Get that heap off the lawn, by Frank Paynter, begins with warm memories of waiting in a frozen parking lot at 2am for my dad to come and jump start our shitty ’52 Buick before someone froze to death.
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I’m an optimist… The newspaper will not be around in twenty years. Let’s say ‘taps’ and move on. Just said by Drew Clark at the luncheon talk at the Berkman Center. It was a toss-off line, but along a very constructive vector. Uncontained by legacy systems like the print one that both supports and shackles the newspaper industry, Drew and his fellow travelers are breaking important trails.
More… there are different sorts of front pages out there… RSS is a sort of front page… Journalism has a very bright future; just a different one than it’s had…
Reading through the comments under Loose Linkage, where I pointed to Jalopnik’s What’s the oldest car you’ve ever owned, I got to wondering if I could remember every car I ever owned, and what happened to it. Here’s a try:
- 1963 Volkswagen Beetle. Black. 1200cc engine. A loaner from my parents. Rolled it during summer school after my freshman year in college. In fact, it rolled over three times before coming to rest right-side up. I remember trying to hold onto the bottom of the seat, watching the pavement come up to the window and disappear overhead, over and over again. I was fine, but the bug was totaled. Still, it brought $425 at auction from a guy who cut it in two and attached the front end of it to the back of another one. New it was $1250 or so.
- 1960 English Ford Consul. Black. Leaked oil from everywhere. Bought it for $400, and sold it for almost nothing, which is what it was worth. The low point came when it croaked in Hickory, NC, where it limped after the alternator belt blew up on the Blue Ridge and where no replacement could be found, so we had to hitch back to Greensboro. In the rain. As I recall no belts could be found to fit around the alternator pulley, and for a while we used some nylon hose tied into a loop.
- 1958 Mercedes 220S. Midnight blue. Bought it for $250, needed new upholstery, which I put in. Had a “Hydrak” semi-automatic transmission, which was a 4-on-the-column, no-clutch-on-the-floor thing. The couchlike seats reclined all the way, making the interior into a double bed. This made it a very romantic car. Alas, the transmission went bad, and I sold it for $75.
- 1963 Chevy Bel Air. 283 V8. Rochester carb. My parent’s old car, and the first new car they had ever bought. Drove it to 125,000 miles, when the transmission started to go. Sold it.
- 1966 Pugeot 404 wagon. Bought for $500. Had dents in all four doors, and lots of stupid “features” such as screw-on hubcaps and spark plugs hidden down inside the valve cover at the far ends of bakelite sleeves that would break. Got rid of it after driving it from New Jersey to North Carolina, in the middle of which a resonator can on the exhaust manifold blew off; and, in an unrelated matter, large hunks of the floor between the front seat and the pedals fell out, so I could see the pavement under my feet, hear the engine noise bypass the exhaust system, and breathe the exhaust, all at once — for another 400 miserable miles during which my hearing was permanently diminished.
- 1966 Volvo 122S. Bought it from my parents, who bought it new in Belgium. Great car, very solid. Ran out of oil once, however, and damaged the engine. Sold it with 110K miles on it to a guy who replaced the engine.
- 1967 (?) Austin America. Belonged originally to my sister. I got it on loan from my father, who later sold it for $10. An early front-wheel drive, it had lots of good ideas but terrible construction. For example, the wheels sometimes fell off. That’s because a cotter pin was all that cinched the splines of the hub to those of the axle, with bad metal on both sides. As driving loosened the hub, the cotter pin would break under pressure. The only way one knew this was happening was by hearing cotter pin fragments clinking around inside a hubcap.
- 1971 (?) Datsun pickup. My father’s, actually. But I drove it for a while. It had two sets of points in the distributor. Very confusing. Mastering those helped me later when I manfully helped a girlfriend keep her Datsun 610 wagon on the road.
