How to make friends and influence people - an invitation

At the beginning of this year, a couple of my friends and I made an experiment. We said to ourselves - hey, the Cluetrain Manifesto is so awesome that we could write a post for each of the 95 theses that begins the book! Let's see what happens if we do!

So we did. The first few weeks, things went smoothly. Then, life happened, and we all kind of petered out after the first month or so. Which might sound like a failure, until we look at the numbers. A post a day by five enthused persons for about a month - that's roughly 150 posts.

Add to that all the discussions, thoughts and wisdoms that followed, and the only way to look at it is through the lens of the two words "epic win". The process of thinking about something together with other people, and doing it for a longer period of time, is a powerful thing, and you learn more than you think when the backs and forth starts to forth and back.

So. Why are you reading this? What am I up to? Am I, in fact, trying to make you ponder the question if you want to participate in a similar endeavor?

Why, yes. Yes I am. Seeing the epic winnage of the last time, there's really no reason not to. One epic win is a victory indeed. Two is a recipe for success.

My plan is to start the first of January, and work my way through each of the 95 theses one day and one post at a time. It is my hope that you will tag along and think this through with me. In any way, shape or form, blog or otherwise.

So. Are you up for it?

Sharing the fait accompli

I firmly believe that piracy will be a non-issue in about twenty years time. Not because of any massive political shifts, but because I and my fellow generational peers will be in our forties by then.

And, by feat of being somewhat contemporary, the internet.

I base this on the fact that piracy is a very hard issue to explain to kids who weren't around when the internet was a New and Strange thing. To those who were born only recently, it has always been there, just like electricity has always been there for us slightly older people. And just like there is an inbuilt absurdity to the claim that electricity is fatal to the candle industry, so the kids will view the claim that the internet is fatal to the culture industry.

To them, the internet is just a fact of nature. And the fact that just about any song or movie can be found, downloaded and shared on the internet comes as natural as the fact that birds migrate - one might marvel at the sight of it, but to question its political feasibility is a very odd thing to do.

And trying to stop it is an even stranger thing. Like trying to regulate the tides.

The very straightforward thing is that things can't be New and Strange forever. The internet might have been that ten years ago, but that was ten years ago. We now live ten years later, and have had ten years to incorporate it into our everyday lives. Which we have - irrevocably.

It's too late to say that the internet will change our lives. The bigger change at this point would be an attempt to remove the internet from the equation.

Candles did not disappear because of electricity, and culture will not disappear because of the internet. Why would it? There's more of it around than there has ever been! Available at our fingertips, just waiting for us to remember that we want to experience it again. And the only reason anyone calls it "piracy" is because that's what it was called when they were kids.

Today, this is called is to share things.

It would seem times are changing. Let's change with them, shall we?

Share me

During my virtual rambling adventures, I often meet new people. Such as you. And somehow, my seemingly random rantings seem to make somewhat of an impression on these new people. A good one, to boot. Sometimes, they even tell me about it, and occasionally they ask what they can do to help me do more of what I do.

I always tell these kind souls the same two things:

Thank you, and share.

Retweet it, post it on the Facebook, Digg it, tell a friend about it - whatever it is that you do when you tell someone about something awesome, do that.

That helps me more than one would think. And it just might make the same impression on your sharees as it did on you.

Thank you again.

Books! Books! Books!

Let's talk about ebooks.

No, no the _ebooks found on Twitter. The other kind. You know, those you probably won't find in libraries.

One would think libraries would be the place to find ebooks. Libraries deal with books, and the leap from dealing with books to dealing with books is not as great as one might imagine. Yet, those ebooks are somehow somewhat absent from public libraries. Why?

The answer is a complicated mess of licenses, restrictions and wishful thinking. Copyright, in other words.

One might imagine that the Pirate Bay would have set something of an example when it comes to establishing large scale databases with open access across many platforms. That the solutions employed in this entrepreneurial endeavor would cross over to apply to other agencies who wished to make sharing a matter of daily routine. That interdisciplinary dialogue would have happened.

It has in fact happened. And the rightholders did not at all like what they heard.

Instead, they took Measures. Legal sized pads were procured, legal pens set in motion and legal documents put forth. Documents that specified that libraries should limit the lending of ebooks to one (1) ebook at a time, that the fees for lending an ebooks should be greater than for old skool books, and that various forms of DRM are to be used on the few books that actually manage to pass through this narrowing of potentials.

You can bet that librarians are not overly fond of this new order of things. But what can they do? They are bound by the rules of copyright, after all, and if they are to have any books to lend at all they have to follow them to the letter.

No matter that the spirit has long since left our phenomenology.

The thing is, though, that all these demands put on the poor librarians is nothing but wishful thinking. Sadly enough. While the ambitions may be to limit the public exposure to free stuff, that very exposure already happens anyway. Not only with the help from the good fellows over at the Pirate Bay, but with the combined efforts of the world in general.

