Of Blue Skies and Deserts

I have been on social media since social media first crawled its way out of the primordial sludge of the internet.  I was there on MySpace.  Xanga.  Facebook.  Ello.  Twitter.  Mastodon.  And now, BlueSky.

Without question or exception, the best social media experience I ever had was Xanga.  I was on Xanga for years, and my arrival on BlueSky brings that medium to mind.  Xanga existed before microblogging became a thing, so posts and engagement there were more long-form.  Connection wasn't algorithmic, 'cause this was back in the day, kids.  You searched for and chose areas of interest yourself, and assembled your own networks.  There was no blocking, because, well, you couldn't.  So, sure, there were trolls, but they couldn't hide.  Troll someone, and they could see your profile, as could everyone in a group.  

There were no bots, because in 2004, bad actors hadn't figured out how to do that yet.  There was no tracking or gathering of data on users, because, again, that wasn't yet a thing.  There were no ads, because the internet was young and free and wild.  The content on a person's Xanga was mostly their own writing. 

It was, to be honest, a pleasure.  You really got to know people as people, and even the neoatheists and fundamentalists I jousted with became friends of a sort.  It's been nearly twenty years, and I am still in conversation with some of the souls I connected with there.

But Xanga died, because...well...there was no way for it to stay in operation.  There was no revenue, and no plan for revenue.  No ads.  No subscription.  No harvesting the activities of users to sell to advertisers. When Facebook rose and started sucking in the users, things began to go south.  Decreasing participation meant less venture capital, 'cause there wasn't any way to pretend it could be sustainable.  They tried a subscription model, but it failed.  They tried a reboot, but it failed.  It was a beautiful dream while it lasted, but it never found a path to long term viability.

As millions upon millions of users flee the propagandistic shores of X and the now-aggressively-censorious algorithms of Facebook, the challenge facing BlueSky is the same.  It's great.  I mean, a lovely place to connect.  Again, it reminds me of Xanga.

And not just in the good ways.  There is no publicly stated path to BlueSky viability.  Servers and moderators and infrastructure require an income stream, and scaling up from an experiment in federation to a sustainable platform will demand resources.  It's all buzzybuzzbuzz right now, but it'll need more than butterfly farts and biz-speak daydreams to keep it afloat.

A good social media platform is, I will note, worth paying for.  The subscription model is the single best way to ensure adequate revenue for that form of social exchange.  It guarantees platform stability, and is ultimately less predatory than the Meta model of viewing the data of your users as your product.  It also adds a transaction cost that limits botfarm incursions and gives a traceable trail to trolls and predators.

Alternately, it could lean into federation, becoming a more user-friendly version of the sprawling mess that is Mastodon.  

What's the plan?  Well, for now there isn't one, at least not one that's been shared.

I do hope it succeeds, but in the meantime, kids: don't get too attached.    

Christian Business and Religious Freedom

The ongoing uproar over legislative actions in Indiana and Arkansas over the rights of businesses to serve or not serve customers based on religious preferences will echo in our ears for a while longer.

The question, of course, is: why?  Why this strange sprawling mess, in which conservatism manages to make itself look terrible?  Religious freedom is kind of a bedrock value in the United States, and the right to believe as you wish and act accordingly is one that is central to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Yet this has been botched, with "standing up for liberty" now morphed into "wanting the freedom to refuse business to people I think are sinners."

This is mostly couched in terms of wedding-stuff.  What about the infidel-weddings?  Could you refuse to provide flowers for a Muslim wedding?  Or a Jewish wedding?  Or the nuptials of a Buddhist and a Bahai?  I mean, they're all supposed to be going equally to hell, right?  None of those would be Christian weddings, right?

And...we're talking mostly about businesses that serve *weddings* here, not marriages.  Is the wedding-industrial-complex suddenly a religious thing?  Or is it a cultural accretion, one that's nice and purty and astoundingly expensive, but has no more bearing on the dynamics of a healthy, lasting marriage than the brand of limo that takes you to your reception?

Christian marriage ain't about having a Jesus cake, people.