- 1969 Chevy Biscayne. Snot green. Black vinyl seats. Looked like an unmarked cop car. Developed leaks in the roof that would soak the front floor rugs, so that turning on the heat would evaporate water from the floor and steam up the windows. Don’t remember how I got rid of it, but I do remember backing into another car in a parking lot because the windows behind me were frosted with moisture.
- 1978 Volkswagen Squareback. Bought it from a buddy for $200, and sold it for $225. My buddy and I fixed it more often than we would have, had beers not been involved in prior fixes. A few months after I sold it, cops showed up at my door to tell me I needed to get its corpse out of the woods, where somebody had set it on fire. Still had my plates on it. Fortunately, I had the paperwork for the sale, relieving me of responsibility for it. For all I know, it might still be there.
- 1969 Pontiac Catalina. “Big White.” Bought if from my uncle. The trunk would fill with water in the rain, making it useless for carrying stuff in there. Not sure what happened to that one, either.
- 1980 Chevy Citation. This famous “X car” was created to compete with Chrysler’s equally bad “K car”. It had front-wheel drive, which was new in those days, and a roomy sloping hatchback. But it was crap and didn’t last long. The main weird feature was a vertical radio. Gave it up in a divorce, in trade for my ex’s old Pinto.
- 1974 Ford Pinto wagon. One of the worst cars ever made. This one had been in an accident at some point in the long prehistory before I came into possession of it, and the frame was bent, so it moved crabwise down the road. Every once in awhile it would start to veer wildly out of control, even on the straightaway. It did this once on the boulevard between Chapel Hill and Durham, hooking bumpers with another car, sending them both spinning. Fortunately, the Pinto’s bumper bent completely while the other hardly had a dent, which was both strange and amazing. The lady driving the other car wanted money anyway, and I paid. At some point, the car died, and I had it towed for scrap.
- 1979 Honda Accord hatchback. A very nice, smooth-running car that went completely dead on a winding coastal road in the black of night, and then produced light in the form of a flame coming up from between my legs. I slowed to a stop as quickly as I could while feeling the shoulder of the road like I was reading braille through my right tires. When I fished a flashlight out of the glove box and got out of the car I found the car had come to rest exactly one foot from a parked car in front of it. A look under the dash revealed a hot lead (from the + side of the electric system) to Everything else that ran on electrons. It had been cut at some point in the past, spliced poorly and wrapped in gooey old black electric tape. As the splice came undone, electricity passed through an increasingly sphinctered path until it turned into a light bulb filament, caught fire and fell apart. So it was easily fixed. But the car, in a very un-Honda-like way, was cursed with problems. I sold it to a young woman for whom it performed fine until the engine blew up. She contacted the mechanic who sold it to me in the first place, found that he had misrepresented the car (saying the engine was original, for example, when it wasn’t), and then sued me rather than him because I had sold her the car. It was a small claims case in North Carolina. I was by then living in California. So I settled. By then, fortunately, I had bought my…
- 1985 Toyota Camry. Basic model with a stick. My first and only new car, and the first that had working air conditioning. Best car I ever had. Gave it to my daughter when I got the Subaru in the early 90s. I think it went way past 200,000 miles. It may still be working, somewhere in Santa Cruz, which is where she donated it to a local public radio station, deeply rusted but still functioning.
- 1986(?) Subaru 4Wd wagon. Tried to drive it into the ground but failed and gave it to a friend earlier this year. It’s still going.
- 2000 Volkswagen Passat wagon. Bought for $5k from a friend who was moving out of the country. Put another $3k into it, to bring it up to top shape. Wish it was a stick, but otherwise it’s a great little car. [Summer 2009 update: I have since put another $10k into it. I’ve never known a better-made that required more work.]
I’m sure I’ve forgotten a few, but that’s an outline for countless stories.
