Eric Garland

The Internet is lit up with hand-wringing about a referendum in North Carolina regarding the passage of a referendum aimed at making gay marriage illegal in the state forever more. On Facebook, Twitter and in the comments sections of all the usual Internet hangouts, well-thinking people are lamenting this step toward a new Dark Ages, a further deepening of injustice, a coursening of society. After all, North Carolinians voted overwhelmingly for a measure that would limit the definition of marriage to one man and one woman, excluding all other forms, specifically the national drive toward same-sex unions that will open the institution of matrimony to gay and lesbians. Surely, people are saying, this is the end of progress for the friends of equality and human rights as far as people see it today. Woe betide us, and lament!

These activists should take a deep breath, because they are actually seeing the penultimate sign of victory for their stated cause. It may not seem that way at first glance, but the overwhelming referendum in favor of an explicit prohibition of gay marriage is actually the last step before gay marriage.

I call this the Theory of Opposites. Let me explain.

All over the world we see institutions over-stepping in order to defend turf they have already lost. People tied to antiquated cultural beliefs are making quite a bit of noise these days. They are marshalling their forces like never before to pass legislation and demand secret government powers and more, all in defense of horses that have left the barn and cats that are out of the bag. Wherever you see the most egregrious behavior in defense of something, it is because the opposite is the megatrend with the most importance.

This Theory of Opposites is certainly at play here in the gay marriage front. Homosexuality is now widely accepted in most societies, or will be soon in the future – which is why the attacks are intensifying. The fact is, younger generations do not care about homosexuality as a threat to societal stability; their parents may, but the kids do not. Moreover, we live at the point in history when it is likely most pleasant for gay and lesbian people. Centuries ago, open homosexuality would have provoked ostracism or death in most societies. As recently as a few decades ago, homosexuality was subject to regular police harrassment, specifically at all-male bars. At the very least, violence toward homosexuals was tolerated in ways it was not toward other populations in society; they were “asking” for it.

Today, we are certainly witnessing a concentration of legislative action in places like North Carolina, where the last set of marriage definition sought to forbid inter-racial marriage – and California, home of Prop 8, where the descendents of Utah polygamists banded together to make sure people adhere to one lifestyle and set of beliefs, clearly attempting to set a world’s record for irony. And with this is a sign the war is almost over.  Glee is on TV, featuring gay high school-age characters, and it produces a minimum of freak-out. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy came and went a decade ago. Ellen Degeneres has been out of the closet for nearly two decades. Girls are going to the prom together. For a few hot minutes, the Republican candidate for president had a gay guy running his foreign policy team. Iowa has allowed gay marriage along with South Africa, Mexico and Spain. And look, if corn farmers, the guys who used to have apartheid, and the guys who invented the word “machismo” have gotten over guys and girls shacking up with whomever they love, the game is over.

The Theory of Opposites is at play in proliferation of drones and robots for the purpose of “target killings” of “enemies” of the United States and other nation states. All this crazy drone and robot activity appears at first to be the precursor to a scenario in which America will take over the world with a  robot army that looks like Johnny 5 from Short Circuit, only viciously murderous. Don’t worry – yet. The Theory of Opposites states that the attempt of one country to automate its war-making efforts is not a sign that it will go insane and take over the world, but rather that it really can’t.

Look – Iraq and Afghanistan may be the last time the United States will put boots on the ground in a conventional war in your lifetime. Sure, the Pentagon “analysts” on Fox News sure play it straight-faced when talking about how great America’s wars have gone, and they even rattle a saber or two at the perennial Persian bad guys while they talk about how much “progress” has happened.

Don’t be fooled. The U.S. Military’s latest foray into Central Asia has been an unfathomably costly disaster. Hundreds of thousands have died. Trillions have been spent, and will be spent in the near future, when you consider the lifetime costs of rebuilding depleted equipment and caring for the thousands of injured for the rest of their lives. Tragically, the United States’ reputation as a basically positive force in the world has been torn and tattered. But most importantly, we’re running low on oil. The apparent peak of world petroleum supply will be devastating to anybody’s intentions for World Domination. Getting tanks up and running, keeping supply chains for men and machines, airplanes, mobile hospitals – it all needs oil, and the Central Asian debacles likely took place in the last decade of ready, cheap, available liquid fuel. General George S. Patton said famously, “My men can eat their belts, but my tanks need gas.” That hasn’t gotten less true, it’s gotten more true.

