nthmost

I’ve spent many, many hours over the past year helping build a new “pirate” radio station in San Francisco called Radio Valencia.

Listen Now if you dare:

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And if you have a minute, visit the website and check out the ever-increasing array of show blogs and nifty widgets for your amusement. Most of the DJs camp out on the chat during their shows and may even do a little monkey dance at your command. On the radio!

The website itself is the result of many weeks of planning, the heroic thematic efforts of Orin Zebest (capitalizing on initial designs by Rick Abruzzo), and the fortuitously timed release of WordPress 3.0, which made it possible to give each show its own “show blog”, i.e. sub-site. We wouldn’t call it “feature complete” by any means, though — still lots more neat stuff to come.

We Want the Airwaves

Someone is broadcasting our stream here in San Francisco over the 87.9fm frequency (you know, the one Pirate Cat got fined over). Given my own history with Pirate Cat Radio and the subsequent events thereof, I find the idea of Radio Valencia broadcasting on 87.9 rather funny. Alas, we cannot take credit, and have no idea where the rogue transmitter might be.

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At TEDxCanberra 2010, Mark Pesce, one of my favorite speakers of all time, delivered this missive on the wonderful, horrible powers of technological connectedness.

Many of you, my dear readers, will be struck by how non-TED-like is his delivery. So I will say: understand this talk from his cadence, his emphasis, his deliberation. He’s making his points not just by spouting words.

And many more of you will hear what seems to be Luddism in his message. Stick with it and you’ll understand. And if the habit of instant connectedness has made you a bit impatient, you will find a minor spoiler below the video that may encourage you.

Best bits:

“It’s not my thought to make you fear the future. But rather to make you conscious of it, so that we can prepare. Because it is all changing. It has already changed. It’s going to change a lot more. And in an instant, things can become unrecognizable.”

“This instinct is being bleached to white in the face of a much brighter light.”

“Take this, and dial! And you will have food and knowledge and hope.”

“Because THIS ends, because flesh fails, IT is more important.”

In other news, I have just become aware of cultofmarkpesce.com and I am thoroughly amused.

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Sympathetically incensed by this post on DadWagon.com entitled, “Dear General Mills: Fuck You”, I started giving some thought to the problem of highly child-attractive packaging selling food that even pigeons would reject. The kind of food for which it seems that the lower the cost of the ingredients, the greater the expenditure on marketing to get kids to badger their parents to buy for them.

I’m sure that a ban on child-targeted marketing (if you could get past the absurdly difficult task of defining what qualifies) would be met with cries of suppressing the free market. But what does it mean for children to be participants in the free market, when a healthy functioning market with the accurate consumer pressures can only really happen in the presence of an informed and rational consumer base? (Pushing aside, for the moment, the fact that there is no such thing as a fully-informed and rational consumer.)

Children may or may not know what’s healthy for them, but they have no concept of moderation or proportion, and they certainly don’t know how to identify a “bad” food just from its packaging. At best, we as parents could teach them, but with intensely variable results that couldn’t possibly result in an honest market. Hell, most adults aren’t that good at figuring it out for themselves, and manufacturers are adept at the art of confusing the issue of “healthy”, just to make it that much harder.

As a society we have agreed that children — persons under the age of 18 — are unable to successfully navigate the moral, legal, and fiscal landscape on their own. We don’t enable them to vote, to open bank accounts without an adult before the age of 11 (generally), or to enter into employment until age 14. We don’t hold the same kind of trial for a wayward child as we would for a wrongfully acting adult, because we don’t consider moral judgement to be fully developed until age 18.

We have agreed, in other words, that children aren’t suitable candidates for participants in a consumer culture.

So why do we allow merchandisers to create messages trying to enter into conversations with children as if they are consumers?

The obvious answer, of course, is that even if we were ready to regulate these messages, we would have an extremely hard time deciding where to draw the lines of acceptability. Could an appointed “marketing czar” satisfactorily put the kibosh only on those brands attempting to speak directly to minors?

But when a huge fast food chain like McDonald’s can admit that even for kids, marketing sells carrots, then we’ve reached the stage at which we’re declaring, without room for doubt, that market conversations drive decision-making. In other words, those veggies wrapped in brightly-colored packages festooned with cartoon characters really are better than their naked veggie counterparts.