[Later…] Fun comments below. By far the most entertaining (or frightening, or both) pointage goes to the Head Lemur’s list. Wow. Reminds me of Hot Rod Lincoln, one of the Great Gassed Insanity Songs. Those linked lyrics, by the way, are from the Commander Cody version. The Commander gives the definitive performance of the piece (I just went through the karaoke exercise supported by the audio at that last link, and The Kid said he was glad “nobody was here” to hear it), although full props go to George Wilson for writing (and living) the original.
[August 2016 update…] Still driving the same VW Passat wagon, nine years later. It has 206,000 miles on it and runs like a top. Hasn’t needed much work in recent years either. I should add that my wife is still driving the 1995 Infiiniti Q45 that she bought used for $5k after her 1992 Q45a died, around 2004. That one has about 200,000 miles on it too.
[January 2019 update…] The Passat died of a bad transmission (or so we were told) last Spring. We sold it for $125 to a guy who replaced the transmission fluid and told me it ran fine after that. I haven’t kept up, so I don’t know, and don’t want to know. It has been replaced by a 2005 Subaru Ouback with 85k miles. It’s fine so far. Then last Fall the Infiniti died too. Fuel injection. We donated it to a local public radio station and haven’t replaced it. For the price of even a beaten up used car, renting and ride sharing are far more economical.
[June 2021 update…] When the pandemic hit, we left the New York apartment to others who could use it, and went to our California place for the next fifteen months. There we borrowed or rented cars until my wife bought a 2020 Toyota Camry XLE Hybrid, which so far has been terrific. The ’05 Subaru, however, sat still under a canopy of juniper trees in a Manhattan parking spot for most of the year, and hadn’t been driven at all for ten months. It was so deeply covered in rotted juniper berries and needles that the coating had turned to soil and things were growing in it. The battery was also stone dead and needed to be replaced. After that, the battery clamp kept coming off and the AC leaked water onto the passenger side floor. Also the brakes were fully rusted. All that got fixed for about $600, which is cheap, considering. Took a lot of work to de-soil the body and the engine compartment, but it seems functional now.
[February 2023 update…] I’ve had the Subaru cleaned up, with lots of minor fixings addressing the concerns listed above, with costs totaling around $2k. Today it lives with us in Bloomington, Indiana, and is well-suited to its main purposes, which are helping us carry stuff home from stores and to and from garage sales. Still, it’s a matter of time before the leak in the steering rack and the aged catalytic converter will need to be addressed. Meanwhile, I’m looking for a good used station wagon of some kind. That’s a form-factor I like much more than the SUV one, though that seems to be the only available choice these days.
Image by Hugh MacLeod, aka @Gapingvoid
Tags: Austin America, beetle, Camry, Chevrolet, Chevy, Chevy Bel Air, Chevy Biscayne, Chevy Citation, Commander Cody, Datsun, English Ford, Ford Consul, Ford Pinto, George Wilson, Head Lemur, Hydrax, Mercedes, Mercedes 220S, passat, Peugeot, Peugeot 404, Pontiac, Pontiac Catalina, ride sharing, Subaru, Subaru Ourback, Volkswagen, X Car
What’s the oldest car you’ve ever owned? In my case it was probably the 1980-something Subaru Wagon that I drove from the early 90s until I gave it to a friend last year. The best car I’ve ever owned was a 1985 Camry sedan. That was also the only new car I ever bought. Gave it to my daughter when I got the Subaru, and she drove it for years after that.
The reportedly late blog by Aedhmar Hynes is actually dead, or just schleeping. Or something.
In respect to the FCC’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for IP-enabled services, Susan Crawford writes
| Thus, the IP NPRM suggests that the Commission views its regulatory authority as extending to end-user software, network hardware, corporate and community websites and more. |
IP in this case refers to Internet Protocol, not Intellectual Property. Although, where the FCC is concerned, the distinction may be a fine one.
Meanwhile, Sprint Presses for Cheaper Access to Broadband Lines, in the Washington Post, tells a story too rarely revealed: that the biggest carriers are playing the scarcity game with the Internet’s backbones.