There's a lot of things other than reading books out there in the world. And there's a whole lot of world too, to boot!

So the net result of all this hassle is, in the end, detrimental for all parts. The rightholders miss out on all the free exposure that comes from being freely available in an appealing fashion, the librarians have to constantly explain the complicated and unappealing ways their ebooks wont work, and the public at large still have to rely on the somewhat unreliable forces of the free market.

We have the technology to make libraries better. There's no reason to question that - only unreason would question better libraries. But we have to give libraries permission to be what they can be, rather than construct ever more complicated reasons for them not to be.

A better world is possible. And it's hard to imagine a better place to start than at a library.

Younicode

The purpose of advertisement is to make you buy or do things you wouldn't do otherwise. This might sound strange, but think about it - if you'd buy/do these things anyway, there wouldn't be any reason to remind you that you're about to do it. You'd just go about and do it anyway, and nothing would have been achieved.

And, contrary to popular belief, companies are not in the business of spending money on useless things.

No, the purpose of advertisement is to sell customers to someone. In essence, to sell you and your behavior. For profit.

Now, most of us don't like being sold off for profit. So we develop strategies for not being sold. On the internet, we can just blast the ads out of the water. Boom, gone, out of sight, out of mind. Good riddance.

In our less virtual environments, it's a tad bit harder, though. The code required to block out physical ads are not as open source as the one available to block digital ads. To paraphrase Virilio: electrical light is more insistently visible than virtual light.

Something tells me Edison didn't quite intend his invention to shine a light on all those ads all over town.

Yet, there is still code available for blocking out those ads. But instead of literal code, it's literary code. Infoecological code - a way of thinking that puts it all in context, perspective, better use. The first part of this is, of course, the realization that whatever ad you happen to be looking at right now is intended to make you do something. And if/when you realize this, you are able to decode what this is, and how they are trying to weasel their way into your behavior.

You see, they are tricky about it. They don't just say "BUY OUR PRODUCT" in big capital letters; that kind of direct marketing is a thing of the past nowadays. Instead, they try to create some sort of narrative and lure you into it. It may not be the most intricate or complex of narratives, but a narrative it is nonetheless.

Most of them have to do with achieving social and/or sexual success. And the product they are trying to sell just happens to be a part of the process of achieving this very success. And, moreover, it just happens to be indispensible for this achievement - it creates a need for itself.

It takes a while to realize that you really don't need all those advertised things to get along in life. It takes more than a while to realize that you really don't need most of those things to be happy in life.

The code for blocking out these ads is to simply know who you are, what you are about, what you want and where you are going. Which, admittedly, is not as simple as it sounds. But it's well worth it, - more so than whatever the admakers are earning from selling you short to those who clutter our cityscapes with their imaginary products.

We are the protagonists in our own epic adventure. So let's begin hacking some literary code, for fun and nonprofit. -

Power/people

I do a lot of lecturing. And since I seldom talk to people more than once, I get to tell the same things many times; and, moreover, I get to see people's reactions to these things over and over again.

I never tire of the reactions to this one.

We all have our problems. Things that need to be done, stuff that has to happen, jigs that needs to be jugged. Whoever we are, whatever we do, there's always something that could be done a little smoother. There's always that one personal roadblock that we can't overcome alone.

This is a good thing.

You see, somewhere in this room (imagine that you're sitting in an audience of people you barely know) there is someone who has exactly what you need to overcome this problem, roadblock or whatever it is that ails you. It could be a thing, a skill or something else, but someone in your immediate  physical proximity has that something. Someone here can help you out, whatever it is that needs to be helped with.

And somewhere in this room, there is someone who needs exactly what you have. Doesn't matter who you are, what you know or where you're from - you are the right person for the job. You.

This is an intelligence test. And it is up to you to pass it. Right here, right now.

After I say that, I shut up. And reactions start to happen. At the best of times, they stop paying any attention to me whatsoever, and get down to business of getting things done. Real things, things that matter.

I get things done by shutting up.

It is a testament to the power of words, if there ever was one. -

An ode to the retweet

Consider the retweet.

It's such a simple act. Someone on Twitter writes something, and someone else reads it. And thinks - hey, this is too good to not be read by everyone I know! I gotta share this with them!

And thus, the retweet button is used.

Some use this sparingly, thinking that there is an art to selecting what to retweet. That it is not an act to be undertaken lightly, and that ample preparation and deliberation is mandated before one commits oneself to it.

Others have a more direct approach.

Now, consider the fact that we all know different people. Those present in your life are most likely not present in mine, and vice versa. What I see in your timeline is not what you see in yours, and what you see is not what I see.

Good thing we have a way to bridge that gap, isn't it?

If we take a step back, we can see that there are more people in the world than you and I. There are, in fact, many people in it, and none of them really see eye to eye. In fact, it is a topic of intense philosophic dispute whether two people who behold the same given object really see the same thing. And thus, there is a great need for bridge building in the world.

