Saw Patti Smith tonight…and thoughts on Gnomedex ’07
Ok, so let me put it one way:
I come up to Seattle for a tech conference. It was mostly OK, but brought down by a few factors:
1) Self important morons
2) Irrelevant subjects
3) Bad Internet access
These three items were a bit annoying, but over-all I had fun at Gnomedex. Chris and Ponzi and his parents do an amazing job, and it feels like a summer camp more than a big tech thing. I just hate the fact that you have these blowhard hacks who suck the life of the room with their own sense of self important.
What was supposed to, and what I think NEARLY came out of Gnomedex is that beyond the hall of mirrors and navel gazing that is the tech sphere, there is a larger world out there that NEEDS help desperately to get it out of the situation it is in. All the Web 2.0 shit, RSS tagging folksonomy crowd-source bullshit is not going to help situations in developing countries, namely the United States of America’s own third-world.
You want a good task for Gnomedex 08 Chris? Make part of it on the streets of Seattle, coming up with technological solutions to the povery, drugs and lack of health-care that exists on the very streets outside the conference hall. We pay attention to some stupid fight between overweight white guys inside a conference hall, where outside there are significant problems that we ignore for the sake of our own false prophet building.
We came close. Really close to something amazing. Darren and Derek approached that dark area that no one wants to enter. The area that makes us question our motives and understanding of our world THROUGH technology rather than using technology as a means to validate our own insecurities with unneeded self-import. RSS feeds will not feed a person for a year. The power of what is decentralized communication could bring just might, but we don’t look at that. Gnomedex showed that we’re all so caught up in being clever, irreverent, ironic and competitive (myself included) that we forget the real power granted through every glowing screen in the room.
If that was turned outward, think of where we’d be.
I bring this up like such because I saw one of the most inspiring, soulful and powerful musicians alive today in Seattle tonight: Ms. Patti Smith.
Patti sings as if channeling all the souls of those she lost and those she worshiped through her being. When she snarls into the mic “YOU HAVE THE VOICE! YOU HAVE THE POWER!” you don’t just believe it, you BELIEVE it and you want to run through the streets following her liked a piper chanting the mantra: The people have the power to redeem the work of fools, upon the meek the graces shower, its decreed the people rule..
Patti at one point tonight dimmed all the stage lights and covered Smells Like Teen Spirit, with Peter Buck playing with her and her son on the other side. Peter knew Kurt, so this was emotional for him, and it seemed to put the room in a heavy fog of collective emotion and recollection: Here we are now, entertain us, I feel stupid and contagious, here we are now, entertain us.
The song, about the hollow emptiness of a worldview born not of optimism but of the knowledge of the essential and unavoidable nature of pessimism seemed to ring not as a blast from a distance past, but a cautionary tale for the future of the world I inhabit and the one that the conference was about.
We yield dangerous tools. They can and have been used against us, and our loved ones. In a world dependent on data, its the wielders of the math who hold the ultimate power, and those that can recombine math upon data upon material life that are more dangerous than any threat in existence.
It is within our capacity to take that back, and recombine ourselves. If we continue to get caught up in playground fights over who’s dick is bigger, we’re just holding the gun to our foot and pulling the trigger.
Again
Again and
Again
R.E.M. has a new record coming out in the next year, and it is amazing and has some poignant and sarcastically biting lyrics. I’ll leave you with two:
“Now, hope for the future took a pounding in the parking lot.”
and
“If the storm doesn’t kill me, the government will. I’ve got to get that out of my head.”
I think both speak to the potential and the potential reality of technology and the world. I hope we can keep hope for the future alive, and I sincerely hope the storm doesn’t kill us, and neither do those who can cause it.
Technorati Tags: gnomedex
Unfortunately, the Winer/Calacanis bitchfight overshadowed all the news that came out of Gnomedex – but it’s really worth going through all the video, etc that can be found if you really look.
And what happened to Scoble? He was MIA after the first night.
I’ve seen Patti many times – including just a couple of weeks ago and the life-changing last performance at CBGB’s. I’d follow her anywhere. I don’t think People having the Power is the issue, but being engaged enough outside of themselves to use it.
Jane: I was there the second day. Maybe not in the sessions, but sounds like I didn’t miss much according to Ethan.
I interviewed a computer science professor about how to improve education while in Seattle and that totally fits into what Ethan is asking for. I’ll have that video upin a few days.
‘Preciate the clue you’re droppin’ here, Ethan. Eric Rice turned me onto your blog and I dig the honesty in your Gnomedex recap. If you get feedback from the Gnomedex crew on whether or not they are willing to get down with your ideas, post that here? It would be interesting to see how they’d shape-shift from this year. Be easy.