Of course, that’s their business and their right.
The big question is why they can’t think like Amazon, which loosed S3 and EC2 on the world as pure utilities. S3 is storage. EC2 is computation. Both cost who-knows-what to build. $Billions? Certainly in the many $millions. In any case Amazon serves them up as if they were oil and gas pipelines. And, because they are pure utilities, and affordable for anybody (with no distinction between “consumers” and “businesses”), they are a tide that lifts many boats of all kinds. Especially business.
Now think about it… If computing were regulated like communications, and Web services were deployed like telco and cableco services, Amazon and its competitors would live like zoo animals in the FCC’s regulatory habitat — and we’d all be paying top dollar for scarce centralized computing and storage services, probably run on behalf of “partners” in the “content” cartel. You, the customer, would be a mere consumer, producing nothing more than money exctracted from countless “billing events”. As for your business, your work, your power to produce in a networked world… Forget about it. There wouldn’t be that world. Just another few-to-many top-down distribution system for stuff you consume.
Instead of Web 2.O, we’d have TV 2.0. Which, come to think of it, is about what we get with “HD” TV.
If the carriers woke up, they’d look at the enormous ecosystem growing around Amazon’s utilities, and realize that the usage restrictions on the “last mile” and monopoly pricing of “backhaul” are preventing far more business than either enable — businesses that the carriers could also serve in ways that leverage benefits of incumbency other than squeezing maximized dollars out of minimized choice. Oh, and they’d find more ways to pay down the debt the took on when they built out their infrastructures in the first place.
But that’s not the way to bet. Instead, the better bet is more regulation, more favoritism, more ways for carriers to put a free market paint job on a captive market offering, while they work overtime to shove the Internet genie back in the pre-1984 bottle.
I’ve got more coming on this over at Linux Journal. But I’m also kinda under the weather and have a plane to catch soon. In any case, I’ll get it up as soon as I can.
The Santa Barbara Book & Author Festival started last night with an award presentation to local author T. Coraghessan Boyle, and continues tomorrow with, among other things, a panel titled What’s Next for Newspapers. On the panel will be: Jeramy Gordon, editor and publisher of of the Santa Barbara Daily Sound; Matt Kettman, senior editor of The Independent; Jerry Roberts, author of Never Let Them See You Cry and former managing and executive editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and the Santa Barbara News Press, respectively; Peter Sklar, publisher of Edhat; and Craig Smith, columnist, law professor and author of Craig Smith’s Blog. I’m the moderator.
A few questions running through my mind…
| Will all newspapers eventually be free? |
| How can papers, which have a daily or weekly heartbeat, keep up with the hummingbird-heart pulse rate of Web-based journalism? |
| Do you see the newspaper becoming Web publications with print versions, or (as they mostly are now) vice versa? |
| Is there enough advertising for all of you? |
| Will advertising survive as a business model? What will be the mix of advertising and other sources of revenue? |
| How do you see the emerging ecosystem that includes bloggers and expert locals who are in good positions to participate in the larger journalistic process? |
| What will be the complementary or competitive roles of radio and TV stations in the future local journalistic ecosystem? Bear in mind that analog TV will be a dead chicken in early 2009. |
| Is it possible, really, to replace a once-great institution such as the News-Press? |
| How do you see each of your roles playing out in the event of an emergency such as an earthquake, a wildfire, a tsunami? |
| What do you see as Santa Barbara’s role in the journalistic world? Are we leaders? Followers? Both? Neither? |
Be interesting to see how it goes. Hope to see some of ya’ll there.
Why do we continue, in 2007, to believe that markets are all about What Big Companies Do? Worse, why do we continue to take advertising for granted as the primary source of the the Bux DeLuxe required to fund technical, social and personal progress?
