Clare Townhill

"Dear Homeless Man Who Totally Witnessed Me Losing It Last Week"

I've loved McSweeneys publications (home of The Believer and McSweeney's Quarterley) for a while. One of their new site additions is the publication of open letters: funny, poignant, sad, sweet, and some just downright weird. Here's one I particularly liked this morning:

Dear Homeless Man Who Witnessed Me Totally Lose It Last Week,

When I ignored you and kept walking down 10th street, it was inconsiderate. When I told you to fuck off after you pressed me for change, it was rude. When you followed me into the crosswalk and I took the seventy-odd cents from my pocket, threw it into the intersection, then told you to go after it, I was being... Christ, I don't think there are words for how heartless that was. I'm so sorry. You saw me at my worst. The look on your leathery face haunted me for days. If I could do it over again I would've put the change in your hand. Shit, I'd buy you lunch, too.

You probably noticed I was wearing a suit and figured I had money to spare. That was a ruse—I never wear suits, and that day I was only wearing one to impress people at a networking event I'd just left. I went in hopes of finding a job, but the event ended up being a crowded hotel ballroom full of tacky, obnoxious people who insisted on using empty phrases like "social media strategy" and "brand evangelism." It was an MBA petting zoo. I only managed to meet one HR worker while I was there, and right after she felt that I was out of visual range, she folded my business card in half and tossed it into the nearest garbage can.

I've been unemployed for the past seven months. The only reason I went to that networking event was the naive hope that someone there would save me. My ship of ambitions has been smashed against the cold, rocky coastline of corporate reality, and there were no survivors.

Defeated, I walked down 10th street back to my car and saw you in the distance. I'm embarrassed to say it, but I laughed at you. I used your misfortune as a springboard to vault myself out of unhappiness. I glared and smugly found reasons why I'm better off than you are. "I wonder if he ever interned for a P.R. company," I thought. "Or stayed up until 5 a.m. carefully sizing and aligning the text on his business card."

And then it hit me: what if you did?

What if you pursued your career goals and experienced rejection so many times that it broke you?

I pictured myself two years into the future. Unshaven and reeking of cheap whiskey, I would stand at the on-ramp of highway 85 North holding a cardboard sign with WILL USE CORPORATE JARGON FOR FOOD scrawled in Sharpie marker. I saw the future me walking Williams Street late at night, starving and broken, as a closeted businessman pulls over his hybrid Civic and calls me into the passenger seat. As I unbuckle his belt, I would catch a glimpse of his shiny new Blackberry and weep quietly about the career that left me behind. Then with the last part of my dignity completely wrecked, I would sit on the sidewalk and beg people for change. This was the exact moment you asked me for money. To have my what-if-I-become-homeless nightmare interrupted by an actual homeless person was more than I could deal with.

I saw that, with the slightest change in variables, I could be begging for quarters, too. And it drove me to hysterics.

I'm not saying this excuses my behavior, but I just want you to know why I acted the way I did. For what it's worth, I'm sorry. If I see you again I'll give you five dollars and a hug.

Sincerely, 
Mark Rooke

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/openletters/5homeless.html

 

"When we pop out of the womb we are all natural hackers"

Really enjoyed the Hacking and Innovation talk this week courtesy of Canvas8 and W+K. At the heart of the talk was the notion that following the rules is robbing us of life and that somewhere in the conflation of sticking to the rules and judgements about our goodness as people it all went wrong. Plus f course some great examples where benevolent rule-breaking can take you. Josh Klein and Bill Jensen co-authors of 'Hacking Work' said some great stuff. Here are some of the soundbites that inspired me most:

"When we pop out of the womb we are all natural hackers"

"We were at our best and brightest when we were driving our parents crazy by asking 'why, why' why? But then unfortunately we grew up being taught that following the rules and being good people equate to the same thing."

In amongst all this goodness I met Giles Phelps and had a great but brief chat to be continued at a later date. He's just posted this lovely video 'Hacking People and Culture', sweet, thought-provoking and a perfect content piece for this post. Thanks Giles.

 

People Watching Plus from Rune Madsen on Vimeo.

Goggle Boxes and Cognitive Surplus

A nice little nudge from Information is Beautiful reminding me to post one of Clay Shirky's stickiest stats about cognitive surplus:

200 billion hours of television watched in the US vs the 100 million hours estimated to have been spent on the creation of Wikipedia. Or to put it another way the US watches a wikipedia's worth of TV advertising every weekend. It's pretty easy to go binary at this point (as many have) about what Clay Shirky's suggesting. TV bad, digital creation good. He's the first to acknowledge that there will always be those for whom consumption will continue to dominate and be preferrable. The point he's making is about what happens when technology enables two new actions - create and share - that amplify the ancient human behaviours of socialise and belong. This is where technology becomes it's most interesting and most powerful: the intersection between new enablement that amplify hard-wired primeval needs.

 Amazon: Clay Shirky - Cognitive Surplus

Thoughts in the dead of night

'The real world map shows what we humans have been given to work with. The Web shows what we have chosen to care about.' - David Weinberger

The return of insomnia has given me lots of additional time to think this week; the following post is likely to be a journey rather than a destination. Apologies in advance. Broadly, the following things hang it all together: digital technologies, material ownership, and genuine indexes of individual enjoyment.

There's been lots of hue and cry over the last couple of weeks about illegal downloads, threatened legal actions, gnashing of teeth on both sides. As E-books are refined the experience becomes much closer to reading from a page rather than monitor all the questions of IP and DRM that have beset and befuddled the music industry are now being fretted over by authors and publishing houses. Ruskin said that literature is 'divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.' Some of the books we'll read are likely to be ones that we'd never have bought, and if we had parted with hard earned cash for, we'd be damn well pissed off. I hope very much that ebooks will give me the same luxury that illegal music downloads do: (just for the record, I'm spending more money on music now than I ever have before) the ability to browse at leisure and in huge volume to decide what I am and am not willing to pay for.

I read this on NewScientistTech yesterday:

Here are some of the responses from NS readers:

The other six pages of comments proceed in a similar vein. The desire to consume and the desire to possess are radically different. Which brings me neatly back to books/ebooks and a comment from an article in The Times (dead tree version) today:

'Some books are worth the trees they're printed on, others are not. That is the distinction that the electronic book offers.'

Some music is worth the trees/discs/vinyl... you get the point. The things I want to read and the things I want to own are as radically different as the tunes on my iPod and the cds on my shelves. The baseline is a judgement of quality and worth. Make more books worth buying and I'll buy them, make more music worth listening to and I will willingly fork out for it. Until the various industries are able to work with this instead of pushing our technologically illiterate government towards empty, draconian and unenforceable threats, we will continue to feel no compunction in downloading 'illegally'.