connecting*the*dots

(originally uploaded by Richard Liriano)

Russel Simmons responding to criticism of Hip hop lyrics on 4/16/2007:

“My response to Sen. Obama is that you have to talk about the poverty and ignorance that creates such a climate that the poets can talk like that. People who are angry, uneducated and come from tremendous struggle, they have poetic license and they say things that offend you,” Simmons told ABC News. “You have to talk about the conditions that create those kinds of lyrics. When you are talking about a privileged man who has a mainstream vehicle and mainstream support and is on a radio station like that you have to deal with them differently.”

Russel Simmons responding to criticism of Hip hop lyrics on 4/23/07:

“We recommend that the recording and broadcast industries voluntarily remove/bleep/delete the misogynistic words ‘bitch’ and ‘ho’ and the racially offensive word ‘nigger’,” Simmons and Benjamin Chavis, co-chairmen of the advocacy group Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, said in a statement.

“These three words should be considered with the same objections to obscenity as ‘extreme curse words’ “

Russell Simmons spotlighted in BusinessWeek on 10/27/03:

“Any company that wants to tap into the youth market today has to pay attention to Russell,” says Frank Cooper, the head of multicultural market development at Pepsi. “He is one of the principal architects of hip-hop culture. It’s a market that is massive and that is global.”

Enough with the corporate perspective; let’s hear from a Hip hop head:

Not all Hip hop artists play the industry to make their dough, so an all out ban on particular language is senseless — it truly is all about context.

So maybe a good place to start would be applying pressure in the signing process of record industry itself, where A&R people tend look for the next hotness explicitly in terms of whether it’ll sell or not.

If these folks were actually held to a standard beyond simply bringing in artists that will sell in the current market, we wouldn’t have this problem — misogynous and degrading rap would fall back to indie distribution models… at best.

But it’s not like Hip hop culture hasn’t been aware of this problem for a long time now:

[…] My optic presentation sizzles the retina.
How far must I go to gain respect? Um.
Well, it’s kind of simple, just remain your own
Or you’ll be crazy sad and alone.
Industry rule number four thousand and eighty,
record company people are shady.
So kids watch your back ’cause I think they smoke crack,
I don’t doubt it. Look at how they act.
Off to better things like a hip-hop forum. […]

(originally uploaded by Akcelik)

sponsored by…

Marc’s Voice
Welcome IBM to the corporate world of social networking

[…]

Synchronizing corporate and business data between networks can take on a whole new level of possibilities once IBM gets the corporate world to bite off on this.

I can’t wait to see what the initial implementations of IBM’s Lotus Connections brings. This is the best news Broadband Mechanics has ever had!

‘Cause they’re doing my advertising for me.

Welcome IBM to the world of white labeling social media. Add in widgets or a mobile gateway, mix in some product databases and static propoganda - and you might even have stumbled upon “digital lifestyle aggregation�.

We’ve been betting that this day would come. That corporate social networking (which included blogging) would make it to the big time. Now I get to compete with IBM on price, service, features and brand.

Let’s rock.

I can see Marc salivating from here (hm, maybe that’s drool).

This flavor of passion regarding corporate change reminds me of Cluetrain, 8 years ago.

Please open your bible to Chapter 5, The Hyperlinked Organization:

The Web, in short, has led every wired person in your organization to expect direct connections not only to information but also to the truth spoken in human voices. And they expect to be able to find what they need and do what they need without any further help from people who dress better than they do. This has happened not because of a management theory or a bestselling business book but because the Web reaches everyone with a computer and a telephone line on her desk.