I don't know how this would even work, honestly.  Could a Christian restaurant owner be justified in refusing service to a man and a woman who might possibly be meeting for dinner before an extramarital tryst?   Would the Christian owner of a roadside motel do the same?  How would you check, without offending every customer you have?

As I read through one in the now nearly endless series of writings on this issue, something else struck me.  The author, a fellow pastor, was genuinely baffled as to how and why anyone would make an issue of this.

"I've never understood why separation and ostracism seem to be the posture of choice," he wrote.

In response, I found myself wondering if it might go beyond theology.  Perhaps, in some way, it is also a peculiar and unintended fruit of the "Christian business" concept.

Here, I'm not talking about folks who are businesspeople and Christians, or who view core Christian virtues--welcome for the stranger, wisdom, honesty, patience, kindness--as defining their business ethics.  To be honest, I think we could use more of that and less self-serving greed and short-term profit-maximization in the C-suites of American business.  If you're that kind of Christian businessperson, you're a blessing.

I'm referring to that peculiar trend within Christianity, in which businesses actively advertise themselves as Christian, with the intent of developing and connecting to other Christians as their primary customer base.

As a pastor, I see those directories come through, on a regular basis, filled with lists of businesses who can be "trusted."

It's an output of that strain of Christianity that views itself as fundamentally at odds with the world, and that carefully seals itself off from corrupting influence by creating a mirror-economy run by and for Christians.

AmeriChrist, Inc., I call it.

You listen to Christian music, you watch Christian film, you frequent Christian bookstores.  You find your mate on Christian dating sites, you hire Christian plumbers and electricians, you vacation at Christian resorts, and make your life about Christian everything.  It's about creating an economic circle of like-thinkers.

For those Jesus folk who want no connection to the world, that way of being can reinforce the faith.  But it also creates insularity and disconnection from the broader life of our republic.  If everything you see mirrors back yourself and your way of speaking, and you will only do business and have exchange with people who think and speak as you do, then it becomes easier and easier to rationalize actions that only make sense within your own echo-chamber.

Which is why, I think, so many of the folks behind this initiative seem genuinely confused at the uproar.  Living within their own separate economy, they have lost the capacity to connect, or to understand how they are heard.

And as someone who genuinely and deeply cares about sharing the Way of Christ, I must also ask: what impact does that insularity have on our ability to articulate the Good News to those who aren't already "in?"

Lord help us.

An Open Letter to Kaye Kory

DelKKory@house.virginia.gov

Dear Representative Kory:

Hi there!  Our neighborhood association recently circulated one of your emails, one in which you highlighted all of your legislative accomplishments over the course of the last year.  It was a good, solid list, one that generally represented your moderate/progressive record.  Education, transportation, and the environment are clearly important to you.

At the end of the letter, you invited feedback/responses/input, which is why I felt the urge to pitch you this little missive.  I'm sharing it with my small blog audience, too, as much as I struggle with the "open letter" as a tired and hackneyed net-theme.

My interest, as a progressive and a pastor, is the spread of title-lending companies in your district.  I've lived in this area for nearly forty years, and watched as Northern Virginia has grown and changed.  It's only within the last five years that title-lenders have started becoming a significant presence.  There are now four active title-lenders in the center of Annandale alone, and this is not a positive development for Northern Virginia.  It is a mark of blight.

Why?

Because these are predatory businesses.  There is no other way to accurately describe what they do.  They exist to lend desperate people money at outrageous rates, meaning annual percentage rates that are close to ten times what you'd pay on credit card debt.

The owners of these highly profitable "businesses" will argue that they're just meeting a need in the community.  This isn't true.  Like their payday-lending cousins, they are preying on the struggling and the weakest, with a "business model" that traps the vulnerable into an often inescapable cycle of debt.  Unable to pay interest exceeding 300% APR, these individuals lose their vehicles to title-lenders, a loss which drives them further into a cycle of poverty.

I'd encourage you to read this report from the Center for Responsible Lending, which details the impact of these "businesses."  Or this article at Bankrate dot com, which steers citizens away from these businesses.  Or this investigative piece from CNN.

But this is about more than just data.  As a pastor, I know the people who are impacted.  These "businesses" destroy lives.