So why all the dreams of robots and light, unmanned aircraft running around to zap individual bad guys? Because the days of sending hundreds of thousands of teenagers with rifles are over. That oil will be better spent carting our aging populations around and I suspect people in the halls of power around the world know it. Robots and drones are becoming the new faces of force projection, not because of a dystopia on the way – but because it’s all we will be able to afford.

SOPA and PIPA were roundly decried on the Internet as the arrival of a new jackbooted regime of info-authoritarians. They even turned off Wikipedia to get attention to this most precarious moment for democracy, ruining the efforts of millions of cut-and-paste school assignments and creating an outpouring of very sternly worded comments on Huffington Post. And the Good Guys won!

The Theory of Opposites tells us that the info-authoritarians are not really that close to winning – and they know it. The ham-fisted legal attempts to let a few companies control parts of the web with minimal oversight was really the sign that our current institutions will not be able to keep control of the power of computers, especially not where antiquated issues of copyright are concerned. The Powers That Be must try to keep their reputation going by giving people the impression that they can still keep a hold of information using copyright – a five hundred year old legal concept designed to keep a monopoly on the printing industry – and using the power of the legal system, which is largely bought off through money and not justice in most countries, and which is completely ill-designed for global issues.

Here’s the reality – if you have anything resembling a smart phone, you have a super-computer in your pocket. The price of memory is still falling; ditto for the price and capability of processing speeds and network bandwidth. Humanity is still rocketing toward a future where every person can keep and exchange every single bit of information ever generated by our race. The institutions we currently employ for a variety of activities – educational, economic, legal, medical and more – are grossly unprepared for the reality this will generate. Are the laughably obsolete companies that control a shocking percentage of the world’s intellectual property, both cultural and scientific, attempting to hold on to their societal position with one last grasp before we figure out that the walls are really down? Is it ugly looking? Will chaos result, mass hysteria, dogs and cats living together? Maybe – but I am currently thinking along more positive lines.

So the next time you see a group of aging bigots band together to pass one last flailing constitutional amendment against a group of your friends, take a deep breath. If you see some lobbyist group try to buy your political representative off to pass a law by which they get to control the color blue and the numbers one through six, just shake your head and smile. If it seems like the world is over, maybe you’re right, but not in the way that you think. Remember the Theory of Opposites, and the fact that a new era is on the way – much to the chagrin of some who like the illusion of control.

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I have, in the past few weeks, received several confused emails and tweets regarding my continued writing on subjects pertaining to the trends, scenarios and where the world is heading in general. “Didn’t you just announce that you won’t be doing that kind of thing anymore in the pages of The Atlantic?” they ask.

A bit of clarity on the matter: I am writing full time at this moment, and if you are writing for people, it should involve their world, their life, and how it might change. This may look very much like what came to be called “futurism.” One might note that I chose my words very carefully in that article for the Atlantic – one I did not seek to publish, but that was requested of me, it should be said. In the article, I made a very specific statement about the strategic intelligence industry, the practice of being part of a corps of analysts at the service of corporate and government bureaucracies regarding long-term future trends and what should be done about them. That is the part that no longer interests me, the bit about arriving at best practices and pretending that futures studies somehow functions like accounting, HR, or even market research.

But thinking about the world and how it’s changing for real people – and helping them decide what should be done to arrive a future that is just, prosperous, aesthetically beautiful, healthy and fun?

It’s not just my business – it should be everyone’s business, in all of their affairs. So, yes, I will continue to write on topics of humanity and how it’s changing.

If you need a futurist consultant, I remain uninterested in that work – but would be more than happy to recommend to you the best practitioners in the industry. Just drop me a line.

