Debt before dishonor: We call him La Traviata because he's dying of consumption.

The attribution of inventions to gods, legendary heros, or emperors has a contemporary equivalent when CEOs publicly announce new products.

Sometimes I feel a little blue about having so thoroughly avoided the possibility of serious money during these many years of involvement with the Web. But then I remember what Gertrude Stein wrote about dropping out of Johns Hopkins Medical School --

Her very close friend Marion Walker pleaded with her, she said, but Gertrude Gertrude remember the cause of women, and Gertrude Stein said, you don't know what it is to be bored.

Underreported fact: Gertrude Stein's gravestone misspells her birthplace.

My Malaysia; Dr. Mohamad's Air.

To Err Is Human; To Give Up, Divine: Good riddance. I was a lot sorrier to see the Mosaic name go.

Ah, memories, in the coroner of my mind.... Throwing Internet development into the Dark Ages by deciding to dictate new "standards" by whim was antisocial enough. But then came the Doughboy's astonishing claim that his (or NCSA's, who's counting?) browser was going to become an honest-to-gosh operating system and wipe Microsoft out. Oh right, I spouted off at the time, a cross-platform operating system that's going to fit without any problems in application space on top of another operating system (which in turn was on top of a third operating system, in the case of MS Windows).... It's exactly the kind of plan you'd expect from an arrogant college goop dropped straight from campus to boardroom.

And it worked exactly as well as you'd expect, too. As a business move, it brought Microsoft down hard on the browser market. As an engineering move, it turned the Netscape application into a breakdown-prone resource-tapeworm. And as for Andreessen's grander ambitions -- surprise! -- Microsoft's engineers had an easier time integrating with an existing operating system than Netscape's engineers had creating and layering a new one.

It did, however, shift enormous piles of money to those responsible for the debacle, thus helping to reorient software engineers' definition of "success" to match their CEOs': the timely manipulation of market gullibility.

Too bad Gates & Co. decided to keep IE5 single-platform; thank goodness they were dumb enough to get into legal trouble by using high-pressure monopolistic tactics to push an application which would be quite capable of walking on its own. And my very best wishes go to Opera and iCab.

It's official: dot-com-izing is the colorization of the 1990s! And see how nicely it can learn to play with the new copyright laws! As excerpted from some guy named Bloomberg:

American Film Technologies Inc. officials have ousted the chief executive of the company that pioneered "colorizing" of black-and-white movies and replaced him with a turnaround specialist, according to filings with securities regulators.
. . .
But a dropoff in demand for colorized films left the company struggling to survive, court papers said. American Film hasn't generated any revenues since 1995 and its lab and film library are sitting unused.
. . .
Rudy said he's arranged for a $250,000 cash infusion for American Film, which will now focus on offering colorized films via the Internet. The company is planning to offer color versions of such classics as To Kill A Mockingbird and A Farewell to Arms, he added.

By colorizing such older movies -- whose copyrights have expired -- American Film gets exclusive rights to the films for the next 95 years, Rudy said.

"We're excited about the possibilities of distributing our product over the Internet and rebuilding the value in this company," he said.

Big business monkeys: An office job is a lot like agreeing to be put in cold storage for a year.

Except without the refrigeration.

Big business monkeys: A story ripped from sixty-five-years-later's headlines, High Pressure remains the best fictional treatment of Internet startups, taking us from moronic vision statement through publicity-inflated stock prices to a happily sold-out ending in only 72 minutes of overtime.

Although mostly sticking to sober reportage, the movie does offer one innovative management idea: unlike most Silicon Valley companies, High Pressure's is careful to restrict its blowhard chief executive to strictly figurehead status, attracting favorable attention from venture capitalists and the press while not interfering with the progress of real work. Why aren't they teaching this at Stanford?

The lights are strung up, Cholly's strung out, and the Club's finally got the true holiday merchandising spirit prancin' and dancin' and donnin' and blitzin' in The Hotsy Totsy Discount Warehouse Outlet:

To our left and right, we see samples of Christina La Sala's and Steven Elliott's Cootie Catchers, published by Chronicle Books. Perfect ice-breakers for the tasteful yet shy, these cunning hand-and-eye-developers are sure to replace Dan Savage and the Magic 8-Ball as your mystic advisor of choice. Arthur Lee once asked, "Pictures and words: is this communicating?" Well, if he'd been talking about the pamphlets of Juliet Clark, we'd have to reply that they're even better than communicating! And at only $5 each, including postage, they're cheaper, too! Give three copies and their grateful recipient can shelve 'em under "Comix," "Memoirs," and "Small Press Collectibles" for easy access. The perfect stocking stuffer for those with large flat stockings. Ray Davis's and Christina La Sala's much bruited about film The Ichthyoid Syndrome ("THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT OF OUR TIME!") is finally available for home entertainment centers. I'll ship a copy on a videotape or Zip disk at cost -- that's only 14 dollars! (Actually, it sounds like a lot to me, too, but that really is the cost, if you include the envelope and all.) Sure to be a collector's item, since normal people don't buy five-minute-long movies!