I bring this to your attention...and to the attention of any Virginia progressives who might read this blog...because the rise of title lenders has been significantly supported by Virginia Democrats.  A review of the legislative history of the growth of these businesses shows that they have a powerful champion in your friend and Democratic colleague Senator Dick Saslaw, who within the last several years has sponsored legislation to allow title-lenders to lend on out-of-state titles.

You voted in favor of that legislation, Kaye.  

As a progressive pastor, let me tell you what your vote did.  It took a car away from a young addict who was struggling to pull their life back together.  It drove a recovering ex-con into a debt cycle that compromised his ability to pay child support.  These aren't canned anecdotes or hypotheticals.  These are people I personally know and pray for.

Not all Democrats have given legislative aid and comfort to these businesses.  Those who represent communities where the malignant presence of title-lenders has been felt...particularly African American Democrats in Norfolk and some of the progressives in Northern Virginia...have voted against the legislation that the Democratic leadership in the Senate has sponsored.  To be fairly nonpartisan, some of those who vote against the spread of these businesses are conservatives, who find their abuse of the poor to be against biblical values.

I realize that you generally champion progressive causes.  Your support of this "industry" seems out of keeping with the rest of your record.

So my question to you is simple: what are you, as my progressive state representative, going to do to defend the vulnerable from these predators?

Peace and Blessings,

Rev. David Williams

A Schmear of Schmaltz on Your Weather

With sequestration arriving in a great mess of snow and slop, I find myself reflecting on the things that government fails at, and the things it does well.

The measure of that difference can be found in the weather.  Or, rather, the difference between weather dot gov and weather dot com.

The Weather Channel gets a whole bunch of eyeballs at times like this.  When frozen precipitation slops from the skies, the hits to their website soar and we search the menus of our cable system to remind ourselves which of the 578 channels it's on.  Bad weather means viewers, and viewers mean ratings, and ratings mean advertising profit.

Which is why, increasingly, the Weather Channel is insufferable.  Naming every single weather system, because some PR/Marketing team thought it'd drive more traffic?  You've got to be kidding me.  Anyone remember Winter Storm "Khan?"  That's a name you save for a storm that blends a hurricane, a blizzard, and a haboob, the air filled with flying fragments of soft Corinthian leather.  Instead, it gave us a "swath of light snow."  Please.  

When I go to the Weather Channel, I feel manipulated.  It's just so flagrantly selling me something, as unctiously as a glad-handing salesman who's upselling you towards that Premium Product.  Hey, buddy, while yer waitin', why dontcha click through to this video with puppies?  And check out our ads while yer at it!

The deep irony, of course, is that what the Weather Channel is selling is something we already own.  Most of their data comes to them from the National Weather Service, which offers all information about all weather events free to anyone.  The satellites and the radar images and even the forecasts themselves?  All paid for out of our collective wealth, because it's a public good.

Go to the National Weather Service website, and you see the difference.  There are no ads.  There's no flash and fluff and sparkle.  You can get your local forecast, and it's got all the same detail, simply presented.  In genuine emergencies, the alerts are hard-core retro, pitched out in a font that looks like it came straight off the Telex in 1967.  All the NWS cares about is giving you information about weather.  Period.  That's their job.  What is not their job is profit, meaning panic and anxiety are not in their corporate interest.     Those Telex-fonted emergency alerts?  They're in earnest, not fabricated to insure you keep watching.

As I walked my dog through the the nasty slop smearing the sidewalks today, the analogy occurred to me.   The Weather Channel is like a schmear of schmaltz on bread.  

Schmaltz is a Yiddish term, one I'd first assumed was coined to refer to cheesy, treacly entertainment.  The old Lawrence Welk show?  Schmaltz.  Barry Manilow at his 1970s peak?  Schmaltz.

But what schmaltz originally was, or so I learned around my in-laws dinner table, is a spread.   It has one ingredient: Rendered Chicken Fat.  You take rendered chicken fat, maybe with a little salt or flavoring, and then you smear it on your bread.  That's it.  Healthy?  Absolutely not.  Good for you?  Not even vaguely.  It's junk, flavor devoid of value, that you smear on top of the real food.