For example, take this BusinessWeek story, which begins,
| Imagine your cellphone as a mini marketing machine. As you head into your car after dinner, a text alert pops onto the screen of your handset announcing the 9 p.m. lineup at a nearby cineplex. You choose the Jodi Foster flick The Brave One and a promo video for the next Warner Bros. (TWX ) release, a George Clooney movie, starts running. Afterward, more text appears, prompting you to launch the phone’s Web browser so that you can click through to buy the movie’s ringtones and wallpaper. |
| That kind of 24/7 advertising engagement–on a phone, no less–may sound like a nightmare. But what if you could determine the kinds of products you get pitched? Or, when your flight gets canceled in a faraway airport, text messages pop up for the best hotel deals in town? No random insurance ads or airline deals for trips to places you never visit. Best of all: Watch or read the custom ads, and your phone minutes are free. |
It’s about a potential Google phone. Google isn’t talking, but others are. Later in the story we read,
| …once you combine Google’s financial heft with its ultra-sophisticated ability to target ads to specific customers. “The day is coming when wireless users will experience nirvana scenarios–mobile ads tied to your individual behavior, what you are doing, and where you are,” says Linda Barrabee, wireless analyst at researcher Yankee Group. |
Here’s my nirvana scenario, Linda:
|
Quick: Who wants their cell phone to be a “mini marketing machine”? And why would a BusinessWeek reporter even begin to think anybody would want that?
One huge reason we get these endless rah-rah stories framed by Advertising Goodness is that advertising pays the salaries of the writers. There is no “Chinese wall” between advertising and editorial. It may seem like there is, but there isn’t. Follow the money. (I know this is a controversial thing to say, but bear with me.)
Stories about money fighting money are also much more interesting than stories about ordinary programmers building whole new worlds for little or no money at all — so the rest of us (including the programmers) can all make more money in that world. Without the free tools and building materials provided by those programmers, we would have no Google, no Facebook, no Amazon, no eBay. Because there would be no Apache, no RSS, no memecached, no Lucene. No Internet.
It’s unfair to pick on journalists, because we’re all in the same boat. More to the point, we’re all in the same Matrix. All of us live a business world framed by the controlling ambitions of companies, rather than by the actual wants and needs of customers. Even when we study customer wants and needs, our perspective is anchored on the sell side. We ask “Which company (or product, or service) will serve them best?”, rather than “How can we as customers best express our wants and needs so that any seller can fill them?” The ironic distance between these two perspectives is deep and immense.
Alvin Toffler explored this irony in The Third Wave, published in 1980, where he said:
| (The Industrial Age) violently split apart two aspects of our lives that had always been one… production and consumption… In so doing, it drove a giant invisible wedge into our economy, our psyches … it ripped apart the underlying unity of society, creating a way of life filled with economic tension. |
I wrote about that split, that tension, in Listen up, back in 1998 — eighteen years after The Third Wave and nine years before now.
David Weinberger and I also wrote about it a year later, in this chapter of Cluetrain. We called it “The Axe in Our Heads”:
| Ironically, many of us spend our days wielding axes ourselves. In our private lives we defend ourselves from the marketing messages out to get us, our defenses made stronger for having spent the day at work trying to drive axes into our customers’ heads. We do both because the axe is already there, the metaphorical embodiment of that wedge Toffler wrote about — the one that divides our jobs from our lives. On the supply side is the producer; on the demand side is the consumer. In the caste system of industry, it is bad form for the two to exchange more than pleasantries. |
| Thus the system is quietly maintained, and our silence goes unnoticed beneath the noise of marketing-as-usual. No exchange between seller and buyer, no banter, no conversation. And hold the handshakes. |
| When you have the combined weight of two hundred years of history and a trillion-dollar tide of marketing pressing down on the axe in your head, you can bet it’s wedged in there pretty good. What’s remarkable is that now there’s a force potent enough to actually start loosening it. |
| Here’s the voice of a spokesperson from the world of TV itself, Howard Beale, the anchorman in Paddy Chayefsky’s Network who announced that he would commit suicide because “I just ran out of bullshit.” Of course, he had to go insane before he could at last utter this truth and pull the axe from his own head. |
We’re all still Howard Beales today. We haven’t run out of bullshit, and there’s no less cause for anger than there was when Network, The Third Wave and Cluetrain each came out. The Information Age is here, but its future is not just (as William Gibson put it) unevenly distributed. Large parts of it aren’t here at all. The largest of those is actual empowerment of customers — in ways that are native to customers, rather than privileges granted by vendors. The difference is huge.