It's a big world. And there's a lot of people in it. We're gonna need a lot of bridges.

Or, perhaps not. Remember that thing about Kevin Bacon? About how you (whoever you might be) need only to make six lateral social jumps in order to get to the aforementioned Bacon?

The same goes for retweets. Something writes something, someone else retweets - and in five more jumps, the whole world has seen you smile.

That, my friends, is power. At your fingertips.

Use it wisely. And use it often.

Sharing

Sharing is telling someone about something.

Sharing is creating an experience with someone.

Sharing is cooperation.

Sharing is the making of friends.

Sharing is linking.

Sharing is helping those in need.

Sharing is expression.

Sharing is the freedom of action.

Sharing is the act of freedom.

Sharing is the essence of the art exhibition.

Sharing is exhibiting essence.

Sharing is the eternal moment of now.

Sharing is giving.

Sharing is recieving.

Sharing is both of the above, at the same time.

Sharing is what makes the world go 'round.

Sharing is right, right now.

Sharing is caring.

We share this world.

Share it with care.

Copyrighted shortness of breath

There is no shortage of the world. And, with the internet, we are able to discover more of it, faster. And, moreover, we are able to tell people about what we've found.

Lots of people. Fast.

These two things might seem somewhat unrelated at first. There are many things in the world, and people can tell each other about them. What's the connection?

As with so many things, there is always a connection. In this case, you only have to think about what it means to live in a big world. With emphasis on the word "big".

So big, that it is very possible to go through life not knowing about things in it. In fact, it is more than likely that most of us will die without knowing about most of the things in it - much less spending time with these things.

People are, therefore, rather picky when it comes to these things. Not by choice, mind you, but by underlying design - they simply die before having the chance to get the full experience.

Which, of course, is why marketing exists. Marketing is a way of telling people about something they might not be or even become aware of. Because it is a very real possibility that they haven't got the faintest idea about the particular thing being marketed. Which is brutally bad for business.

Connection established. Big time.

With this in mind, we might want to rethink how we understand certain new developments, such as file sharing. There is no lack of people who are up in arms about how artists, writers and other creative/creating persons are not getting paid when people are listening, watching or beholding their work for free. Which makes intuitive sense - the traditional model has always been that paying customers make things happen, after all.

The thing is, though, that with this internet thingy around, it is suddenly a whole lot easier to get a hold of things. Even if we eliminate piracy completely from the equation, there is still enough free stuff around to last for at least a lifetime. Blogs are aplenty, YouTube exists, and if you ever get tired of that you can always play with this thing called "social media". And the world outside is still as large as it ever was.

Suddenly, the question is not whether or not people will pay. Rather, it is whether or not they can be bothered to care.

As a general rule, people who can't be bothered to pay attention are not very likely to pay anything else either. Time is, rather literally, money.

The upside is that it is also a whole lot easier to get a hold of people, too. And that they are more than keen to get a hold of each other, and - even better - tell stories about that awesome new thing they just happened to find. Which, given the size of the world, probably isn't that awesome new thing you just created.

But it could be. If they knew it existed.

Give people a reason to care. Give them time to care. Give them your work for free, and then provide them with ways to give back to you. Through Flattr, Paywithatweet or - best of all - an offer they can't refuse. An offer to buy more of what they've just seen and loved.

Ars longa, vita brevis. Art is long, life is short. Use it or lose it.

The Name of the Game

There is a new religion on the block. And it does not want your money. It does not want you obedience. It doesn't even care about whether you have sex or not.

It only wants you to think. Not about anything in particular, but the world in general.

The central tenet is that there is no shortage of the world. While there may be shortages of various kinds in the world, the world itself is in a state of abundance. As you will find out pretty soon if you try to walk from point A to point B, instead of taking the tube or pedaling a bike.

It takes forever, doesn't it?

And during this taking of time, you may find yourself discovering all manner of things in the spaces between points A and B. You may, for instance, find shops, cafés or forgotten places. Places that you on any ordinary day just rushed past, preoccupied with the telos of B. Places only discovered by the act of slowing down and paying the world some much needed attention. And, if you happen to have time to spare, you might even pay these places an unexpected exploratory visit.

Given time, the world is rather large.

The thing about the real world, we are often told, is that its prime feature is scarcity. There is never enough x - never enough money, food, time, you name it. And, should you believe the spokespersons of the marketplace, the only thing there is no shortage of is things you want but don't have.

Think about this. Is it so very strange that the discussion about file sharing - and about the ability to instantly copy just about anything an infinite amount of times - so very often degenerate into the discussion about how some marginal corporations are going to make a living?

When confronted with abundance, a culture overly focused on scarcity will find ways to make the abundant scarce.

There is a new religion on the block. Kopimism is its name, and its central tenet is that there is no shortage of the world. And that the highest purpose in life is to take of this abundance, remix it, and share of it to all who would listen.

To remix it to the streets, as it were.