That analogy seems appropriate.

Selby's

Friday afternoon, I popped by our local Bloom grocery, looking to snag some food and supplies for an overnight "man-trip" to West Virginia with some old friends.   It's the closest store to us, a seven-minute walk from our home.  It has only been in operation for a few years, replacing a frayed Magruders that had been there for just about ever.  


To my dismay, the store had signs all over the front of it announcing it's imminent closure.  It weren't just our Bloom, neither.  The Dutch holding company that owned the brand evidently wasn't making money on it.  So they are now, in the BizSpeak of their US CEO, closing all their stores to "solidify our U.S. operations and enable our company to focus on our successful brand strategy repositioning."   The success of their brand strategy repositioning comes as a great comfort to the five thousand souls they're laying off, I'm sure.  A bummer for them, although only a minor bummer for us, as there's also a Giant, a Safeway, and a Harris Teeter within a two mile radius of our home.  Retail density is one of the few advantages of living in an inner suburb, and not out in a small town.


Like, say, my recently adopted bi-weekly church home in Poolesville, which has in living memory only had one grocery store.  Poolesville, hermetically sealed away in the growth-restricted Montgomery County Agricultural Reserve, stands as a kind of last redoubt of Small Town America.  It is the Helms Deep of denominationalism and the family owned grocer.  


From the moment I arrived in Poolesville this last October, I knew the family owned grocer was in trouble.   

Selby's was one of the first places I saw and heard about in the little 'burg where my little church lives.   As a family-owned and named small town grocery store, it was one of the few remaining examples of a dying breed.  It was one of those "hubs" of the community, a place where folks could go to shop, where girl scouts could camp out to hawk cookies to passers-by, and where pastors of local congregations could put up flyers announcing events at their churches.

It was in putting up my very first flyer that I noticed the unmistakable marks of a business on its last legs.  Light foot traffic and empty, unstocked shelves mean only one thing.  Suppliers are drying up.  Credit is short.  Restocking can't be done.  

It felt a great deal like other businesses I've watched go under.  Corporations are not people, not quite, but small businesses die in much the same way human beings die.  One system fails, then another, then another, until the cascade makes continuing existence impossible.

The scuttlebutt amongst the folks who actually live in the town was that after a long run, Selby's was finally succumbing to the same cultural and market forces that have taken down Mom-and-Pop stores everywhere.   The Walmart in Germantown may be nearly 12 miles away, but what's 12 miles?   Your average soccer/ballet/karate mom puts in twice that before breakfast.  And the Harris Teeter that recently encamped on the Western front of Darnestown?   That's just 8.4 traffic free miles from P-ville.


David sometimes beats Goliath. But if Goliath is wearing powered Chobham ceramic composite armor and wielding a AA-12 Combat Shotgun with Frag-12 rounds, the odds get considerably worse.  The greater selection that comes from larger stores, the increased leverage with suppliers that comes from being a Big Box Corporation, and the expectation-meeting advertising and store-design resources that come with brand marketing, those things are just too much.  

Now that the going out of business signs are up, though, the challenge for this little community is that with the loss, it will become a slightly less desirable place to live.   Not having the option of shopping locally may feel like a minor inconvenience for those used to driving everywhere, but come the next Snowmageddon, not being able to walk to get groceries will be notable.  More significantly, it will be more difficult for those for whom driving is an issue.  


Where to get groceries, if cash for gas or a car itself is lacking?   There's a CVS for milk and eggs.  There's a friendly but pricey organic food store run by the local klatch of Buddhists.   Whichever way, it's going to be a challenge for those in the community who are struggling to get by.  The local pastors are already wrassling with what that will mean.   


It is also having an effect of the geist of the town.  The closing of Bloom will mean a bit more blight on one of the strips in my native Annandale.  But Bloom was a recent and unsuccessful incursion by a faceless multinational corporation.   


It's a very different context than the environment in Poolesville.  The depth of relationship, the personal knowing and histories of a small town, well...that makes the closing of a place like Selby's more difficult.  When it has a face, it's more than just losing a business.

