Pink Air

Eighties

I haven't read a newspaper in a month and I feel much more relaxed. When I was in the U.S. last summer, I read three papers a day and everything I read made me feel bitter in one way or another. But it's my own my fault. Nobody forced me to wallow in the nihilistic, know-nothing nincompoopery¹ of the theatrical troupe formerly known as the Republican party. Or to ask passing strangers, "But isn't it actually stupid or worse for a heavily armed public servant trained to defuse situations to arrest someone simply for being arrogant?"

When I feel bitter, incredulous, lazy and self-pitying all at once, I like to listen to Killing Joke. Which is not surprising given that their music is, not fascist, but proto-fascist. Their energetic dirges and invocations of millennial apocalypse to cleanse the earth of human soil would have been beer hall favorites if the electric tuba had existed in 1923. And what with Jaz Colman flying off to Iceland to await the Apocalypse and/or record Scandinavian Black Metal bands, his quizzical sympathy for the Germans of the Sudentenland, the musically and ethically spurious claim to be free of all nasty American influence including the Blues (um, about those electric guitars...) and just generally sounding like flaky assholes a lot of the time, it's not surprising that some have imputed actual fascism, but in fact they're just motivated by a common feeling of having been cheated by the people in charge:

You can apply the killing joke to everything. Imagine a soldier in the trenches in WW 1. He's just been told to run over and gain, say another 15ft of land and he knows he's going to die, and he suddenly thinks that there's some fat cunt back in Westminster controlling his life, and he feels a bit of a mug. That feeling is the killing joke.

An otherwise random WWI reference makes perfect sense from this perspective. As does their mystical kinship with Rammstein, the fantastical bog men spawned from the long buried guilts and resentments of the East, who are also regularly accused of fascism. Both bands are built from the same cultural and psychological stuff that fascists whipped into an unstable explosive: the revanchist "stabbed in the back" myth, neo-Pagan calls for cleansing destruction, the cult of anti-Reason, easy and equal contempt for democracy and communism. Variations on this recipe recur throughout history² and regularly blow up in their maker's hands because they aren't really sustainable political systems. They're anger management tools, like punk.

I suspect that both Killing Joke and Rammstein know this. Both have, with varying cogency, refuted accusations of fascism. But if you don't believe their words, I think exculpatory evidence can also be found in their musical behavior:

1. Their music is funkier, rockier, just much better than fascist art.
2. The leering chuckle of Geordie's vintage golden Gibson ES and leather pants (and pretty much everything about Rammstein) owes a lot more to the transvestite theater of Weimar than Nuremberg.
3. Both bands are familiar with the myth of Götterdämmerung
4. And maybe for that reason, they both exhibit a wistful sense of distance from the apocalypses they claim to welcome. They're not so much Armageddon's cheerleaders as its jesters.

And even if they were Nazi agitators, the audience of black t-shirted 40-somethings at last year's Pandemonium show, our nodding bald spots scattering the stage lights like stars, would be in no condition to answer The Call. Certainly not that late at night. Why can't they start these nostalgia concerts at a decent hour anyway?

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1. Source: Will-I-Am Safire, the nonpareil of noisome Nixonian nastiness.

2. I often imagine Killing Joke's "Eighties" applied to the 1380's and the Peasants Revolt³, another one of those times when people felt cheated by their leaders, except for the boy king Richard II who, inevitably, betrayed them. It might sound like this.

3. Chumbawamba (who else?) recorded The Cutty Wren, a folksong that actually has been attributed to the Revolt.

Bad service 2.0

Blogs are a dime a dozen. Bad customer service experiences are about the same. So blogging about bad customer service is worth (0.1/12)² or about 0.0000694 USD. But I'm going to run through my recent experience with Dell anyway because it was bad in an interesting way.