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You really must give a read to this absolutely excellent presentation about the effect of digital technologies on record labels and artists, entitled “Meet the New Boss, Worse Than the Old Boss.”The author is a professional musician who achieved some success in the business as it was, and who also had high hopes for the potential of digital to “liberate” artists. But his extremely-well-considered debate is as follows:

What follows is based on my notes and slides from my talk at SF Music Tech Summit.  I realize that I’m about to alienate some of my friends that work on the tech side of the music business.  These are good well intentioned people who genuinely want to help musicians succeed in the new digital paradigm. But if we are gonna come up with a system to compensate artists fairly in the new digital age we need an honest discussion of what is going on.  The tech side of the music business really needs to look at how their actions and policies negatively impact artists,  just as they have pointed out the negative effect record company actions have had on artists.

Too often the debate has been  pirates vs the RIAA.  This is ridiculous because the artists, the 99 percent of the music business are left out of the debate.  I’m not advocating going back to the old record label model,  to an industry dominated by the big three multi-national  labels.  This is a bit of hyperbole intended to make us all think about this question:  Is the new digital  model better for the artist?

The answer: No.

I can tell you as an professional musician and author in the digital age, the Internet is 1% cool, as a fellow listener and consumer of all this great free stuff, and 99% awful, as it destroys the path that people must walk down to become a mature creative person. Remember, becoming a great musician or writer means that you must grow into the role – and frankly, on the way to that growth, you have to make enough money to eat with. Not “light cigars with $100 bills” enough money, but “rent an apartment, have a used car, and eat modestly while purchasing fresh strings and the occasional blown speaker cone” enough money. This is what ALL of your favorite bands did starting out – make enough money to keep developing as an artist until a truly compelling artistic voice emerges. You become a great performer by touring, and you become a great artist by making enough money to survive while you write new material. When you take a link out of that chain, notably the modest amount of money to cover expenses, then you confine people to only playing local shows and keep them from making records.

I do not have a solution to this problem, but I will tell you that the author’s conclusion, that the tech industry’s assumption that content is valueless and of endless supply, is a truly pernicious development in our culture. Think it through.

P.S. I’m playing Latin music with Tino Mendivil this Friday night at Dante’s club in downtown St Louis, please stop by and support live music.

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Some of you may be following the presendential election happening right now in France, the second round of which will be between François Hollande and the sitting president, Nicholas Sarkozy. If you are in the English speaking world, you will be interpreting this through brief news clips and some statistics, likely receiving a tiny fraction of the real goings-on in this country to which we are so tied, and yet from which we are often repelled.

My friends in France shared this piece in Le Monde with me about the entire election as seen through the eyes of a single man, Bruno Lafeuille, a 53 year-old wine store owner who is shutting his business down while simultaneously considering an election that will affect his country’s future. I thought this piece was really poignant, a way to show how most people in the industrialized world are sharing many of the same experiences – career disappointments, the effect of weird values in the banking industry, a revisiting of assumptions, a bit of everything. This man is shutting down his wine shop and shelling out cash to get a certificate to be an ambulance driver. And instead of voting for the right-wing, like he normally does, he’s voting Communist, of all things.

The story is fascinating, so I have translated it in its entirety into the English language. Enjoy.

>>>>>

The life behind the vote

(Originally posted at http://avallon.blog.lemonde.fr/2012/04/21/une-vie-dans-un-vote/)

This is not a polling sample. Nor a case study. Nor even a special report. More like a bit of serendipity. Just a man you meet who suddenly just sets to talking. A citizen who, on April 22 and May 6, will go vote because he “has always voted” which he considers “a point of honor.” It’s the mysterious alchemy of a single vote, one that shakes up preconceived notions, defies sociological analysis, and which goes far beyond statistics.

In the envelope that, along with millions of others, Bruno Lafeuille, 53, a voter in Avallon, France, will slip into the urns Sunday, there will be a sort of chemical precipitate, if you will, of “major” issues in current affairs: the Crisis, banks, debt, the environment, employment, unemployment, business, renewal, education, illness, values, consumption, taxes, citizenship. But also: trials and tribulations, friendship, small pleasures, stops and starts, anger, and hope.