Re: The Occupy K Street Account

The following represents a privileged client communication of Ferguson and Cohen, LLC as defined by federal law, SEC Section C642.h - C645r, 1992.   Any unauthorized distribution of this material represents a violation of the aforementioned statute, and will be subject to felony prosecution and penalties.





CONFIDENTIAL
DATE:  10.28.11
TO:  R. Cohen, D. Ferguson
FROM:  J. C. Morgenstern
RE:  Occupy K Street Account Development Strategy Session

Following our new client development strategy session last month, I and my staff were tasked with doing an initial development FTF with Occupy K Street.

As the management team discussed during our September 17 planning meeting, the Occupy movement has increasing brand visibility, with all media-market metrics since brand incept showing explosive and exponential growth.   This growth is coupled with a strikingly positive brand-identity in broad and multiply replicable public survey data, a yield that is verified by our own internal assessments.

Our review of recent contract-chatter through informal professional social networks indicated that, amazingly, neither Occupy Wall Street nor its subsidiary Occupy K Street have retained the services of brand management and strategic planning consultants.  Clearly, this represented an opportunity for F&C to expand our client base into a new and growing market.

Our New York office was charged with initial contact with Occupy Wall Street, and I and my team began preliminary work on potential front-end deliverables for the K Street subsidiary.

To that end, my client development staff conceptualized some preliminary Six Sigma/POLIS Delta protocols for the movement, which we felt would clearly represent the value-added of engagement with F&C's branding team.  The two most promising POLIS/Delta yields:

1) Increased Drilldown on Brand-Specific Marketing Events:  In our assessment, Occupy K Street has the potential to be the most viable of the Occupy subsidiaries, particularly given its location at the nexus between corporate power and the American political system.   Its primary location is within several hundred yards of some of the most influential and well funded corporate lobbying firms.   To date, however, it has failed to leverage that synergy to any discernable advantage.

Instead, it appears primarily focused on impromptu dance parties in intersections, making cardboard signage, intense respectful discussions, and drum circles, none of which are recognized as mission critical functions in our Six Sigma protocols.  It has also diluted brand-identity by engaging in non-productive partnerships with previously established brands, such as FreeTibet LLC and GazaCorp.

Our value-added on this front would be to identify individual lobbying firms, their partners, and their office locations.   Focusing media events on the entities that define K Street in the public eye would, in our assessment, yield a positive and predictable process result.  It would also expand brand appeal into the fragmenting Tea Party market.

2)  Improve Social Media Messaging Brand Protocols:  A review of social media outputs indicated considerable potential for improvement in messaging strategy.   The primary twitter feed, for example, seems primarily used to say there isn't enough water/shelter/pizza, or to fret about the cops, or to talk about interpersonal disagreements.  As messaging goes, this could use some refinement.  A market-identity that is hungry/thirsty/cold is unlikely to draw significant support in the key 18-34 young urban demographic, and while highlighting interpersonal drama works well within the reality television marketplace, it has been shown to be less effective as a tool for mass movement mobilization.

Refocusing primary social media messaging away from damage control, in-house-chatter, and development efforts and towards the aforementioned Brand-Specific Marketing Events would increase the visibility of the Occupy K St movement.  Those functions could be dealt with by secondary outlets.

With these two primary yields, our team endeavored to approach senior management at Occupy K Street to establish the front-end relationships necessary for proposal negotiations.  Background research indicated that the management structure at all Occupy subsidiaries is a carefully guarded corporate secret, and our experience onsite confirmed this research.  Each initial contact insisted they had no knowledge of senior management.  Most seemed unwilling to admit to any knowledge of CoC structure, and would stay messaging-consistent, insisting that there was no such thing.   Despite this considerable and impressive control over management access, we persisted.

Our eventual on-site FTF came following a chance encounter with an individual named Johnny Justice Muffin, who admitted that he was, in his own words, "The Supreme High CEO of All This [Fornicating] [Excrement], Bro."   CEO Justice-Muffin indicated that there is some distance between our anticipated front-end billables (150 hours at a staff-average $100/hr, plus 35% overhead) and their fiscal year 2012 budget for management consulting (a previously used tarp, two hand-made free-range squirrel-fur caps, and a package of what was described as "some seriously kind [stuff], it only looks like shake, man.")