My Dell beamer smoked and died about two months ago. After ruling out lung cancer, I checked the lamp which seemed fine, but I replaced it anyway. Still nothing. The beamer was almost four years old, so out of warranty, but had been used for only about 60 hours, a small fraction of its estimated service life. I called Dell service and was told, "Out of warranty. Nothing we can do." I went to the Web for possible solutions, but found instead a number of people complaining about similar problems and similar Dell response.

So I sent Dell an email explaining that I knew the product was out of warranty, but that it seemed defective and given their recent efforts to improve their fairly abysmal service reputation, maybe they would have a look at it. Nope. Out of warranty. But "thank you for choosing Dell." Fair enough, I responded, but no, thank you, I will not be choosing Dell again.

Here's where the "service" kicked in. For the next month, I received a series of messages from Dell, seemingly desperate to get in contact with me. Emails and the occasional unannounced call bounced around between Amsterdam, Maryland and Bangalore, trying to find the best time and number to get in touch. Twice, I waited by the phone for scheduled calls that never came. Eventually, they tracked me down here in California and when we finally met, voice to voice, they said (wait for it): "Out of warranty. Nothing we can do."

But they wouldn't leave it at that. I explained again that I knew it was out of warranty and didn't claim any legal right of redress, but that I still didn't think happy thoughts about Dell. I was passed to a supervisor and then a manager who, with increasing levels of authority and solicitude, repeated the same thing: "Out of warranty."

There were some interesting digressions. Like when the supervisor tried to sell me an Epson beamer for $649.99 (Supervisor: "That's a great discount." Me: "Umm. No, it's not. I'm looking at it on Amazon for much less. And why are you trying to sell me something at this point anyway?" S: "I'm not trying to sell you anything.") And when the manager said, "If only it were less out of warranty."

I kept saying, "Look, you're saying it's out of warranty. I understand that. But I still don't like Dell and will not buy a Dell product again. That's just the way it is." This seemed intolerable to them, but marginally more tolerable than actually fixing the thing. Finally, the manager offered to "take this to the engineers." I doubted they would spend much time thinking about a discontinued product, but it seemed to make him happy.

After hanging up, I went back to the Fortune article on Dell's efforts to improve customer service and it's funny. They talk a lot about communicating via social networks and product co-creation and monitoring online chatter: Dis the company in a blog or a Facebook group, and someone from a crack response team may even chime in, if only to let everyone know that Dell cares. They seem to have confused communication with service. "We're listening. And calling. And emailing. And Twittering." They don't say anything about actually making better products and standing behind them. Bad service on Twitter is still bad service. That's my 0.007 cents worth. Thank you for your time.

Don't blink

Robert Burton's On Being Certain could be described as the anti-Blink. While Gladwell's book suggests that our intuitions are right more often than we think, Burton's argument is that we aren't right nearly as often as our intuition tells us we are. More precisely:

Despite how certainty feels, it is neither a conscious choice nor even a thought process. Certainty and similar states of "knowing what we know" arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of reason.

Each book is the flip side of the other. Both tell us that quick, reflexive, primitive brain circuits make a lot of decisions for us which we then explain or explain away with more rational justifications. But Burton's is the better book.

Maybe it's the Asperger's talking, but the idea that you should "trust your feelings" has always struck me as useless. Which feelings? (Okay, to be fair, Blink is about specifying the times when you should trust your instincts, but the gist is that intuition is underrated. It's not.) At the level of consequences, gut-level certainty is much more destructive than doubt. And personally, I've always been an outsider to that moment in the creative development process when everyone seems to converge on one approach as being "right" and team feeling takes over from discussion. Intuitive, creative leaps are necessary to get anywhere and a sense of rightness is politically and emotionally useful, but certainty, particularly in a field as socially-determined as advertising, is a fairly certain sign that you're wrong.

Interactive effects are the future

Brian Eno once said something like, "Effects are the future." Since I can't find the exact quote, I get to make up what he meant by it.

Computers get a bum rap from many artists, partly because machines have long been assigned the wrong role in the creative process. They were touted as substitutes for human judgment which demeans both machines and humans.