Additional details about this chance meeting: discussion of the presidential campaign was far, far away. Bruno was getting ready to attend his weekly singing lesson. When he was little, people always told him he had “a beautiful voice,” and it was he who always pushed the family to have singalongs. Time went by, and music remained his great passion. He has been singing classical music in a choir for a decade or so. He’s a tenor, and his eyes light up when he talks about his music professor and about Requiem de Fauré, listens to Pavarotti’s version of Nessum Dorma on infinite repeat, loves show tunes, plays in a rock band with his buddies, and even does a bit of community theater.
When we ask him what he does for a living, he says, “wine shop owner.” Then, stopping suddenly, his regard gets more distant and he says, “Well, I guess I should say I was a wine shop owner. Because in a few days, I’m closing up shop for good.”
And this was when the dam started to give way, a flood of words that we could scarcely interrupt or get a question in edgewise, words to be taken as they were. And as such, We wanted to pass them along.

“I went back to see my banker, and he wouldn’t work with me. It’s over. I went to get my bankruptcy documents in order. I’m going to do my best to pay my small suppliers, the winemakers who trusted me, and who, like me, are just trying to squeak by. The others, hey, too bad, I don’t have any choice. A few weeks ago, I thought I could make it out of this. My banker authorized 1000 euros because I had the place up for sale, and I had some guys interested in buying me out. The buyout package was signed for the amount of 25,000 euros. The buyer were owners of a house in the Paris suburbs, they wanted to sell it, and so they need a loan while they waited. Their bank refused, and the buyout fell through. Then, my banker said he could no longer arrange for lines of credit. I owe around 15,000 euros. That’s both a lot and not that big a deal when you consider I do around 120,000 euros of business per year before taxes. But since I can no longer buy stock, I can’t sell anything, so neither can I pay back my lines of credit.”

“These days, bankers are only interested in these enormous structures, because there are jobs to save, and they know there will be government subsidies. But Bruno Lafeuille, from Caves de la Halle in Avallon, who has no employees other than himself, nobody gives a damn. And that’s why I’m angry – bitter, even.”

“Banks are no longer doing their jobs. We have got to separate out commercial banking and speculation. And I’m tired of fighting it. Whatever people say right now, we’re screwed. Before, if you wanted a loan for 5000 euros, they offered you 10,000, telling you that the interest rate was much better. So people took it. It’s like telling a little kid not to eat sugar and then sticking an enormous cake under his nose. So he eats it, gets sick, and throws up. But we don’t care, because it least he was ‘consuming’ something. And when he’s in too much debt, we cut him loose.”

“Before all this, I was a car salesman. We had people walk in who wanted to buy these crazy expensive cars. And we looked at their income and said, ‘Are you sure you might not like a different model, or even something used?’ They told me they were going to take out a loan. And we would set the loan up for them since the dealership got a cut of the action. That’s why I quit. I no longer wanted to sell people cars through debt.”

“After that, I opted for a change of lifestyle and I got a professional certificate from the local training center to get an apprenticeship working the vineyards. I did that for seven years, in Vézelay and at Saint-Bris-le-Vineux, organic wineries. But there, it was my back that gave out, and the opportunity presented itself to run a wine shop.”

“If I have to shut everything down tomorrow, I’m not saying that it’s entirely the fault of the banks. It’s my fault, too – I surely could have managed the place better. And then there was just the hand of fate. My wife who worked with me – she was the accountant – got very sick. Cancer. We got divorced, and I met someone, a soprano, but during the ten months of her illness, I took care of her, gave her all her shots. We had some beautiful moments together, we talked, we forgave each other, and she died in the hospital in my arms. That was back in November 2010, and that is likely why work was pretty tough.”