• And Anselm Dovetonsils makes this ruggedly handsome offer: for every little magazine in which you publish one of his poems, he will pledge to provide a rave review of a book published by your small press -- and if you publish him in an anthology sold in real book stores, he guarantees that his review will appear in the New York Times! No other poet can match such a promise this late in the holiday season! Remember: Dovetonsils will not be undersold!

As regards meme-propagating, the Hotsy Totsy Club has been a slugabed. We've never dogpiled on a Turkish guy, we've had so many days without weblogs that A Day Without Weblogs would've just been silly, and I'm so content-centric that I'm not even sure that owning a dot-com domain name is a vital matter of artistic integrity.

But this -- this is the most straightforward evil-vs.-good Internet story yet:

• A respected international academic journal with a one-word title was founded thirty years ago. This year, a corporation trademarked, in France, a couple of phrases that include the same word. The corporation then sued the academic journal for over a million dollars.
• The word in question is a common given name. Both the journal and the corporation used the word as a reference to a name-owner who's been a celebrity for centuries.
• The corporation is claiming damages because the academic journal shows up in an web search for the word.
• The corporation got a governmental police force to break into the apartments of the widow of the founder of the journal to go through her papers.

But if you want to raise a young executive, it's probably best to accustom him to indulgence from the start. How can anyone who's scrubbed a toilet manage a decent vision statement? "Visions" (that aren't visions) and "toys" (that aren't toys) are what the "boys" (that aren't boys) need to save themselves for; as for dealing with that-which-is, The Girl will do that for us.

A while ago, I sat in a white-collar-crimes grand jury and heard a year-and-a-half of buffoonish CEOs deny their own competence (more plausibly than they might think) with a formula so consistent that it must be part of the MBA program: no decision had ever been made by them, no memory had ever been set; they were no more than perpetually adorable infants fed and changed by "The Girl." "Sorry, but I let The Girl take care of that kind of thing." "I have no idea, but The Girl would be able to tell you what went on." "Oh, that's over my head; you'd have to ask The Girl."

Grand jurors are allowed to question witnesses, and so the obvious question was occasionally put: "If 'The Girl' does all the work, how come you make all the money?" Though we might briefly eclipse their winsome twinkles, our curiosity was never satisfied, and finally, like everyone else, we got tired of asking.

Rastafarian stocks skyrocketed this morning after I-and-I.com announced its switch to lowercase "i"s.

Our motto

"Out, out damned dot-com!" - Julianne Leigh

After twenty years, I conclude:

As long as we work in the software, academic, or entertainment industries, our lives will be controlled by maniacs or idiots.

Continuing his series of commentaries on Election Year '00, here's Henry Adams with some thoughts about the Microsoft antitrust trial:

"The merits or demerits of the particular interest, -- what Roosevelt calls the good and bad trusts, -- concern particular districts or individuals; but this personal question surrenders the principle; nor can I see, as our society has now fixed itself, any loop-hole of escape. The suggestion that these great corporate organisms, which now perform all the vital functions of our social life, should behave themselves decently, gives away our contention that they have no right to exist. Nor am I prepared to admit that more decency can be attained through a legislature made up of similar people exercising similar illegal powers.

"As long as these people subject me, as person and property, to the arbitrary brutalities of the Custom House Jews in order to make money for private individuals in business, I shall be perfectly willing -- nay! I shall be singularly pleased,-- to see you Spokaners skinned by Jim Hill. None of you dare touch the essential facts. The whole fabric of our society will go to wreck if we really lay hands of reform on our rotten institutions. From top to bottom the whole system is a fraud,-- all of us know it, laborers and capitalists alike,-- and all of us are consenting parties to it.

"All we can hope to do is to teach men manners in wielding power, and I'll bet you ten to one, on the Day of Judgment, that we shall fail."

(Like most turn-of-the-last-century well-to-do non-Jewish Anglo-American intellectuals, Adams uses "Jew" as the catch-all term for anything that he doesn't like about big business, small business, middle European immigrants, bad taste, or urban life. I've never seen him use it to refer to religious practice.)

