COVER -> DAY ONE
 |
Although the care with which I craft these articles might lead you to believe that I hardly do anything else, the truth is that I have a day job directing a not-for-profit agency which specialises in information technology and social exclusion. It is very stimulating as I develop new hypotheses, test them and, if they are right --- as they usually are --- I incorporate them into policy advice for legislators and Governments.
Inevitably, too, I come into regular contact with the industries that make up the information and telecommunications firmament. A good deal of the time I spend in the company of executives from these organisations is wasted because their argot is so strange I do not understand what I am being told.
I think of something that needs doing, find some money, pay to see that it gets done and then try to replicate it if that is appropriate or, in any case, to draw conclusions.
Occasionally I am invited to become involved in a partnership but I insist that this is clearly defined and equitable to both parties.
Businesses, on the other hand, seem to spend all their time manoeuvring, leveraging and writing strange configurations on flip charts. Indeed, the whole culture is so mysterious that I don't actually know what some of my best friends do for a living; they seem to have loads of money as the result of extended conversations on their cell phones but they can't answer the old fashioned question: "What do you do for a living?"
There will be some of you by now who are no doubt feeling frightfully superior, such a quaint little person this Carey, rooted in the old economy, but I have a story to tell.
Last week I was invited at three days' notice by one of the world's leading IT consultancies to make a presentation at its first ever, day-long session to develop a Pro Bono strategy. I agreed to spend some time on a briefing during which I explained what I might say. My contacts utterly rejected my observation that the key problem with IT is that many organisations are seriously out of date but do not know it and that this is a particular problem in the not-for-profit sector; that would be unhelpful, they said.
Still, we agreed what would help them. I asked if I might come early to learn a little about them but they had, they said, some projects which were still under wraps, implying that I wasn't to be trusted.
So the terms of the deal were that
- I was to make a presentation to people who did not trust me,
- would not talk about themselves,
- would not tell me who would be there,
- could not afford a ten Dollar train ticket (communicated in a sour little e-mail)
- but wanted me at three days' notice.
Now you know why I write such trenchant anti-capitalist stuff!
As the presentation involved no extra work and as their office was on the way to the Royal Albert Hall, where I was to hear the B Minor Mass on the 250th Anniversary of Bach's death, I agreed, out of the curiosity, to a certain extent, that irresistibly drives children to probe their own scabs.
I made a lively enough presentation and was followed by two other people who had interests in the IT and social exclusion area but the third, much more gifted in diplomacy than I will ever be, asked our audience (a third of that we had been promised) how it would have seemed to them if a major not-for-profit had called them and asked at three days' notice for their top three executives to present free of charge without any briefing about the audience?
Had it not struck them that we three were busy people?
I was glad he said that; it gave me courage in the Q&A later to refer to the regrettable situation whereby poor people give money to not-for-profits who are expected to give valuable free advice to global companies. I, for instance, frequently find myself advising some of the world's biggest companies on the sheer stupidity of their design and marketing policies.
Afterwards, over coffee and more corporate blather (you can always spot it, there are never any concrete nouns) I finally brought myself to ask our charming hosts what it was they thought their organisation had to offer us and whether they thought there was anything we had to offer them. It was clear from our treatment and the language used that the transaction was, intellectually, all one-way; that we knew nothing whereas this global corporation possessed vast knowledge and resources we lacked. As I left, the thought that stuck was that if they were that great they would have had a better idea of what they wanted because the only bono in their Pro Bono was certainly going to be reflexive; on the sound basis of Cui Bono I rated my chance at zero but theirs only slightly higher.
I tell this story because we live in an age where major corporations are often thought of as the sole source of wisdom. So let me remind you of another story.
Three years ago, in Wired, all five major CD creators and distributors --- BMG, Sony, Universal, Warner and EMI --- separately wrote panels saying that the Internet was going to destroy them unless they did something about it.
At the time I wrote a pleasant piece saying that publishers, including record companies, should see the Internet as an opportunity; that all the research showed (and there has been much more since) that the Internet complements and boosts sales of what we might call "conventional" products; but that if they were worried they should construct a unified site for music sampling and sell downloads of back catalogue at rock bottom prices.
Then, predictably, along came Napster; the industry had spent three years collectively moaning, wishing the whole nasty Internet business would go away or praying for some data blocking process as impregnable as Fort Knox.
Each year that went by the back catalogue was plundered and the public blackmailed. No matter which way the Napster court decision goes it will be irrelevant in the long run but there are other more pressing issues which the supposed gurus in their tower blocks and penthouses seem not to have come to grips with: which side is going to win in the war between Bayesian logic systems which can separate the wheat from the chaff and the chaff-brokers who think that advertising will be the quid pro quo for 'free' Internet services?
If the advertising model fails, what then? Will the micro payments system and traditional copyright survive as the basis on which people make content because they expect to be paid for their trouble, or is copyright dead, in which case we need a new market model for intellectual property?
How will digital access through television be culturally different from access through PCs which grew out of an academic and industrial background?
If your system is geared to a pay-per-view digital provider who has every incentive to get you to buy things and, therefore, is not likely to welcome your freelance creativity, what chance is there that our domestic digital technology will inherit the 'sit up' characteristics of computers rather than simply enriching our 'sit back' television experience with yet more sport and even more camera angles? And that's only the hors d'oeuvres!