And when a leader like McDonald’s makes these assertions, then it seems that in our free market crazed society (not necessarily a bad thing, but just sayin’), we’ve decided that there is no putting the spirits of branding back into Pandora’s box.

This choice (made entirely by corporations FOR us, it must be understood) means that the task of parenthood would not be to teach how to choose healthy foods based on knowledge of foods themselves, but to guide children through a brand landscape that seeks to engage minors in conversations based on profit motive, rather than intent of good for the child. Parents might then teach not about avoiding the attractive packaging and happy-faced cartoons, but about which happy-faced cartoons represent the Good Food.

But can we teach children in this way? The very essence of marketing is to cut to the core of human desire, to slip past the cognitive filters with a combination of emotional engagement and sensory overload. And through forces we don’t quite understand, aesthetic choice might be influenced but can’t be rationed with. As the Roman saying went, “de gustibus non disputandum est” — there is no disputing taste.

There are also implications for the foods themselves. To say that the conversation is not about the product but about the brand is to say that there is nothing intrinsically appealing about carrots — that the appeal of food comes from the sensory overload delivered by its packaging. This is fertile ground for Michael Pollan to have covered.

It’s never my intent or interest to issue decrees, to try to “solve” cultural problems, although I do think that exploring and discussing the issue actually constitutes real action towards betterment of everyone’s condition.

But I will say this. We could just ban kids from grocery stores and fast food joints.

Thanks to Jonathan Foote for un-bastardizing my egregious Latin.

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…And its implications for Modern Consumerism

This is a tale of how even customer service with “good intentions” can sometimes have a deleterious effect on customer approval and long-term loyalty.

I can’t blame Interstate’s customer service rep(s) for how they acted; but it would be useful for Interstate to understand why this particular customer — my partner, Josh — chose to buy an entirely new non-Interstate battery when his Interstate battery died, even though he was eligible for a free, unconditional replacement under the Interstate battery warranty.

It is also a demonstration of how consumer attitudes have shifted and continue to shift beyond the behaviours expected by classical economics.

Not long ago, Josh found his Mazda RX-8 in an unstartable condition after about a month of garaging. He quickly tracked it down to a dead battery — which was curious, given that he’d only bought the battery about a year ago. Untroubled as he had an Interstate battery that was well within their much-vaunted warranty, and he still had the receipt, he proceeded to call around to find locations that would replace his battery.

The Interstate warranty is of course a lengthy and legalistic document, but it boils down to this: all batteries bought from Interstate which fail within a certain time period (depending on type and usage of battery) will be replaced free of charge. Simply take your dead battery with the receipt to any Interstate vendor — regardless of where you purchased it — and you’ll be provided with a new one.

Simple enough in theory. But as we quickly discovered, Interstate is not actually able to enforce their own warranty.

First Josh called up a local Firestone and asked if they would replace the dead battery. Firestone informed him that they wouldn’t give him a new battery unless he paid for 2 hours of labor. Since 2 hours of labor costs about double what a new battery costs, this course of action would be patently ridiculous.

Next he called Midas to see if they’d replace it. They told him they’d only replace an Interstate battery if he were holding a Midas receipt.

Finally, Josh called the local hardware store about a mile and a half from our place. They also refused to honor the warranty in their store since the Interstate battery hadn’t been purchased through them.

Annoyed, Josh went looking for their account on Twitter, didn’t find them, and posted a public gripe about Interstate batteries that was something along the lines of, “Interstate’s battery warranty is worthless. Firestone and Midas won’t replace.” Within minutes, a user known as @interstatebatts, which turned out to be the official voice of Interstate’s customer service division, told him that his battery should absolutely be replaced, and that Josh should contact Interstate more directly to remedy the situation.

Over Twitter and phone conversations, the situation was relayed, but not exactly remedied. Interstate appeared to have no interest in trying to hold their resellers and vendors to their stated warranty.

Instead, Interstate suggested to Josh that he go ahead and take the battery to Firestone — paying them for 2 hours labor — and that Interstate would reimburse him for that labor time. End result: Josh gets his battery replaced for free; Interstate spends 3 times what the battery is worth.

We Can’t Afford to Just Be Consumers Anymore

In the classical model of economics, a self-interested consumer like Josh would readily accept Interstate’s offer, seeing no downside.