There aren't many things I've been overly optimistic about, but one of 'em was that we'd have a lot more websites like Ian McKellen's by now. Intelligent celebrities have even more reason to be wary of journalists than big business monkeys are, and taking charge of your own quotes is pretty much the same idea as a company's publishing its press releases on the web, except more entertaining:

[Christopher Lee] loves stories about actors and I amused him last week with one he didn't know, which I was told by Brian Bedford: "Noël Coward reads a poster: Michael Redgrave and Dirk Bogarde in The Sea Shall Not Have Them! 'I don't see why not -- everyone else has.'"

In related news, Doug Asherman points us to a "well-funded startup" who stapled this flyer to a telephone pole on Sixth Street in Berkeley:

I wonder how much they'd offer me for a proofreader....

1995 flashback:

Dave Gobel, the company's president and CEO, envisions the Web changing into a social environment. "Today, the Web is a lonely place," he said....

Even aside from the New York Times reporter's hopeless muddle over the word "virus," I have mixed feelings about this story. On the one hand, The Sims is proving to big business monkeys that the CD-plus-downloadable-behavior-changes software model I've been pushing (with no luck) for six years actually does work. On the other hand, I'm not programming The Sims.

"Like almost everything in the game, the guinea pig's function as a disease vector was carefully simulated, Mr. Wright said. For example, the guinea pig only spreads the disease if a Sims player neglects to clean its cage, and only if a player reaches into the cage to pet the software animal and is bitten will he get sick. Someone who has gotten sick sneezes and coughs and will infect other human characters in the game who come within several 'tiles' distance."

Gosh Darn the Pusher

One of the few things I don't like about MP3-mania is the way that the big software concerns have positioned it as a way to pirate CDs. I mean, what I love about MP3 is that it's a convenient cheap durable way to preserve and play audio that's otherwise available only on inconvenient or not-so-durable media: cassette-only recordings, old 45s and 78s, very out-of-print LPs.... But Real and Microsoft and MP3.com concentrate solely on making it easy for moving CD tracks to the computer, and since CDs are already pretty convenient and durable and are less likely to be out of print, it's hard not to see that as encitement to piracy.

In fact, one of the first free pieces of software that did convert non-CD-audio to MP3 files, BladeEnc, was hassled right out of binary distribution by big business monkeys. Conspiracy theory, anyone?

For alternatives, go to The Sonic Spot and Transferring LPs to CDR. My current toolkit: Wave Repair for recording and LAME for compressing.

Sticky Fingers

This graphic (via Beth Rust) does for connectivity what Microsoft Outlook has done for love letters, prompting the question: Might David Cronenberg have a future in Bell Canada commercials?

The Media Question of the Month (and potential Word of the Day) was raised by Joseph Gallivan in the New York Post:

On hearing last week that Freenet was on hit list of Hilary Rosen and the RIAA to be shut down, Clarke laughed. ".... any legal action against me would be just as ridiculous as taking legal action against the manufacturer of women's [pantyhose] that were used in a bank robbery. Both Freenet and women's [pantyhose] provide anonymity to those who use them."

Those who haven't triggered the proper marketing traps won't be familiar with Levenger -- a stationery store aimed at nouveaux riches -- and its catalog of "Tools for Serious Readers."

Even for yuppie junk mail, Levenger's copy is overripe, redolent of leather everything (including leather manila envelopes -- "rather like changing Eliza Doolittle from East End flower girl to Ascot lady... will burnish beautifully the more it's handled"), splattered with $90 ball point pens, and bedecked with sepia-toned celebrity portraits. Be as happy as Henry James! as suave as Robert Louis Stevenson! as elegant as Sir Isaac Newton!

And for the most part the photographed samples of what's achievable with a little intellectual leverage from Levenger are what you'd expect given such heady role models. On "the BMW of folios" someone's noted that "Each new product will be involved in a series of meetings from concept to final update"; "Monumental Letters with Pedestals" construct the message "ASPIRE"; the "lighthearted Innovation gel pen" has written "Discuss strategy with Internet group," "Confirm flight reservation" is written on "a delicious temptation of color and texture" (i.e., notepad), and "5 year plan - Goal?" is written with "Rotring's impeccable style"....

But in The Perennial Journal ("a luscious cream stock... with gilded edges for lasting beauty"), the target consumer's mask slipped:

"One less bell to answer. One less egg to fry. Isn't that how the song goes? Not that I fried eggs anyway. Too much fat and cholesteral. But I digress... I'm just trying to keep my mind busy with other thoughts, I suppose. I'm not meant to live alone, to have everything to myself. Some would say I am lucky now, but all I can do is cry."