That’s why yelling doesn’t work. What we need instead is to make tools that work for us, and not just for them. We need to invent tools that give each of us independence from vendor control, and better ways of telling vendors what we want, when we want it, and how we want to relate — on our terms and not just on theirs. As Neo said to the Architect, “The problem is choice”. That problem will be with us as long as that axe is in our heads.
The axe is marketing. Marketing is what The Matrix does.
As a verb market is not merely about selling. It is about convincing. Its ideal is control. This may not be what enlightened marketers want the verb to mean, but marketing comes from the sell side, not the buy side. Thus in practice has become a tool of control by the industrial machine. Yes, some good people in marketing actually do talk to customers, actually do advocate them. But this is still the exception, not the rule. Marketing still comes from the side of the axe that’s buried in all of our heads — no less deeply than the electric spikes on which the heads of the human batteries that power The Matrix are impaled.
It’s a waste of time to revolt against the marketing machine. The job at hand is to build the Real World again, from the humans out to the companies that serve them. Real markets — the noun, not the verb — are what we need to strike a Neo’s bargain with the machinery of marketing. Unless we build tools for ourselves, we’ll just be talking the talk.
By the way, when I want to talk to somebody about what a real market is, my first source is Stephen Lewis. Like me, he has in his life labored far too long in the mines of marketing. Unlike me, he has lived in, and studied deeply, real markets in the real world. We need more of that.
Tag: vrm.
Joe Andrieu is on a roll. Or in a role. Four links before I hit the road:
| Leaving the Information Age |
| Marc Andreessen hits three nails on the head (also talks about nails Marc misses) |
| Change of ages |
| Why Search Needs VRM |
Consider those bonus links to lots of other stuff.
David Brooks in the New York Times:
| Now it’s evident that if you want to understand the future of the Democratic Party you can learn almost nothing from the bloggers, billionaires and activists on the left who make up the “netroots.” You can learn most of what you need to know by paying attention to two different groups — high school educated women in the Midwest, and the old Clinton establishment in Washington… |
| …the netroots are losing the policy battles. As Matt Bai’s reporting also suggests, the netroots have not been able to turn their passion and animus into a positive policy agenda. Democratic domestic policy is now being driven by old Clinton hands like Gene Sperling and Bruce Reed. |
| …many Democratic politicians privately detest the netroots’ self-righteousness and bullying. They also know their party has a historic opportunity to pick up disaffected Republicans and moderates, so long as they don’t blow it by drifting into cuckoo land. |
I was talking with a Republican friend a couple days ago. He thought Hillary was the next Kerry: a candidate of the party establishment — unbeatable in the primaries, and beatable in the general election. He thinks the most interesting candidate on the Democratic side (and one he would consider voting for) would be Obama. And that Obama might be the one Democrat who could beat the Republican candidtate. But the Clinton establishment won’t let that happen.
I agree.
Netroots are important and interesting, but so far they are patches of grass. Maybe parkland. But not whole prairies. Nothing wrong with that. Just nothing right enough to move the middle. Yet.
And, for what it’s worth, I don’t think the electorate wants nothing but Bushes and Clintons running the country from 1988 to 2012 or 2016.
If the Dems want to win, Obama is the candidate to do it. But he’ll be the veep candidate, and I’m betting Clinton/Obama will lose to Thompson/ or Romney/.
If the Republicans run Rudy/, the Democrat will win.
But I’m just one root, out here on the Net.