Ethan: why do you fund this kind of crap and write hypcritical posts like the one you just wrote? http://scobleizer.com/2007/08/12/warner-music-why-do-you-fund-this-crap/
Ethan, sorry, but as a total outsider to Gnomedex, reading this, I have to say it is, too, self-important and histrionic all its own
I don’t mind if a few overweight white guys want to argue about technology and how to make it work and make it more accessible to the masses at a tech conference. That’s fine. That’s their job. They don’t have to save the world and be Mother Theresa and Gandhi and Martin Luther King all in one. They are making the tools that people like those heroes will use. It’s fine to geek out and obsess and be self-important about making tools, just make them work. I don’t worry if they collapse into total irrelevance sniping at each other because new ones will appear and people will just walk around them.
The people who use these technical thingies still like toys — like the normal folks who aren’t tekkies — can then decide: does having a website, a blog, a Second Life island, a Facebook page help me in my chosen vocation of human rights work? Does it help me network, organize conferences, publicize cases, spread news and campaigns, or is it a self-referential and fanciful waste of time?
People could say that about Web 1.0, the Internet itself, and yet now it’s indispensable, and nobody sits around thumb-sucking over the fact that Africans don’t have water, yet people saving Africans have email. They need water, they need email, they need it all, and people work on it.
There’s a terribly extremist political viewpoint underlying this sentiment that people wishing to create entertainment or social media are somehow responsible for, or beholden to, or obliged to do something about other people who are living lives of poverty and deprivation. It makes it seems like a terribly facile transfer of wealth/technology is needed, like “let’s all give these people part of Scoble’s salary, a laptop, and some coupons for Best Buy, and they’ll be fine”. Seriously, poverty is a lot more complex than that, and the very people you are so patronizingly imagined as injured or bereft by Scoble or Calanis arguing and fussing over technology probably are *in* Scoble’s Facebook friends, he has so many, and have Facebooks and Myspaces and blogs of their own.
You need to get out of this horrid liberal guilt mentality which at the end of the day is condescending and removed from people you ostensibly want to help.
RSS feeds don’t feed people? Electricity in your city doesn’t feed people for a year, either. Does that mean you are supposed to turn it off? Be a little more concrete here. Why not use Facebook to network and raise money for the causes that *can* help feed people in need? Why not aggregate the blogs of Africans writing interesting journalism from countries people only have the most cliche’d images of and help them get more publicity? There are 1,000 things you can do besides curl up and die over Scoble fussing with making Twittergram work. Scoble doing that may enable some humanitarian serving in a refugee camp get out a quick note of alarm about an attack, or ask for help in getting equipment or books or something some day.
If dorky geeks cut off from reality aren’t allowed to play with technology until they can get it to work and make it simpler for the rest of us, how can anyone save the world?
Prok, it’s a FIC thing but at a much grander level than the FIC you are familiar with. It’s social FIC and part of the reason why I found the SL FIC-ness to be so cute.
As an aside, no one here will know of any reference to FICdom, so I’d say we can take it offline.
@ethan you’re spot on dude, it’s maddening and this is the stuff that makes the walls of the echo chamber thicker. I should have posted my predictions on the responses because it’s the same thing over and over.
Write a book!
Your arguments may have been stronger had you not decided to reduce them into “two overweight white guys” arguing. There is really substance to their argument and that is, people who go to Gnomedex by and large don’t want to sit through a pitch for their product.
I read another blog post musing that Winer’s heckling of Calacanis was a blessing in disguise for Jason. I agree. I had planned on blowing off Jason’s remarks altogether until Dave spoke up. Calacanis couldn’t find a new idea if it fell on him. Mahalo is weak, no one is going to use it, it isn’t scalable, etc. We all know this.
Personally, I am mad we are still devoting all of this time and energy to Winer / Calacanis when we should be talking about how weak some of the other speakers were. Geekbrief was almost unwatchable, as was the KEYNOTE address for gods sakes.
The only speakers worth hearing were Kawasaki, Barefoot, and Greg from Jib Jab. There were a few honorable mentions but for the most part if GD had just those three speakers it would have been worth seeing.
Ethan’s understanding of how the world works is as infantile as his grammar and syntax. It’s the same irritating drivel peddled in pop-music lyrics, which is why so many of us scarcely bother listening to music any more.
In particular, Ethan seems to think that the world’s problems can be solved by taking money away from everyone else and throwing it at the problem. That never helps. The money always falls into the wrong hands, is used for the wrong purposes, and fuels the corruption and moral malaise that caused the problems in the first place.