“I’m angry with consumers today. I see these people who say, ‘Oh wow, you’re closing, that’s too bad! Yet one more small business shutting down.’ And I say back them, ‘Sure it’s sad, but you’re going to Auchan supermarket a whole lot more than you’re coming to see me. So I’m not asking you to buy all of your wine from me, but you ought to think about what you’re saying here, you know?’ And people are all talking about making small business work, buy local, eat organic – but they don’t put their money where their mouth is! What I don’t understand in France is how everybody gives these great speeches, but then their actions don’t match up at all.”

“It’s true, I’m bitter. Because I’m not a crook. That’s what I told the bankers: I’m honest, I don’t have a giant SUV parked out in front of the store, I’m not taking all my lunches in restaurants, I don’t go on vacation all of the time. I manage my shop, probably not great, but like the father of any family. And you guys go and treat me like I’m some kind of crook.”

“There’s also this image of the small businessman, who in the minds of a lot of people is rich guy who is getting a lot of his money under the table. I invite all of those people to come look at my books, and those of my friends next door, who are all working their butts off.”

“So I’m changing careers once again. Since I was a volunteer firefighter for ten years, I’m going to switch over to being an ambulance driver. But now, to drive an ambulance, you have to get your certification. I took the training to get it, which ran me 650 euros straight out of my pocket. Since this is a job retraining, I don’t have the same rights to get help from the state unemployment office.”

“With that, I should find some work. With ambulances, there is a lot of demand right now, since the country is aging and the health of this place is changing along with it. Hospitals are getting further away from people, which means you need transportation, so there’s plenty of work. So that’s what I have to do. Especially me, at 53 years old, there’s nobody in a company looking to hire someone like me. Luckily, I also have a backup plan besides ambulance and rescue. I’m going back to school, too. I’m going to get an ambulance driver diploma so I can specialize in night shifts and make a little more money that way.”

And at that moment, we invited the presidential campaign into the discussion.

“I was born in Neuilly to a family that was pretty well off. I had a golden childhood. I went on vacation, I was always well cared for, I wanted for nothing. When I made it to voting age, I went along with my parents and voted for the right-wing. I kept it up. In 2007, I voted for Sarkozy. I believed in him. I thought we were going to get to work and see the benefits of our labor. In 2007, that’s when I really went out on my own, launching my wine shop. But Sarkozy, man, that’s over and done with.”

“There was a moment when I really believed in François Bayrou. I said to myself, ‘Finally, a guy that is like me. We’re going to move forward.’ Because I think there are good ideas on the right and good ideas on the left, and I always wondered why we didn’t meet in the middle for the good of the country. But I quickly figured out that Bayrou was nothing but an opportunist. Anyhow, that’s how he seemed to me. First he was more left, then he went more right. He’s playing both angles, flip-flopping, and that I don’t like.”

“I think it’s the system that has to change. We can’t keep going like this. I went to see Mélénchon, the Leftist Front candidate. At first, I never imagined that one day, I would vote for a guy like that. I mean, there’s the whole thing with the Communists, the Soviet Union, millions of dead. And in his program, there are things I don’t like. He’s kind of recruiting for a movement, a populist. But he’s the guy who said things I wanted to hear.”

We bring up Marine LePen, the ultra-right National Front candidate. “She, too, says some things that you’d like to see brought up.”

“Marine LePen, I gotta say… [making hand gestures of hesitation, weighing two things against each other] Me, I am a Frenchman. And I don’t want that word misinterpreted. I think, for example, that when you live in a country, you should live by its rules. So with LePen, there are things that I like. But there are a bunch that put me off as well. I was a volunteer firefighter, so I’m somebody who just loves people. So extremism, I just don’t dig it.”

We ask him how he will vote in the second round of voting May 6.

“I’m going all the way. I’m voting Left. Because I’m trying to be logical and I want things to change. I don’t really believe in it, but I’m going to do it anyway.”

Just one man, one vote – but the breadth of an entire life will be in that envelope.

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I was reading Barry Ritholz’s The Big Picture when I spied the guide for comments section:

Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data, ability to repeat discredited memes, and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Also, be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor even implied. Any irrelevancies you can mention will also be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.

Words to live by.

