profile subject: 6th

Matthew Ingram: Gawker, the WaPo and the death of journalism

I’d be willing to agree that Gawker could have — and maybe even should have, in an ethical sense — mentioned Shapira and his story specifically. But there is no way in heck that a post with three links and an explicit reference to the source constitutes anything approaching a “rip-off” or the “death of journalism.” How about the death of hyperbole, and the rebirth of rational debate about the value of linking and traffic, and/or the ethics of sourcing online? That would be nice.

emptywheel: The Stealing Wars: What’s Good for Gawker Is Good for WaPo’s Slate

Shapira has a point about this particular instance of Gawker’s abuse of etiquette. But he misses all the ways that this information economy is a multiple-directional exchange, one the WaPo is as happy to engage in as Gawker.

VOXPOPULI: How Alan Denton And His Gawker Henchmen Are Ruining Journalism Forever

So, what’s the point of all this? Shapira points out that what took him a day to produce took Gawker less than an hour to claim as its own and make ad revenue from. Newspapers and other traditional media are certainly not the only form of journalism, but they are the ones that 1. pay well enough for one to live a decent life as a working journalist and 2. have (had?) the resources to allow for real news-gathering, which takes time and effort. And with newspapers fading away, there’s less original content for blogs to re-purpose as their own.

On the other hand…blogs are more fun, or can be, and I myself am a Gawker regular. Blogs are a lot less formal and the best don’t, after all, just cut and paste without adding a bit of their own eleven herbs and spices. In the age of the Internet, information is an increasingly free commodity.

Appendix

This is totally tangential, and I doubt you’ve made it this far, but I’ve had my own brush with Nick Denton’s blogging empire before.  Gizmodo picked up my head(banger)phones project from the ITP Winter Show last December.  They misreported the programming language I used to execute the project.  I posted a comment to correct them, but the post was never corrected.  Oh well, I enjoyed the 15 seconds of Internet fame while it lasted.  You could always read the official story about the head(banger)phones on LEESEAN.NET.

In case you haven’t heard enough from Shapira:

Washington Post staff writer Ian Shapira will be online Monday, Aug. 4, at 11 a.m. ET to discuss his Outlook article titled “How Gawker Ripped Off My tory and Why It’s Destroying Journalism.”

The most obvious change is the removal of the big photos that showed up in the header.  After careful consideration, I decided that while I like them, they were taking up too much space in the browser window, especially on small laptop monitors.  I removed the header image so that users won’t have to scroll down so far to start reading content.  If you miss the old header images, you can see them all here.

The other design tweaks are very minor.  I’ve increased the total width of the site to 850 pixels, and played with some of the font settings to increase legibility.  I’ve also brought back an updated Links page.

This site is a perpetual work-in progress.  I learn more PHP and CSS every time I make design changes, so it’s an educational exercise as well.  How does the new site look?  Feedback appreciated.

My ITP classmate, Catherine White, has set up a community on Ning to discuss her ongoing project.  In her own words:

My research is primarily focused on how we work together in groups, particularly how to make collaboration more fruitful, and efficient (and less painful – because it sometimes is). Specifically, I am looking at groups we are part of online.

My thesis project came out of a midterm paper I wrote in March for Clay Shirky’s Social Facts class. I studied a forum online and discovered that there are some people who can be pretty disruptive in groups – even though they may not be violating the rules of the group. Its these people I’m interested in studying, to see how we can structure and govern groups to make collaboration enjoyable, not painful – and to ensure that group decisions reflect the group as a whole….

One small explanation about the term ‘Noisy Idiots’ – my main aim is to find ways to include people in debate and groups. The phrase came about in a playful manner due to sheer frustration at seeing some people dominate group discussion in a disruptive way. This paper tackles tricky issues such as balancing free speech and constructive conversation, but the aim is to get us all talking and listening to each other. I also understand the very important role that minority voices play in conversation – and am in no way suggesting that we shouldn’t listen to those with a view that is different to ours.

I’d be hugely grateful to hear your thoughts – and your ideas, thank you.

Read the the draft of Catherine’s paper and join the conversation at the Noisy Idiots Ning Community.

