There Is No Plan

Sarah Palin had plenty of opportunity to jump into the ring, and make hay in Iowa at the expense of her lookalike Michelle Bachmann. But with the Iowa Straw Poll this Sunday in Ames, IA, it looks like she’s gonna continue to be a no-show in this race, despite the fact that poor Barack just can’t seem to catch a break, and Sarah is running second without running at all. It’s beginning to look like she’s not stepping up.

Thereisnoplan is surprised. Not because she’s missing a golden opportunity to show us the ‘real’ Sarah Palin, but because this campaign was a great big BP fastball for a rampant egotist like Palin, and the consequences of not running might seem to be too horrific to imagine for someone like the ‘cuda. A retreat to post-celebrity status for an ego like that would seem to be fate worse than death.

We’re going to have to make do with Bachmann, it seems. But at least we have her outrageously not gay husband to keep us all amused in the coming months.

The real threat that Google Plus represents for Facebook is not that it’ll outsize it anytime soon, but that it outclasses it in short order. At a billion minus users, Facebook is the internet equivalent of Shanghai (with its puny real life population of thirty million), a shiny, boosterist, creation which is mostly facade (pardon the pun). Google Plus represents something that – in the short term at least seems to have more, dare one say it, integrity. Certainly Facebook’s apparent amorality doesn’t help. It seems too bent on exploiting its users. G+ doesn’t appear to be so brazen.

Last year Myspace was the wrong side of the tracks and FB was the high-rent district. But now the tracks have shifted ever so subtly. Myspace is now the internet version of the municipal dump. FB is the formerly wealthy neighborhood that’s now getting a little seedy at the edges, and G+ is the shiny new district on the hill, full of hope, and definitely less gaudy (i.e. no ads as yet). If Google can maintain the shine on it’s brand upgrade (born of a new cohesion and better leadership), it might just solidify its long term better than anyone could have anticipated.

Make My Day

It’s official. Thereisnoplan has declared Little Taco-Dog Poops a menace to decent society.

The basic problem is simple. Tiny little dark stringy dog poops that nestle in the sidewalk grass. But the real issue goes deeper – indeed right to the heart of civic responsibility. Were the owners of those obnoxious little Yorkies and Chihuahuas just lazy or incapable physically of stooping down to scoop up the poop? Or did they justify that laziness or incapacity by rationalizing that nobody would notice such a tiny stool? Or worse still, did they think that the small size of those poops made them any less of a health hazard? The answer almost certainly has to be one of the above.

In a very small and stringy way, this problem sums up America. “It’s no big deal” says the owner of the dog, proprietor of the plastics factory, or the administration that starts the dumb-ass war.  They figure they’ll get away with it and avoid sieve-like regulation, often with the help of bare-faced lies or hare-brained politics, or both.

That works find until someone steps in the poop.

Or on top of the land mine.

I'm with a bevy of hot babes. Facial Recognition rocks.

It’s your face. Don’t let Facebook tell you otherwise.

Perhaps it was always about creating a big book of people’s faces.  But it certainly seems like Facebook’s latest attempt to control the ‘social graph’ of the entire planet is the ultimate emblem of its profoundly amoral, conscience-free, pursuit-of-profit megalomania. The idea that you can post a picture and that everyone in it is tagged for future ‘sharing purposes’ crosses the line in a way none of its past transgressions has even approached. But like all the others, it’s pretty clever; incremental and insidious, rather than explosive and egregious. As with all efficiently spreading viruses, Facebook is stealthy and surreptitious in it encroachment and colonization. It feeds on that very human social impulse that we all to a greater or lesser extent share (no pun intended).  And as such, its parasitic reach is almost universal. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the marketing tricks that Wall Street likes to pull these days is that they’re “experts”. The ballooning banks, ratings agency scumbags, and hedge fun hyenas front their operations with learned economists, know-it-all analysts and other sundry eggheads who ponce around on radio and TV just to give the world the impression that their company’s greed is backed up by, you know, hard facts.

Of course, it’s all just marketing BS. 99% of them don’t know shit from shinola.

After the debacle that was the ’08 financial meltdown you’d think we’d have got the message that they’re nothing but pump and dump guys in decent suits. But we haven’t.

Now Thereisnoplan doesn’t pretend to be an expert in IPOs and all that jazz but it seems to me that there’s something decidedly fishy about all these fabulous valuations that are flying around for tech companies these days. Read the rest of this entry »

It will never happen.

They want to map us, share us, track us, provide for us.  They want to be our digital deliverance, our screen-saviors, the pioneers of our future. And we dutifully share, and comment, and post, creating more page views that they can monetize as they continue to propogate and colonize every corner of the internet with their shiny startups promising revolutionary ideas about how to reshape the very core of humanity. They’ve invaded our homes, our workplaces, our memories, the way we communicate, befriend, even fall in love.

Gradually we’re losing touch with the way it was, throwing out the good with the bad, as we suckle at the teat of the new, willing dupes allowing our humanity to be digitized and categorized. We’re gently prodded towards the new spiritual and intellectual vacuum, not capable of resisting the mesmeric call of the profile, the avatar, the lists of basic information that populate a billion databases in a humming, ice-cool, and human-free data center.