Ethan’s self-righteous guilt-mongering comes from a desire to feel morally superior to the rest of us. If he thinks he knows all the answers, let him spend only HIS OWN money and effort, and work IN PERSON, to solve those problems that he keeps whimpering about.
Eric our SL FIC is merely but a microcosm of the bigger metaversal FIC we all need to worry about, it’s not to be taken offline whatsoever.
what 1389 said.
Did anybody talk about how Mahalo seems a regression back to early Web 1.0 and that social media in Web 2.0 might even be worse at the end of the day if it brings us memed-up and biased hand-crafted “socially-edited” pieces with “social justice consciousness” and other politkorrektnost.
1389′s reflexive verbiage is at least as irritating as Ethan’s, and far less humane. It’s not even true.
Ethan’s problem is that he’s caught up in this scene, an echo chamber of overfed people with expensive gadgets, and can’t figure out where the “exit” sign is.
1389 shares a simple fault with Ethan: neither have a good idea of how we’re already intervening to improve people’s lives, to close the poverty gap.
That’s a pretty big problem with the open-source scenesters. Their hearts are in the right place, but they don’t have domain expertise, and don’t necessarily have the connections to get that expertise. That they’re self-important Anglo doughboys certainly doesn’t help, given our country’s history. Despite these hurdles, they are doing the work that will bear fruit in the years to come. It’ll just take time and a lot of work that will be done for free.
My advice: get out of the scene a bit, and hang out in other scenes. Talk up free software, and the ideology behind it. The software itself won’t convince anyone, but the ideology will be popular.
jk2001,
You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
I am not part of the “open-source scene,” nor am I a member of Second Life, nor did I attend (or wish to attend) Gnomedex. I came over here out of curiosity because I had seen a discussion of Ethan’s hypocrisy on Twitter.
My remarks ARE true, not that you would know. Anybody can see exactly who Ethan is and where he is coming from, just by reading the drivel that he wrote. His posturing is typical of those who are trying to make a living in the corrupt and dying music industry.
Moreover, anybody who has studied history before the current wave of political correctness took over the American campuses will have no trouble seeing the results of the leftist social programs perpetrated all over the world, ever since 1789. Hellish mistakes, every single one of them.
You choose to overlook what the road to hell is paved with. Plenty of people have had, or thought they have had, “their hearts in the right place,” while their actions have brought nothing but harm, not only to those they purport to help, but to the world at large.
As to your remark, “That they’re self-important Anglo doughboys certainly doesn’t help, given our country’s history.” – Your contempt for your own country and its history, and the blind racism inherent in that remark, reveal that your own heart, such as it is, is most certainly NOT in the right place. It is impossible for someone with your attitudes to accomplish anything good.
Better that you and Ethan and others of your ilk should stay in your corner tweaking your software, where at least the amount of harm you do will be somewhat limited. I’m just glad I’m not the one who will have to do systems support for whatever it is you are writing.
I’m still slumming in Ethan’s blog here:
“He has an MFA in conceptual art and cultural theory. He believes Jacques Derrida is the true father of the Internet.”
Ethan is too young and too well indoctrinated to realize it, but his own profile is a measure of how far the once-honorable university system in th US has declined. A lot of parents, and taxpayers, won’t be getting their money’s worth, to put it mildly.
Cultural theory? Derrida? Deconstructionism? All of this is, in fact, nihilism – which is the antithesis of culture.
Conceptual art? There’s another oxymoron. I suppose he spent two years studying the likes of Yoko Ono. They actually give degrees in tripe like that?
The only type of culture anybody will find here is of the microbiological variety!
1389:”Ethan is too young and too well indoctrinated to realize it, but his own profile is a measure of how far the once-honorable university system in th US has declined” – Where the hell do you get off, crawl back in your bunker where the world’s not so scary. Classy that you take advantage of people being transparent, yet hide your piggy little face behind some neo-con badge ID.
I’m far from being a “neo-con” – but you wouldn’t know that, now would you?
“Piggy little face?” Since your whole point is that you don’t know what my face looks like (which you have no need to know, unless you’re a stalker), whence comes your description of my imagined physiognomy?
Badge ID? What on earth are you talking about? What badge? I just SAID that I was NOT an attendee at Gnomedex!
One reason I didn’t go to Gnomedex this year was precisely what you mentioned. Too much screaming by middle-aged men banging the rattle on their high chair.
Yes, Web 2.0 is quite amazingly self-referential and unaware of anything outside it. They may not even actually understand what the Third World is. Thanks for mentioning it.