Here are my preliminary thoughts on the topic (Cross-posted on Ning):

Maybe you should put the paper online in wiki form and see what the crowd of angry idiots do to it

I understand that the choice to use the term “noisy idiots” is meant to be eye-catching and edgy, but what exactly do you mean by “extreme” viewpoints? If the Pirate Party or right-wing groups can elect MEPs to Brussels, than it represents in a way, that their views have been institutionalized or become more “mainstream” even if they are still minority viewpoints.

I guess what I have to more clearly distinguish between noisy/idiotic views and noisy/idiotic rhetorical styles (i.e. trolling). I have some far-from-mainstream political views, but I don’t usually go around harassing strangers on the street or online about them. You make this distinction on page 8, but I guess it would have been clearer if the definitions were made sooner.

You do clearly state that the paper is not about minority viewpoints, but about bad netiquette, however, I would argue that behaving outrageously is almost an essential tool for a minority group looking to make change in the world, whether their persecution if real or simply perceived.

If you look at history, many (most?) revolutionary changes have begun with a small group of noisy idiots, who keep it up until something in the socio-political climate tilts in their favor. While compromise and meeting “in the center” are crucial to the sustainability of a democratic system, the seemingly pathological rantings of the lunatic fringe can serve as important indicators of the health of the body politic. The question then becomes, how and why would someone come to believe that all Muslims should be deported in the first place? (substitute with any other “noisy idiot” belief)

Online fora are a place to blow off steam. In the fora you describe, it is doubtful that the people involved actually know each other in real life, or their identities are safely hidden behind pseudonyms. If I’m a noisy idiot, I know deep down that my online rantings are not going change anything. I’m either preaching to the choir or annoying people who disagree with me. Bottom line, trolling online makes me FEEL GOOD without having to take any risks, unlike trying to foment direct action in the name of my idiot cause on the streets. Posting on an online forum allows me to air my opinions that I wouldn’t otherwise hear in the mainstream media or political debate.

“Is there any other way.” It seems that the established solution is to raise the walls of homophily. After all, isn’t this why people live in gated communities, as to avoid the social friction of interacting with “the other”? Snark aside, the point is that the democratic process is messy, and not always civil and polite. YouTube Taiwanese politicians fighting to get an extreme case of what I mean. The more we scale up the size of a community, the more we have to break down into smaller units or sub-groups. That is why Congress has committees and the US is divided into states. We subdivide and compartmentalize in order to specialize and to better solve problems. The upside of homophily is reduced friction and increased group productivity and efficiency. The downside is that homophilous groups may get stale and eventually run out of new ideas. We do want Noisy Idiots sometimes to stir things up and “shock” us into new ways of doing things and inspire new ways forward. Noisy Idiots sometimes, but not too much. Find the balance and you save the princess and the Nobel Prize and World Peace are yours.

Also, related to your paper, you’ve seen this article, right?
NY Times: Ideas Online, Yes, but Some Not So Presidential
When the White House asked people to post ideas on open government on a new Web site, it heard about U.F.O.’s, marijuana and the president’s birth certificate.

HEPNOVA’s greatest-hits collection, “Best Shots,” is now available on Grooveshark (search for “Hepnova”) and on Bandcamp.  Of course, our entire collection of music can still be found at Hepnova.com.

Original HTML version

PHP/MySQL/Javascript version

Flash XML version

My friend Sophia Chang’s book, Mona Again, is a quarterfinalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award 2009. This means that out of 10,000 submissions, Mona Again is in the top 500 and in the running for a book deal with Penguin.  Read the first 20 pages for FREE and help support Asian American literature with a few clicks of the mouse.  

Learn more about the book and vote for it here.

I’m finding more blog posts about the head(banger)phones from across the international Internets.

Here are posts from Australia, Brazil, and France.