Token Non-Trivial Item of the Day

Juliet Clark forwards her sighting of a very rare bird, actual reporting from a San Francisco newspaper!

"Tens of millions of Americans can no longer get medical treatment, a job, a home, a credit card or a host of goods and services without agreeing to resolve future disputes in confidential, unregulated proceedings riddled with conflicts of interest. They cannot claim injury, fraud or discrimination without paying filing fees that may reach thousands of dollars. They cannot rely on legal guarantees of due process and fair treatment. They cannot appeal, except in rare circumstances...."

Is there any other position where incongruous boasts of one's athletic prowess and fatuous preening over not being asked tough questions would be called "new maturity" or "growing into the job"?

Why, yes; thinking back over the CEOs and corporate board members I've met, there are plenty of such positions....

Childe Roland to the Drop Zone Stunt Tower Came (or, I could be well contented) (via metameat)

Trading a living

The best way I can think of to memorialize last September 11 is to go to work late. That's how all the survivors I know of survived.

(When I worked at WTC myself, I probably tended towards promptness, or worse. It must be some delusion that I'm getting the job over with quicker that way.... But my most vivid memories of the place are simply of waiting for an elevator, joining in the competitive speculation over which would show first and be emptiest.

My most vivid memories that are my own, I mean.)

He governs best who governs leased

Kevin Phillips throws all the busy bulk of Wealth and Democracy behind two central points:

1. There ain't no such thing as a free market. From colonial days to tomorrow, the great fortunes of America have been created and maintained with government aid, and policy has been steered by the rich whenever they weren't forcibly kept away from the wheel. The wealthiest citizens-to-be when Adam Smith wrote were Revolutionary War profiteers, and we're still paying big for the oil subsidies that fueled the Bushes and their friends.

2. Booms, balloons, busts, and recoveries follow a similar pattern through the centuries and across leading economic powers. Wealth pours into the financial sectors; the middle class, although they hardly notice in the hullabaloo, work more, gain less, and take on debt; industry and agriculture weaken; the tariff setters of yesteryear suddenly insist that uninhibited global trade is an essential human right.... Post-bust, the middle class regains control of politics, and part of whatever's left of the upper-five-per-cent's plunder is redistributed. (Did you realize that the Eisenhower administration kept the New Deal upper-tax-brackets in place funding the nation through all those Republican-idealized good old days? I didn't, not in so many words.)

But that's really only a problem because particularly pressing bits of information land on virtually every page. Wealth and Democracy became an indispensable reference somewhere during its first chapter, and I've found occasion to refer to it in every other extended conversation of the last few weeks, online and fleshy, from the Bay Area to rural Missouri. Even if written by a mere best-selling TV-guesting pundit, it's that rarest of secondary (or, in this case, tertiary and popularizing) sources: the one I'll buy for my own library.

Which is how I discovered an Amazon game new to me, though not to hundreds of satisfied players. A mob of dittoboys dogpiles on an insufficiently right-wing book, posts extremely negative reviews, and then boosts their own reviews' rankings. The results stand out (and are made easier to remove) by the outrageously high number of "found this helpful" votes (over a hundred instead of the usual ten or less) and by the absurd blatancy of the reviewers' lack of first-hand knowledge. I'm sorry I didn't save a few samples before Amazon cleaned the joint up; the ones calling Nixon-loyalist Phillips a Communist were particularly refrigerator-door-worthy. No, Phillips's concern is the middle class, pure and simple and unspoiled.

That's what makes the book useful and even, with reservations, hopeful, this being America and all.

Happy Hour for Depressives

For a limited time only, you can punch back those Ba-lue Mun-deii Ba-lues-Are with the big hit of the Comics Journal message board, "It's a Great Life (If You Don't Weaken)," recorded by Sam Lanin & his Orchestra on November 26, 1929. That same day, long-time Hearst columnist Arthur Brisbane assured his readers that "All the really important millionaires are planning to continue prosperity." Six days earlier, he'd predicted "It ought to be a good year"; by January 1931, he was looking at the bright side: "Sometimes when things go wrong, it is a comfort to be reminded that nothing matters very much. If the earth fell toward the sun, it would melt like a flake of snow falling on a red-hot stove."

Product Placement

Harper's wartime ad

"Easily"

OKI is "easily of the importance of moveable type, the alphabet, and printing," says Ed Walker, CEO of the IMS Global Learning Consortium....

– MIT Enterprise Technology Review