But Josh is part of a new class of consumers who understand the idea of “voting with your dollar”, and it goes well beyond which brand of toilet paper you bring to the checkout line. There are several immediate downsides to the “resolution” Interstate brought to the table:

1. Firestone would be rewarded for their ridiculous 2-hour-minimum policy to change the battery.
2. Interstate would continue to be unable to enforce their warranty.
3. The customer (Josh) would have no reason to believe he’d be able to get a new battery in the future without all of the nonsense implied by the resolution — namely, paying for the 2 hours of labor himself and then securing reimbursement from Interstate.

Josh looked at the options and decided not to enable the vendors in their bullying of Interstate, and not to encourage Interstate to bend over for them. And he realized his time in chasing down his due was worth more than the value of the product in question.

So in the end, Josh refused the offer, and bought a brand new non-Interstate battery at a chain auto parts store, which will honour his receipt at dozens of locations around the Bay Area.

And he swears never to buy an Interstate battery again, because even the best-intentioned customer service and warranty offers mean squat if they cause the consumer more hassle than the product is worth. His decision was rooted in a certain kind of “new self-interest” wherein consumers can see the web of consequences arising from a transaction and can vote with their dollars — or in this case, with their acceptance of customer service — on whether they’d like to live in a world that continues to operate in that way.

Interstate may have written up an “impressive warranty”, but it’s worthless without a business ecosystem willing and able to fulfil it.

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Culture fascinates me, particularly the foundations and perpetuations of niche subcultures transfixed on certain anchor points. We think of “hipster bars” and the type of people who frequent them, as if they are a distinct race, and we feel strange that we can pigeonhole individuals this way; except that these snap assumptions so often bear out that we can parody, hilariously, how to become this “sort” of person.

Why can we do that? Why do people who dress a certain way tend to hang out at the same places, talk about the same sorts of things, and use the same brand of smartphone? Of course much can be explained by upbringing, socioeconomic class, geographic location, and so on. Those factors are the traditional foundations of culture.

But these factors don’t explain the ever burgeoning emergence of subcultural tribes composed of non-related individuals who often have none of these things in common, and yet are found exhibiting remarkable similarities and frequently anchoring themselves to arbitrary foundational concepts.

Recently, my sister Mary, fashion model and model loligirl, brought my attention to this mini-documentary about Lolita, a subcultural genre founded on the revival of Victorian and Gothic fashions.

Lolita was originally a Japanese fashion but has found purchase in tiny caches all over the world, and can now be considered a truly international phenomenon. The fact that Loli-girls frequently number something like a dozen or less in any given city (outside of Japan) and yet maintain a certain consistent quality of dress, speaking, and acting — all of which stand in stark contrast to these individuals’ local cultural standards — makes this a subculture worthy of study. (Important note: not identical, but consistent.)

With regards to what it means for individuals to emerge into and form subcultures, one of the women interviewed in this video totally hit it out the park, starting at about 4 minutes 30 seconds. (Or watch the whole thing if you want to get Mary’s snarky comment about it.)

“I’m more attracted into going to a teahouse than I would be at hanging out at a club. You have a certain sense of aesthetics that you project onto the world around you, so when you are looking outwards, beyond yourself, you are sort of, like, looking for the page in the book in which you’re supposed to be illustrated.”

This is It

There is a sense of “goes-with”, as Alan Watts would say. Part of it comes FROM culture, and part of it is the ongoing dance of establishment OF culture, in which individuals are drawn to certain aesthetics and find themselves either gathering in cafes wearing black berets, or amassing in dance clubs wearing high-heeled neon boots.

Alan Watts might call teahouses, fluffy dresses, twirling, and looking off into the distance “symptoms” of Lolita. Not all of these symptoms must be in evidence, but they tend to go together. And the individuals — who are not really acting individually, but are rather acting in concert with the Lolita “condition” — draw themselves together and into those goes-with places at the same time they are constantly revising both the places and themselves. The revision itself becomes a game, becomes the topic of interest that continues to draw these people and things together.

But what is that strange force I’ve been dancing around, the one doing all of that drawing?

It’s aesthetic.

What is aesthetic?

I’m not sure. But I had a revelation about it about 2 years ago, and I recorded my thoughts on a Creative Zen thingy that I bought in Tokyo, left in the DJ booth at Pirate Cat Radio a few months later, and never saw again.