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On Monday, Facebook shocked the world by making an offer for Instagram, a web application that shares photos, for one billion dollars. This is notable for a few reasons:

1. Instagram has only been around for a couple years
2. The company only has 13 people
3. Nobody can quite show how the company makes any money

Yet the business press, doing about as well as it usually does, is breathless about the implications of this “acquisition.”

Gather ’round, kiddos, so Uncle Eric can tell you about the Good Ol’ Days of the late 1990s – Dot Com One Point Oh! It was really, really fun! In Austin, Texas, San Francisco, Boston, and DC, everybody bought leather jackets, “cell phones,” and leased Porsche Boxsters. And people made $65,000 a year for their ability to spell “HTML” right on the first try!

Oh, and the conversations we had about “Dot Com” companies. Such as “the company is worth $635 a share, but is still searching for a business model.” And nobody started laughing, they just chugged back a $12 “Cosmo-tini,” which people had invented nine seconds earlier. And “Glugg.com, the world’s greatest web portal for soda, was just purchased by Baloogie.com for $32 billion in stock options and leprechaun farts.” And nobody laughed at that, either, they just turned their attention back to trying to sleep with Jessica, the new web developer, who had just started working at company nine milliseconds earlier.

Seriously, if you missed the first version of this lunacy, you missed a much better time. The World Trade Center was still standing, we didn’t have troops in Mesapotamia, and you actually thought your 401 (k) might get you through retirement.

Back in the day, though, my background in farming and industry led me with this unshakeable thought – “We are all completely full of shit. This is only floating because Boomers are dumping money into Wall Street and the cash has to go somewhere. And nobody can tell me what economic purpose is served by 99% of this junk. As opposed to actual companies.”

So in the spirit of my old skepticism, I would like to compare Instagram’s finances to a real company – General Electric, a maker of things you would miss if they were gone, such as jet engines, nuclear power plants, and lightbulbs.

Instagram has been valued, albeit by only one buyer, at $1,000,000,000, or $76,923,076 per employee.

General Electric has 301,000 employees, and, as I mentioned before, produces things people use other than photo sharing with cool filters.

If General Electric were valued in the same way as Instagram on a per employee basis, its value would be $23 trillion dollars – or roughly 50% of the economic activity on Earth.

General Electric’s actual revenue is $147 billion per year, or roughly 0.2% of the world’s yearly economic output.

Yes, these comparisons may not be justified, but then, lacking any actual revenue as the basis for an analysis of the deal, this is kind of the best I can come up with. Which reminds me of Dot Com One. People running around throwing out big dollars (of decidedly Other People’s Money) with a complete inability to justify the numbers based on the rest of economic activity in the world. This is when rational thought goes out the window, and the hypemeisters say, “Look, man, don’t overthink it, it’s a big deal – just trust me.”

The last time I heard that, we had a spate of hideous corporate corruption cases at Enron, Global Crossings, Worldcom, and others.

Should I lease a Porsche while times are good?

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Man, in television land they never let you get beyond soundbites – which is why it was so great to be on The Alyona Show to discuss the implications of my Atlantic article. This is a much bigger story than just a few soundbites about who’s right, who’s wrong, who’s an idiot.

Check it.

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On the front page of The Atlantic today is piece on how strategic intelligence has become a shell of itself since 2008.

According to the private intelligence industry’s view of itself, a phalanx of analysts collect data, assess the risks and opportunities inherent in trends, and provide a series of scenarios that help their clients make contingency plans, such that no matter what future arrives, people will thrive. But the reality of 2012 is quite different. A large number of people promise these services, from generalist mega-consultancies such as Booz Allen, Accenture, and McKinsey, to more boutique providers such as Global Business Network, the Institute for the Future, Frost & Sullivan, and countless individual practitioners. And many executives claim to practice state-of-the-art strategic management, dutifully using the insights of these providers in their day-to-day operations. Still, the culture of intelligence has been in free-fall since the financial crisis of 2008. While people may be pretending to follow intelligence, impostors in both the analyst and executive camps actually follow shallow, fake processes that justify their existing decisions and past investments.

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