What computers are good at is storage and variation without prejudice. This means that, like a creative ad agency, they produce a lot of weird and trivial stuff. But every so often they make something that is interesting: valid, beautiful, useful, unexpected, out of the blue, sensible, open to competing interpretations, concrete, emotionally resonant, inspiring, generative, worth thinking about. And as Paul Arden said, a few of those usually make up for all the other crap.

I've been using Ableton Live for some time now because I find it relatively easy to produce things I find interesting with it. That is largely because I focus on the accretive, almost geological, application of filters and other sorts of effects rather than trying to produce interestingness ex nihilo. I tend to start with a simple melody or rhythm, then add or subtract multiple effects and connect them via a few parameters so that there is a little bit of feedback going on. A little bit of interaction between the elements of a mix is important because it means that the ultimate result is coherent. The ear perceives a relationship between the sounds even if I didn't put it there explicitly. And coherence is what distinguishes an interesting result from a beautiful mess.

A few days ago, I discovered Motion, Apple's motion graphics program contained in Final Cut Studio. I now divide my life into Before and After Motion. Motion uses visual effects in a way that is similar to Live and other music software. With just a few filters exchanging a little bit of information over and over again, something big and complex and interesting can pop out. And since Live and Motion can also exchange some information, you can create interesting synesthesias with just a few clicks: Download Synesthetic mandala

The fact that this looks like an animated Grateful Dead logo begs the distinction between interesting (active) and mesmerizing (passive). In fact, there is some discussion among educational psychologists as to whether interesting material actually requires less active attention than boring material. It seems likely that we process interesting things more deeply, creating a mental model of the relationships between the parts which we can then manipulate, trying out variations not explicitly defined in the original material, rather than simply applying more attention to interpret it verbatim as we do with boring material. Which means:

1. As a brand holder, you want people to process your messages at this deeper level. Interestingness is much more powerful and inexpensive than effective frequency.
2. Interesting brands are brands that people find it easy and pleasurable to generate variations on. Generativity is a way to measure interestingness and should be a core brand measure.
3. We learn and create by generating and trying out possible variations on things. Like computers. And neither humans nor computers are demeaned by this shared characteristic.

Miners

Like planning, data mining (AKA KDD (Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining)) is kind of leaning over the edge of facts to select from a set of more or less risky possibilities. So besides being something that planners might find useful, it's also a field that planners might find interesting, in part because KDD's efforts to automate the process of finding the most valuable among the huge number of patterns discernible in any large database has led them to contemplate the nature of interestingness.

There is no standard definition of interestingness among the miners. That would go against their gritty and perverse nature. But there is wide acknowledgment that interestingness is central to their task (“Data mining can be described as the process of finding interesting patterns in large databases”) and that it is usefully decomposed into a number of sub-criteria:

Interestingness differentiates between the "valid, novel, potentially useful and ultimately understandable" mined association rules and those that are not--differentiating the interesting patterns from those that are not interesting. Thus, determining what is interesting, or interestingness, is a critical part of the KDD process.

Different authors produce different lists of criteria...

...but in general, the miners' blueprint of interestingness overlaps to a surprising degree with intuition and my more scribbly formulations. Novelty, validity, surprisingness, range, peculiarity(!) and utility are all there, each one intriguing if not entirely self-explanatory (I see that as my job), and the "ultimately understandable" criterion is consistent with the observation that delayed comprehension can be more valuable than immediate understanding. At least, it should make us reconsider our definition of comprehension.

Insights into interestingness are everywhere, but data mining offers an especially rich, data-driven yet thoughtful lens through which to view and address our own interestingness management issues. What makes "Just Do It" such a concise, surprising, useful idea to so many people? What contextual knowledge ("domain expertise" in minerspeak) is required for a campaign idea to be novel rather than just weird? "Novel, surprising and peculiar, yet valid, useful and ultimately understandable" could describe a leverageable pattern of purchase behaviors mined from the slag of last week's retail numbers. It could also be a critic's response to Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz or a viewer's take on a chocolate ad featuring a musical gorilla. Each of these things is worth minding and potentially valuable because first of all, they are interesting.