At least that would’ve been better than these pseudo-educated Gen X posers who are also banging their rattles. I can’t believe this person is “head of technology” anywhere; for all I know, he might not be. Yikes.
“1389″ — Battle of Kosovo?
wow, and I thought the wackos and crockpots were only SPEAKING at Gnomedex!
Ethan,
There quite a few organizations attempting to use technology for good. Here are a few that I am aware of:
Reuters Digital Vision Fellowship, http://rdvp.org/
Benetech, http://benetech.org/
Grameen Bank Technology Programs, http://www.grameenfoundation.org/what_we_do/technology_programs/
Stanford Social E-Challenge, http://bases.stanford.edu/site/socialechall/index.jsp
Kiva, http://www.kiva.org/
Acumen Fund, http://www.acumenfund.org/
The Skoll Foundation, http://www.skollfoundation.org/
Partners In Health, http://pih.org
Right on Ethan. Gnomedex is for the most part a circle jerk for people who don’t matter. 99% of America doesn’t care about this nor does it really impact us.
http://techdumpster.com/2007/08/13/gnomedex-is-a-joke-scoble-is-still-a-tool/
No, they were asking questions, too. And yelling at each other so the room could BEAR WITNESS.
SHOE ON HEAD.
“Crockpots” speaking? Now THAT’s funny! Wish I’d been liveblogging that with a videocam!
Wow, 1389 is on a roll today…truly inspiring. Ethan, all of this nonsense aside, I think your points are being absorbed and you’ll see a spike in “why I’m in this game…” posts, it will be interesting to see if anyone takes it to heart.
The tech world is no different than any other domain in that personalities will clash over real and perceived slights and there will always be differences of opinion and jockeying for credit.
You think this sort of thing doesn’t happen between genome researchers? In the NGO/non-profit world? The tech world is no different.
But it’s not a zero-sum game. It’s not ‘go to Gnomedex’ OR ‘find a solution to poverty’ and pitting one against the other is just plain silly.
For good or bad, we’ve all chosen to work in the tech industry — which means our presumable ‘goal’ is to facilitate the exchange of information. Dave and Jason bashing heads is just another part of the process. I wasn’t at Gnomedex, but from all evidence the whole thing should have been quickly shunted over as a ‘meta’ discussion (a la MetaFilter) to not get in the way of the real discussion.
I hope someone who was there writes about the larger topic of the disagreement which is whether conferences like Gnomedex are venues for discussion of commercial work. That should take all of thirty seconds and then we can all get back to work.
P.S. Enjoyed your writing and will continue reading what you have to say.
Hey Ethan, I really enjoyed your post. As interesting as Gnomedex was, I agree that there are more pressing problems. Solving societal challenges around education, health care, transportation, environment, etc. will probably help many more people sleep better at night than RSS, Web 2.0, Folksonomy, etc.
hey man, and how about the, like, even worse problem of bad spelcheeking and grammer on blogs…
Bravo. Excellent, insightful post. You’re only (sadly) all too right about overfed white guys like Winer & Scoble, cluttering up the airwives with their self-important nonsense. i pine for the day when we figure out that these guys are just not very talented and that their mediocre ramblings are not worth our time.
In the meantime, great posts like yours are a bracing antidote to the cyber loudmouths.
Great work.
London Premiere of new Patti Smith documentary- Friday 3rd October at 21:30
Patti Smith Dream of Life – Cineworld Shaftesbury Avenue, 13 Coventry Street, W1
21:30 on Friday 3rd October.
Arguably punk rock’s poet laureate, Patti Smith occupies a curious position within the rock world. Having influenced generations of future icons, from The Smiths and REM to PJ Harvey, she retains something wholly unique within modern rock. This is exemplified by the hypnotic beat-style spoken word fused with three chord riffs of her early albums through to her brave and unconventional cover versions of the likes of Nirvana and Prince in her later works.
Steven Sebring’s documentary, narrated by Smith herself, was shot over a period of ten years on a mixture of colour and black and white 16mm stock, capturing the artist perfectly in an archive-like manner. Each frame resembles a meticulously planned still photograph, even in it’s verité moments. One of Smith’s powers as an artist is to draw you into her thoughts and views, to the extent where you hang onto every word communicated through her iconic and hypnotic voice. Sebring uses this to his own advantage, compiling clips and still images that reinforce the enigmatic presence shown in her music. That’s not to say however that his portrayal is fantastical; at one point Smith is shown struggling in good humour with simple guitar rhythms, which comes across as a comfortingly human.
Utilising years’ worth of live footage and interview clips, some dating back before the release of the seminal Horses, the film is essential for anyone with even a passing interest in this striking performer.