Here are some news clippings of the ITP Winter Show from across the Internets:

MAKE: Blog: ITP Winter Show 2008 – Best of show… Plate spinning DJ, drinking piano, magnet music

MAKE: Blog: More from the ITP Winter Show 2008

More from the ITP Winter Appearance 2008 | USD6.com

ITP Winter Show 2008 – Highlights.  – Wiredset / Blogs / Mark Ghuneim

Like John and Yoko said, “War is over, if you want it”:

November 12, 2008
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SPECIAL TIMES EDITION BLANKETS U.S. CITIES, PROCLAIMS END TO WAR

* PDF: http://www.nytimes-se.com/pdf
* For video updates: http://www.nytimes-se.com/video
* Contact: mailto:writers@nytimes-se.com

Early this morning, commuters nationwide were delighted to find out that while they were sleeping, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had come to an end.

If, that is, they happened to read a “special edition” of today’s New York Times.

In an elaborate operation six months in the planning, 1.2 million papers were printed at six different presses and driven to prearranged pickup locations, where thousands of volunteers stood ready to pass them out on the street.

Articles in the paper announce dozens of new initiatives including the establishment of national health care, the abolition of corporate lobbying, a maximum wage for C.E.O.s, and, of course, the end of the war.

The paper, an exact replica of The New York Times, includes International, National, New York, and Business sections, as well as editorials, corrections, and a number of advertisements, including a recall notice for all cars that run on gasoline. There is also a timeline describing the gains brought about by eight months of
progressive support and pressure, culminating in President Obama’s “Yes we REALLY can” speech. (The paper is post-dated July 4, 2009.)

“It’s all about how at this point, we need to push harder than ever,” said Bertha Suttner, one of the newspaper’s writers. “We’ve got to make sure Obama and all the other Democrats do what we elected them to do. After eight, or maybe twenty-eight years of hell, we need to start imagining heaven.”

Not all readers reacted favorably. “The thing I disagree with is how they did it,” said Stuart Carlyle, who received a paper in Grand Central Station while commuting to his Wall Street brokerage. “I’m all for freedom of speech, but they should have started their own paper.”

Here are the Rules:

1. Link to the person that tagged you
2. Post the rules on your blog
3. Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself
4. Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs
5. Let each random person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website.
6. Let your tagger know when your entry is UP.

1) I think high fructose corn syrup is nasty.
2) The joints in my upper body is hyperflexible, which really messes up my back and shoulders sometimes.
3) I don’t like melons.
4) I think walking down the street talking on your Bluetooth headset is douchy.  Also, if you are not on the phone, take off your Bluetooth!
5) I’m allergic to cats too!
6) I have 2 scars on my face that have required stitches.  Both were from childhood accidents.  I fell off of a chair when I was 2 or 3 – you can barely see that scar.  Another one is on my eyebrow.  My neighbor threw a rock at his brother, but it ricocheted off the ground and hit me instead.

I can’t think of 6 people to tag right now…maybe later…

Protest Against the Bush Bailout on Wall Street from lee-sean on Vimeo.

Also on YouTube and Blip.tv. Photos on Flickr.

Click here to send a letter to your Senators and Representatives, demanding them to take a stand against public liability for private debt.

Learn more at EndBailouts.org.

CITIZENS STAND AGAINST BAILOUTS WITH PETITION AND INTERNET SITE

EndBailouts.org established 24 hours after bailout plan was announced

A group of outraged American businesspeople and academics from Arizona, New York, and California are taking a stand against the proposed $1 trillion plan to use taxpayer dollars to absorb bad debts from private corporations.

EndBailouts.org, the volunteer advocacy group they formed 24 hours after the announcement from Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, has launched an online resource and petition as a means to give a voice and support to Americans who oppose the bailout plan.

“Don’t give our children more debt and our creditors more power over us,” says Stacy Seger, an Arizona schoolteacher who helped launch the movement. “Don’t be afraid to speak out against these unprecedented government moves.”

The group circulates the petition online and on foot, planning to deliver it in person to Congress.  Public demonstrations are planned to draw more people to the issue.  EndBailouts.org is reaching out to combine efforts other taxpayer advocacy groups, and will provide information to taxpayers through online and other media channels.

For more information, or to schedule an interview with an EndBailouts.org representative, please call Nicholas DiBiase at 480-734-9983 or email ActNow[at]EndBailouts[dot]org.