Overconfident

Last week, I accidentally erased some of Jen's email as we were trying to diagnose a previous problem. I still don't know exactly how or why it happened, but I do know when. I deleted an old account that was somehow serving as the Library setting for her current account. Jen hates deleting anything, so she asked, "Are you sure we should do this?" and I  quickly responded, "Sure. You don't use this account and there's nothing in it."

I also remember feeling impatient. I don't feel frustrated or anthropomorphize broken gadgets into bad guys. It's more like being eager to tinker and find out what works. It's fun to figure things out and machines are figureoutable. You may stop looking, but you can be sure that an answer exists. That's why I repeatedly disassembled our phones as a child and prepared for work in the IT department at Morgan Stanley by reading about medieval Italian banking and the nature of electricity. (This is an excellent site if you're interested.)

Mac Repair salvaged what they could, but in the end, I permanently erased two weeks of Jen's mail. My only defense is that I was in some sort of engineering fugue state. Men in particular seem susceptible to these outbreaks of blind overconfidence, especially when it comes to traditionally masculine topics, which makes us (among other things) worse investors than women.

While we were waiting at the repair shop, I happened to be reading a kindlet that contained one of Captain Bligh's last messages sent from the Bounty and I think it works as a general credo for Male Pattern Overconfidence:

My little Ship is in the best of order and my Men & officers all good & feel happy under my directions.

Immanent domain

There was a point in "Going Dutch," Russell Shorto's critical appreciation of our adopted country's social welfare system, when I thought he was about to recognize a pervasive quality of Dutch culture that I've always felt, but never seen clearly expressed. Interestingness often feels like the revelation of something we already knew subconsciously, so I was prepared to be interested when I read:

It’s true that I have grown to appreciate many aspects of this system. But honesty compels me to reveal another side. There is a mood that settles into me here, deepening by degrees until its deepness has become darkness...Something about this place rekindles the existential rage of my youth. Why are we here?

"Existential" is a word I often use to describe Dutch culture, confusing natives and immigrants alike, and I'd hoped that someone more articulate was about to clarify my meaning for me. But Shorto's essay glances off that target to bury itself in the broad backside of Dutch collectivism, consensus and conformity. True (and at times annoying) enough, living here is sometimes like an extended visit to the DMV. "What makes you think you're so special?", translated into Latin, could easily be the national motto of the Netherlands.

But there is a powerfully individualist flip side to Dutch culture, visible even in the well-known admonition to "just be normal" that Shorto quotes, like most people, incompletely. The full saying is: Just be normal and you'll be crazy enough. The Dutch system is based on an existential appreciation of the basic weirdness of everyday human existence. It attempts to minimize the common material wants that typically fuel market economies and make people more fearful, competitive, rushed, violent, status-oriented, more crazy, than they need to be. Like Freud in reverse, the Dutch system is designed to remove the sources of common unhappiness and free the individual to ask, "Okay. If I'm not here simply to survive, why am I here?"

That question, as strict and bare as the interior of a 17th-century Protestant church or "the calm, bland streets and succession of broad windows giving views onto identical interiors", leaves you stranded with yourself in a way that might very well inspire an existential rage in someone who believes that individual value and happiness are dependent upon being special in some way. I think this is one of the reasons why ex-pat bitching sessions inevitably resolve into complaints about Dutch "service." There's always a whiff of "Don't these people know who I am?" in the air. (A phrase which, translated into Latin, could easily be the national anti-motto of the Netherlands.)

Dutch culture doesn't exactly deny the possibility of individual transcendence. But it does make you wonder. Maybe that kind of happiness, if it exists at all, just isn't something you can pursue.