Over the course of several cafe outings, in which I’ll be sorting out what kind of aesthetic I can manage now that I have a baby strapped to my chest when I go out, I’m planning to recover those thoughts for a future blog post.

In the meantime: what are YOUR thoughts? What IS aesthetic?

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We are letting go of all our helium. This is no joke. As we satisfy our mylar bellies’ hunger for maximum buoyancy, helium escapes from our planet at a rate much faster than the Earth can replenish it, and the US, holding 75% of the world’s supply, happens to be selling it off at bargain-basement prices [dailymail.co.uk]. We’re set to fully run out of helium around the year 2035.

But some of my favorite comedians — the ones with more than trace elements of intelligence — love to make light of it.

Last night, The Daily Show ran a special report on the looming helium gas-hole. But Brian Malow (the Science Comedian . . . “dot com!”) beat both The Daily Mail and The Daily Show to the punchline back in 2009, in this nerdtastic Ignite talk at the Web 2.0 Expo in SF [laughingsquid.com]:

Helium is a nonrenewable, finite resource, yet it’s a crucial and insubstitutable element in technologies where its uniquely low boiling point is necessary for cooling, such as in MRI scanners and in the manufacture of liquid crystal displays. Why are we so frivolously letting go of helium?

Well, basically, because we can… and because people are unaware that we shouldn’t be able to. Prices have been driven up, scarcity can definitely be felt, but public understanding of the fact that helium, once consumed, can never be retrieved and won’t be replaced, is not exactly at the forefront of environmental education.

“We have to be thinking of these things,” said Lee Sobotka, a chemistry and physics professor at Washington University. “Up to now, the issue often hasn’t risen to the level that it’s important. It’s a problem for the next generation of scientists. But it’s incumbent upon us to have a vision, and tell it like it is a resource that is more strictly nonrenewable than either oil or gas.”

This is not to say that guilt would stimulate conservation. As this party balloon seller remarked in 2008 [herald-review.com], following a huge price surge in helium gas,

“Sometimes customers are a little surprised by the price, but it doesn’t prevent them from wanting a fun arrangement,” he said. “It’s sort of like price increases with things like gasoline or bread, or milk. People don’t stop buying them.”

For the consumer, helium was already an occasional luxury. Now it’s simply a more expensive occasional luxury. It will likely take prices even the rich consider ludicrous to deter consumer-market depletion of helium, which is not likely to happen without tight regulation of the supply.

Et Tu, Boyfriend?

Testing the theory that girls love a bad boy, my partner Josh fritters away our dwindling helium reserves by sending weather balloons up to near-space to take pictures and send back GPS and other sensory data via ham radio. He filed this post on his blog about the third in a series of missions dubbed “Bacchus” under thank god my girlfriend thinks this is sexy. Hmm.

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The SF Bay Guardian just turned Noisebridge‘s Five Minutes of Fame into fifteen, in their article, “Performant Nerds Vs Geeks and Other Four-Letter Words”:

…both nerds and geeks presenting at Noisebridge’s monthly “5 Minutes of Fame,” to a crowd composed of nearly 100 folks who mainly, though not exclusively, could be categorized as either, or possibly both. The premise of 5MoF is short (very) and sweet: in five minutes or less each presenter gives a talk, makes a pitch, or demonstrates a work in progress to the general public who may then in turn offer assistance or appreciation.

Topics this week included why dumb is good (‘cause Socrates said so), music you can make on your iPhone, how to combat global ignorance with a video game, the creation of a new Tenderloin performance space dedicated to “cutting-edge vintage,” the demise of the fourth estate, and what the heck is in my kombucha anyway?

Heyyy… guess who’s got two thumbs and did a presentation on kombucha that night?

In fact, guess who’s got two pictures of herself delivering said presentation sitting at the top of that article?

Shout-outs to noted supernerd Doctor Popular for taking pics that night!

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I’m doing some research on the sort of traffic that H+Magazine gets from various parts of the web. This dude Steve Quayle has at various intervals sent tens of thousands of visitors to articles on the H+ Magazine website.

An average amount of hits per stevequayle.com burst is about 3000. And on January 14th, his website sent over 7,500 visitors to H+ magazine to look at the article, DARPA Takes Suspended Animation: Zombie Pigs, Squirrels, and Hypersleep.

Meet Stephen Quayle

He’s a bible literalist, apocalyptic, and total Luddite. And he commands a hell of a lot of web traffic.