So, the gulf opens between those who are connected and those who think an office with a door is a sign of success. The gulf is one of expectations, and expectations always guide perception. As a result, the company thinks it’s doing one thing while accomplishing the direct opposite with its connected employees. For example:

• The company communicates with me through a newsletter and company meetings meant to lift up my morale. In fact, I know from my e-mail pen pals that it’s telling me happy-talk lies, and I find that quite depressing.
• The company org chart shows me who does what so I know how to get things done. In fact, the org chart is an expression of a power structure. It is red tape. It is a map of whom to avoid.
• The company manages my work to make sure that all tasks are coordinated and the company is operating efficiently. In fact, the inflexible goals imposed from on high keep me from following what my craft expertise tells me I really ought to be doing.
• The company provides me with a career path so I’ll see a productive future in the business. In fact, I’ve figured out that because the org chart narrows at the top, most career paths necessarily have to be dead ends.
• The company provides me with all the information I need to make good decisions. In fact, this information is selected to support a decision (or worldview) in which I have no investment. Statistics and industry surveys are lobbed like anti-aircraft fire to disguise the fact that while we have lots of data, we have no understanding.
• The company is goal-oriented so that the path from here to there is broken into small, well-marked steps that can be tracked and managed. In fact, if I keep my head down and accomplish my goals, I won’t add the type of value I’m capable of. I need to browse. I even need to play. Without play, only Shit Happens. With play, Serendipity Happens.
• The company gives me deadlines so that we ship product on time, maintaining our integrity. In fact, working to arbitrary deadlines makes me ship poor-quality content. My management doesn’t have to use a club to get me to do my job. Where’s the trust, baby?
• The company looks at customers as adversaries who must be won over. In fact, the ones I’ve been exchanging e-mail with are very cool and enthusiastic about exactly the same thing that got me into this company. You know, I’d rather talk with them than with my manager.
• The company works in an office building in order to bring together all of the things I need to get my job done and to avoid distracting me. In fact, more and more of what I need is outside the corporate walls. And when I really want to get something done, I go home.
• The company rewards me for being a professional who acts and behaves in a, well, professional manner, following certain unwritten rules about the coefficient of permitted variation in dress, politics, shoe style, expression of religion, and the relating of humorous stories. In fact, I learn who to trust — whom I can work with creatively and productively — only by getting past the professional act.

Something’s gone wrong. Or maybe something now is starting to go right.

[…]

Bottom-Up

The Web is undoubtedly a part of your business plans. You’ve got it safely contained, under control, managed. Why, your organization has probably already installed a corporate intranet so it can publish the human resource policies that no one read on paper to people who now won’t read ’em on screen. Excellent!

Yes, your centralized corporate intranet has eliminated some paper and is making management feel vaguely cool. But that’s not the web that’s going to shake the foundations of your fort.

While you’ve been hiring consultants to create a slick corporate intranet, establishing policies about who gets to post what, and creating a chain of command to ensure that only appropriate and approved materials show up on your internal corporate home page, your engineers, scientists, researchers — hell even the marketing folks — have been creating little Web sites for their own use.

No one is controlling what’s posted on them except the people doing the posting. No one is making sure that the corporate logo is in the right place. No one is making sure that the writing is official, officious, and as dull as the pencil drawer of a recently downsized middle manager.

The real party got under way while you were still setting up the banners at the corporate prom. (This year’s prom theme: “Responsibility in a Web Age!”)

For example, by the time Sun Microsystems got around to counting, they had eight hundred intranets. And when Texas Instruments put in their corporate intranet, they invited everyone who had one already in place to register with the top-down one. Within a few months, two hundred and fifty internal sites had registered, and no one knows how many unregistered ones there were. Even a top-down intranet can take on a bottom-up feel, as happened at Lucent Technologies, according to an article in The Wall Street Journal. After Lucent brought together a product-development team of five hundred engineers across three continents and thirteen time zones, it watched dozens of them insert their own pages into the project intranet. Some of these pages related directly to the project; others were strictly personal, like, “Hey, look at this picture of me and my dog!” Either way, the project took on a human cast that never would have been present otherwise. In the end the team leader attributed the success of the project in no small part to “the ultimate Democracy of the Web.”

Granted, these are technology companies, but you don’t have to be a technical genius to create an intranet. If someone wants to share some information, they can turn their computer into a Web server. It’s free, and it’s getting easier every day.

The intranet revolution is bottom-up. There’s no going back. If a company doesn’t recognize this, the top-down intranet it puts in can breed the type of cynicism that results in ugly bathroom graffiti and mysterious golfing cart accidents.

The intranets under the radar screen — and the rest of the Net panoply, including e-mail, mailing lists, and discussion groups — ignore the corporate blather and ass-covering pronouncements. Instead, these new Web conversations are actually being used to get some work done.