And who are the new overseers? Read the rest of this entry »

There’s nothing the social media and tech mavens like doing more than talking up social media and its influence.

In Iran, that influence turned out to be overplayed, and the ‘Green Revolution’ fizzled out. But in Tunisia and Egypt, it seems like it did indeed play a major organizational role, at least in catalyzing the original clashes. The Iranian police state proved itself much more adept at manipulating social media for its own ends. Plus it had the added advantage of dealing with a rebellion that was bourgeois in origin. The Egyptian riots seem to have a far wider social base, which may prove to be crucial. It’s interesting to note that in both Tunisia and Egypt, satellite cities away from the capital played a big role in fomenting the rebellion.

But regardless of the social pattern, it’s clear to Thereisnoplan that the internet is a crucial part of the equation in Egypt, which explains why it was cut off. Washington has been watching closely, but I’m guessing that Beijing has been taking note too.

China has overheated its economy pretty nicely. A real estate bubble, a more educated, and connected population with vastly increased expectations, inflation levels near the tipping point, and a depressed international consumer economy are adding real pressure for political change. And while China’s conciliatory approach to human rights and democratic change is probably just talk, unlike their distaste for the current Nobel Peace Prize recipient – they’re getting closer and closer to a time when concrete decisions will have to be made. Read the rest of this entry »

One of my favorite stories about American history is about the original Tea Party, in 1773. It goes like this. The British wanted to find a way to boost the sagging fortunes of the East India Company. The brain trust in the Colonial Office in London came up with a genius idea. Dump cheap Indian tea on the American colonies at a great price, to boost the EIC’s bottom line. The way they decided to do it was to reduce the duty the colonies paid on the tea. That pushed the price down just below the price that American smugglers charged for the Dutch East Indies tea they distributed in America.

Pretty sneaky. But it gets more amusing. The smugglers were enraged. After all this was just another classic example of Britain’s wanton use of its prerogative over the Colonies, who wanted “no taxation without representation” (even if the taxes were, umm, lowered).  The British said they wouldn’t back down and insisted that the tea be shipped. The smugglers took matters into their own hands in Boston Harbor.

Of course, the modern Tea Party are less concerned with Royal prerogative than they are with lower taxes, which are sacrosant. So if they were discussing this in the coffeehouses of Philadelphia and Boston would they have supported the smugglers and their higher prices, or the East India Company and it’s shall we say ‘competitive’ pricing?

Demagogues love history, or at least a simplified, sanitized highly convenient version of it. Read the rest of this entry »

Cheaper Tea? How Dare you!

Americans are “mythmakers”. There’s nothing they love better than discarding the inconvenient bits of a story to fit their purpose, whether that purpose is to sell mattresses or glorify the nation’s founding.

A classic example of this is The Boston Tea Party of 1773. Indeed, so central a story is it in American Folklore that it’s the inspiration for the ‘party’ of the same name, currently running amok in American political life. The Tea Party believes in lower taxes, and cutting the deficit (go figure), and one of its favorite banner quotations is “No Taxation Without Representation”, which just happened to be a big favorite around the time of the orginal Boston Tea Party.

What today’s three-cornered hat wearing nutters don’t realize is that the use of the term “No Taxation Without Representation” was a rather convenient cover for what the Boston Tea Party of 1773 was really about.  To explain why requires a brief overview of something which people pay little attention to these days. History. Read the rest of this entry »

In the real world friendship is a big deal. It has meaning. It has to be earned. Losing it can be devastating.

But in the detached, bloodless world of the Social Network much of that meaning is lost. It’s almost as if the same word is used to describe two states that differ profoundly.

There’s a very good reason that social networks use the term ‘friend’. Simply put, it’s good for business. It adds value to what they do. If Facebook were to suggest we “find new acquaintances” or “make new connections” they’d still be operating out of Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room. Connections work for LinkedIn, which has at its core a non-social, almost clinical networking purpose, but “Friend” is a big word, a simple, profound and potentially profitable word. It’s a critical source of Facebook’s success. But the use of the term isn’t at all convincing, and far worse, is damaging and socially corrosive. The Social Network commoditizes and verbifies friendship, appropriating its value along the way, and demeaning the very concept of friendship – which is after all part of the glue that holds humanity together.

It’s the sanitized uniformity at the core of Social Networking that is also its profound weakness. For real life friends, the social network is essentially superfluous. Real friendships don’t need the artificial landscape of Facebook. They did very nicely before it came along, for thousands of years in fact. For obscure acquaintances, and former friends one has lost touch with etc, the term “friend” invites expectations that almost certainly will not be met. The constant swirl of meaningful friendships subtly devalued by the flat-lining semantics of the social network and those meaningless ‘friendships’ overvalued by the same social network make for a rather dysfunctional, intimacy free landscape, driven by habit, marketing, and an unnatural distortion of human relationships.

In short, they are a geek’s paradise. Read the rest of this entry »