Unfortunately the 1998-ish quality of his website makes it impossible to link to the context on his site in which he originally put the links to Hplus articles (although he does keep an index of the links he’s posted, e.g. the technology articles such as the Zombie one above fall under the heading “Technology Decadence / Mark of the Beast”). That puts us at a disadvantage; it’s impossible (with the exception of that bit of flavor from the index) to tell what kind of message he gave his readers to compel them to click.

But we can make some good guesses just based on the sorts of things he’s likely to say and the sorts of people who are likely to follow him “religiously”.

One of the reasons I love doing market research is the interesting and sometimes (let’s say) unencouraging perspective on humanity that it brings. According to my cursory Related Keywords research, the keyword phrase “steve quayle” is highly associated with the phrases “nephilim” (12,099 searches per day), “antediluvian” (1,339 searches/day), and “sons of god” (730 searches/day).

That means… You know what, I’ll leave it you, dear reader, to determine what that means.

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Last night at Five Minutes of Fame, I gave a talk about kombucha.

I occasionally give workshops about kombucha, and I’ve spent a lot of time ruminating and researching on it. So I knew there were dozens of different focii to choose from that would fit in 5 minutes or less, and I didn’t want to rehash what I do in workshops. (It wouldn’t be fair, anyway — the information I share in workshops is meant to be absorbed while you’re tasting and mixing kombucha.)

Eventually I settled on the idea of contesting a few kombucha health claims by highlighting how little we know about the contents of any given brew. My slides are below. I believe there’s a video recording out there, but I’ll have to find it later.

[Note: this isn't an issue in the slides, but I made an error in my speech about hyaluronic acid. I called it a "precursor to collagen and elastin" -- that's totally inaccurate. It's a component of synovial fluid which fills in a lot of structure around collagen and elastin. I was fishing around for a way to describe "filling in structure", and that's what came out -- and with 5 minutes allotted, I hate correcting myself. The worst is that I think I said it twice...]

The title, also the title of this blog post, was suggested by Aesthetix over a year ago, I think for the May 2009 Five Minutes of Fame. I instead used my time slot to deliver a presentation called “UR Doin It Wrong”, a talk about how, if you love your brain and consider it your best asset, you’re probably not treating it right.

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Since I donated my car to 826 National, I’ve been just a little bit less stressed out.

I watch the DPT ticket cars on my street missing their permit placards for our neighborhood, and I sigh happily. I sail past traffic on my bike in the Mission, overloaded with groceries but happy for the exercise. The now-empty driveway I come home to seems a little lonely, but it also represents no more risk of sidewalk-parking tickets and no more paying insurance on a car whose windshield was probably going to cave in within a year.

But there is one reason I do still miss my car, and that is acquiring a watermelon.

Watermelons — whole ones, mind you — don’t fit in bike baskets. And they definitely don’t fit in the arms of an 8-months-pregnant lady like me.

So, behold! The Japanese have invented the Perfect Thing for this modern dilemma.

The Watermelon Stroller

The name of this refrigerated fruit transporter is Marugoto Tama-Chan, which translates roughly as “whole round thing [cutesy name]“.

Google Translate delivers some more entertainment:

Tama-chan is the whole season, and even when cool or warm depending on the season OK.
The outdoors is the really shines more! Hot summer day is a whole watermelon “Tama-chan” into the swimming GO! By train to the core support so cool cigar socket.
We carry easy to carry with wheels rotate 360 degrees telescopic more!
And as cold weather heating cabinet is big success! Canned coffee and tea, meat, etc. “Tama-chan” if put in, you can always receive a warm still tasty.
Also, I put in the rookie of the constant cold temperature guests delicious rice.

It charges in your car (I think that’s what is meant by “so cool cigar socket”), which gives me a little bit of a “so then what’s the point” feeling, but it also charges by regular A/C. Being Japanese electronics, one would actually have no problem getting power to it here in the U.S.

There’s an appeal to specified-usage, tailored gadgets. Images of walking down the street happily pushing my watermelon baby home from the store in a chromed-up hyperbaric chamber on wheels put a smile on my face.

But at $230, I have to decide that I don’t really miss watermelons all that much. My car insurance for a quarter of a year cost roughly that. And anyway, I’ll have a real baby in a stroller soon enough.

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