And the work continues…

Last Monday, Ed Cone posted a letter from Nelson Johnson regarding Smithfield Packing’s refusal to give its employees Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. day off. A handful of comments down the line, Smithfield’s unconscionable operating tactics were exposed.

Now, for the company PR:

UPDATE: Here’s a shot from Smithfield’s waste facility, featured in Jeff Tietz’s Rolling Stone article, Boss Hog:

Johnny Marr & David Cross covering Ethan Chandler’s Bank of America “One” cover.

In more corporate stupidity news, Universal Music Publishing Group has issued a cease and desist letter to a blog showing the original BofA “One” video.

Be sure to download your copy of the video before YouTube kills caves to another lawyer.

Corporate people scare me sometimes.

Speaking of corporate, read this story about what went down recently at Bank of America. If you’re a customer, don’t you think it’s about time to change banks?

Noam Chomsky once explained the driving force behind the war machine as one that won’t begin to slow down until corporate America realizes that the majority of its customers are against a particular conflict. For when advertisers adjust to the collective vibe of the people (in order to sell product), the message is brought home to politicians in ways they must take seriously in a state-capitalism system.

I can’t remember where I read that — probably in Understanding Power — but it reminded me of his synopsis of the Vietnam Syndrome:

[…]

The bewildered herd never gets properly tamed, so this is a constant battle. In the 1930s they arose again and were put down. In the 1960s there was another wave of dissidence. There was a name for that. It was called by the specialized class “the crisis of democracy.” Democracy was regarded as entering into a crisis in the 1960s. The crisis was that large segments of the population were becoming organized and active and trying to participate in the political arena.

Here we come back to these two conceptions of democracy. By the dictionary definition, that’s an advance in democracy. By the prevailing conception that’s a problem, a crisis that has to be overcome. The population has to be driven back to the apathy, obedience and passivity that is their proper state. We therefore have to do something to overcome the crisis. Efforts were made to achieve that. It hasn’t worked. The crisis of democracy is still alive and well, fortunately, but not very effective in changing policy. But it is effective in changing opinion, contrary to what a lot of people believe.

Great efforts were made after the 1960s to try to reverse and overcome this malady. It was called the “Vietnam Syndrome.” The Vietnam Syndrome, a term that began to come up around 1970, has actually been defined on occasion. The Reaganite intellectual Norman Podhoretz defined it as “the sickly inhibitions against the use of military force.” There were these sickly inhibitions against violence on the part of a large part of the public. People just didn’t understand why we should go around torturing people and killing people and carpet bombing them. It’s very dangerous for a population to be overcome by these sickly inhibitions, as Goebbels understood, because then there’s a limit on foreign adventures.

It’s necessary, as the Washington Post put it the other day, rather proudly, to “instill in people respect for the martial virtues.” That’s important. If you want to have a violent society that uses force around the world to achieve the ends of its own domestic elite, it’s necessary to have a proper appreciation of the martial virtues and none of these sickly inhibitions about using violence. So that’s the Vietnam Syndrome. It’s necessary to overcome that one.

[…]

Enter into the conversation: The Dixie Chicks.

These three woman made plain what they felt was true in the run up to war in Iraq and now — three and a half years into this unjust war — their message is shared by a majority of Americans (65% want out of Iraq and more than 60% disapprove President Bush’s job).

So if you buy into the analysis that it’s necessary for a state-capitalism system to overcome such “sickly inhibitions about using violence” in order to flex all foreign policy options, then the actions of one of the last defenses in the current corporate line — the über-conglomerate NBC Universal — shouldn’t surprise you.

Even though CBS moved forward with an ad buy, NBC has steeled up and decided to not run ads for the Dixie Chicks documentary entitled, Shut Up and Sing. Here’s part of their rationale (with my emphasis):

[…]

While the Weinstein Co. had shown NBC its ads, it had not inquired about buying commercial time, he said. Generally, when an ad is rejected, prospective advertisers return and work with the network on ways to make it acceptable — as was done with the Michael Moore film “Fahrenheit 9/11,� he said.