Voudou

As a lifelong member of the National Romerian Association (not to be confused with the other NRA with whom we have nevertheless proudly shared both a president and a tagline for just over a year now), I have never had much time for the Haitian or "voodoo" zombie. In the end, being docile, hard-working and non-flesh eating just isn't all that interesting. But I'm willing to reach out across the aisle after seeing the Voudou exhibition at the Tropenmuseum yesterday. The red and black icons of the Bizango secret society would be equally at home in Silent Hill or the Saatchi collection.

Henchmen Inc.

Companies rename themselves for any number of reasons. Sometimes they want to direct attention to a fundamental change in what they do. Sometimes new management simply want to announce their arrival. And sometimes (think Philip Morris to Altria), they want to cover their tracks.

This seems to be the case with Blackwater, the U.S. military security firm that quietly changed its name to the benign and in their own words "meaningless" Xe two months ago. Any rebranding risks effacement of brand equity, but when effacement is the primary objective, most companies seem to believe that the more meaningless the new name, the better.

Which is a shame. Evil henchmen have a long and inglorious history, reflecting the eternal need of rulers to shed blood while avoiding the spatter. When the cry rolls down from the castle, "Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest/little girl/country?", who will respond to the call?

Why not Wickersham, Wickersham & Wickersham, Royal Purveyors of Mayhem Most Subtile Since 1798? Or if you want something more Web 2.0, names like Iago, Flying Monkeys and Turd Blossom prove that unscrupulous doesn't have to mean humorless. (Nor must it imply a tin ear, though most henchman themes seem to be variants on the Song of the Volga Boatmen. Even the Oompa Loompa song. This may be because good henchmen, like good proletarians, are required to joyfully signal that they have no individual identity.)

Now, Oompa Loompas, while clearly henchmen, are more creepy than evil, reminding us that the defining characteristic of henchmen is not evil but amoral obsequiousness. The word appears in the 14th-century as an apparent compound based on Old English hengst/horse, so the original henchman was probably a groom or stablehand.

Hengst still means "stallion" in German and Dutch and is associated with male sexuality through related forms like hengstig/horny and hengstenbal/stag party. (Which speaks to the Oompa Loompa connection.) And as a sidenote to that sidenote, Hengst and Horsa (also meaning horse) were 5th-century mercenary brothers from Jutland who were invited to England by the Celtic Britons to fight off their native enemies, the Picts. Mission accomplished, H&H liked it so much they decided to stay, invited a bunch of other Germanic tribes over, and took the country away from under their chagrined Celtic hosts. The Blackwater of their time, the Jutes may have been first on the ground, but were dropped from the letterhead when the Angles and Saxons later instituted an ambitious but ultimately successful rebranding effort.

Inhuman

 

I borrowed Jen's iPod Touch to try the Amazon Kindle app and in the past two days I've read sample chapters from about twenty books. Mobile book browsing seems to hit a neuromarketing sweet spot in my brain where browsing, buying, reading and stealing intersect. I feel like one of the survivors in a zombie movie, grabbing stuff off the shelves in an abandoned store because, why not?

But instead of racing back to a reinforced cellar in the evening with a knapsack full of No-Dōz and Moon Pies, I do a quick wireless sync and in ten seconds I'm reading from the collection I've stashed away piecemeal during the day. It's surprisingly satisfying to read ten to twenty pages from a book and move on. You get a high rate of interestingness at a comfortable, intermediate, cycling pace, and a good sense of what you actually want to read all the way through.

I'm eager to read more of Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson's practical, philosophical guide to what makes animals happy. Imagining another species' mind is touching, shocking and oddly relaxing, like Magic Eye. To see it, you have to let go of something you didn't know you were holding onto.

I also enjoyed a sample from Forensic Pathology, part of the CRC series in forensic investigation. (I've long treasured my old copy of Practical Homicide Investigation by Vernon Gebreth, BBA, MPS, FBINA, Bronx Homicide Task Force and general editor of the series.) There is, admittedly, a lot of unseemly rubbernecking to be done in a book about bodily decomposition, both sudden and gradual. But like the animal mind book, it offers a compelling alternative perspective on almost everything, as very interesting things often do.