But NBC heard nothing more from makers of “Shut Up & Sing� until portions of what NBC executives thought were confidential business correspondence showed up in a news release, he said.

“There was no attempt to come back and have a conversation,� Wurtzel said. “There are times when some advertisers get more publicity for having their ad rejected.�

[…]

NBC’s positioning for making the trailer more acceptable is akin to the central theme of a documentary called Shut Up & Sing. Are they really surprised that they walked away and went to the press?

10 years ago, such a tactical play by NBC could’ve crippled an independent film’s message due to lack of exposure, but not now, not in the information age. NBC can stick to their “standards” and play all the games they want, because as Chomsky so eloquently analyzed, the people are on it.

Decide for yourself if the trailer is unacceptable.

UPDATE: Lawrence Lessig talks about a previous media denial encounter with NBC that fell into the same “not very flattering to the president� category.

(via Baron over at TwangNation)

Until this past July, I had never lived in a house with a working garage.

As a kid, my parents parked in the driveway and as an adult, the majority of my renting years were in urban environments paying for a spot. So all those tool commercials and images of garage mayhem over the years pretty much escaped me.

But I’m a perceptive person; I get how the image of a garage is one tie of many to homogeneous normalcy. So, over the years, I’ve taken notes while experiencing — first-hand — what goes down inside the signifier of friends and relatives suburban existence.

Because, quite honestly, I’d be nothing if I weren’t a contributing part of the whole.

An example of my apperception: My Uncle Bob attaches a tennis ball to a string and dangles it down from the ceiling of his garage for his windshield to touch, marking exactly how deep his car can be parked without blocking the door to the house.

Ingenious, right?

Well, with my recent venture into home ownership, I think my car stopper has his version beat, hands down.

I’m sure those that know me can picture the grin plastered onto my face each time I maneuver my truck in and out of the garage.

To those that don’t know me, well, it’s a simple case of me hating the very concept of corporate management — either being in the position or reporting into the hierarchy.

Actually, it’s not that simple.

I have no issues working with corporate management from a consulting perspective; I can work with anyone and their internal politics as long as my rate is being paid and I have no long-term skin in their games.

But from within the system of corporate management itself? Let’s just say that my years within the machine taught me a hell of a lot about real world politics… and in ways that I regret and despise today.

Corporate employment provides you with more than a dress code at the job; it encourages you develop multiple personalities — or masks — in order to encourage and coax ridiculously high degrees of throughput from your employees, all the while dealing with similar two-faced assholes as yourself who are attempting to climb their own corporate ladders.

I’m now 18 months free of that game and I couldn’t be happier.

Especially when I park my car.

(originally uploaded by Bog_King)

ZDNet.uk
Chuck D lays down the law on DRM
by David Meyer

Digital rights management (DRM) has its benefits, but should not overly restrict users, according to musician and mobile entrepreneur Chuck D.

The rapper, who was a founding member of hip hop group Public Enemy and now runs a content service, told delegates at the Mobile Content World conference in London that he had always looked at technology as “something you can apply to a better world if you stay on top of it and don’t let it stay on top of you”.

“[Napster founder] Shawn Fanning revolutionised the way we get music — he doesn’t get the respect he deserves even today,” said Chuck D on Tuesday.

He said he does “believe in some sort of DRM” but pointed out that MP3 was the most popular compression format because it does not limit how the customer can use the file once bought.

“You’ve got artists who are just starting out who are understanding that DRM is a way of life,” Chuck D said, adding that musicians “understand it doesn’t have to be the Pirates of Penzance as it was”, a reference to the free-for-all early days of Napster and similar P2P engines.

The issue of DRM has become increasingly contentious with the growth of new media distribution services. Some see it as a way to protect the intellectual property of content creators, while others see it as unnecessary infringement by distributors on the rights of the consumer.

Speaking to ZDNet UK after his presentation, Chuck D described the current situation with DRM as “just a lot of fucked-up shit“.

[…]

Until the bottom-feeding leetches of the RIAA are kicked out of the music industry, artists and consumers are going to be screwed by DRM.

(via Pete)

And his name is American Belly.

Belly bumping one corporate asshole at a time.