Given this hard-line approach to contract negotiations, it is our recommendation that next-stage conversations be subcontracted to our contract development specialist team.  I will look forward to further conversations on that front, and to responding to your questions, at this next months client development strategy session.

JCM

Retail Politics and the Tea Party

The relationship between business and politics is an odd one.

On the one hand, politicians are often accused of being in the pockets of business.  Government pork is funneled to contractors.  Industry lobbyists make sure that politicians are kept rolling in campaign donations, just so long as every decision they make favors industry.  It's one of the charges leveled most regularly against elected officials, and one of the things that makes Americans so very very fond of our political culture.

On the other hand, being a competent and capable businessperson is typically seen as a significant asset for an elected official.  If a candidate knows business, and understand the dynamics of running a successful business, it's something that gets trumpeted in every campaign ad.  This is particularly true of the folks on the more conservative side of the political spectrum.

Looking at the imploding spiral of political paralysis that threatens to own-goal collapse the integrity of our financial system, I find myself wondering why it is that while conservatives frequently trumpet business as the model for what is best for America, the most conservative wing of our political sphere seems completely oblivious to the dynamics that make for a successful business.

A good businessperson wants to make a profit, sure.  They want to come out ahead.  But what you don't do in business, not ever, not never, is completely refuse to negotiate or compromise.   If you want to land a contract, or get the best deal from a vendor, you might haggle a bit.  But in the long run, you want to establish a working relationship, and to develop a customer base that views your business as resulting in a mutually satisfactory exchange.  It means occasionally compromising on the absolute bottom line.  It means making sure that people come away from an exchange feeling they've gotten a deal, and wanting to continue the relationship with you in the future.

This is not a Tea Party strength.

I find myself envisioning a Tea Party car salesman, sitting on a lot full of Fords, utterly unwilling to budge for a moment on MSRP, no matter what that guy across town has offered.

I find myself visualizing a Tea Party vendor, who pitches a proposal that is undercut by another vendor offering the same service, but who won't sweeten the deal at all.  The proposal is what it is.  Take it or leave it.

I see a Tea Party CEO who in the face of a flaw in the antenna of their companies' latest smartphone just tells people to suck it up.  You bought it.  You know how to make it work.  You'll get nothing more from us.

A business run by Tea Party standards would go bankrupt.  This does not augur well for America.

Compassion and Business Failure

About five minutes walk from my house, there used to be be a 7-11. It had been there since before I was in high school. When I came back during my college summers, I'd often stop in late at night to pick up a bucket full of caffeine and sugar and CO2 in solution before pleasantly squandering my evening and early morning playing NES and talking with friends. Since shortly after we bought our little homestead, it had been a target destination for walks with the boys. Amazing how the promise of a Slurpee can motivate kids to take a brisk hike.

Early last year, much to the horror of my boys, the 7-11 shut down. For more than six months, the building was empty. Then, someone leased the site, and that someone began trying to start up a new independent convenience store.

It doesn't seem to be going well.

For the longest time, the interior was totally stark, with only a smattering of shelves with an assortment of oddments. No posters. No colorful displays. No fountain drinks. No Icees or Slushies or Mushies or Squishees, or any comparably icy blended beverage. The store appears to have one employee, the owner, who appears to be either Indian or Pakistani. 99.975% of the time, his battered early 90s SUV is the only one parked there. He sits at the counter. He stands outside smoking. He's there in the morning, at night, on weekends and on weekdays. He appears, quite frankly, to live there. But though he's there all the time, his business is evidently failing. What would be the best little convenience store in Islamabad just doesn't cut it in suburban America.

My boys and I have noticed and talked about it. There's real pathos in this struggling business. There's a life coming apart right in front of our eyes, as each of the lease payments come due and the unsold stock passes it's expiration date and that little parking lot stays empty, day after day, night after night. So we're rooting for the guy. We've watched as the store owner has made efforts to improve. A few ad posters now decorate the walls. There are now decorations and a few displays. My 11 year old son, whose heart beats big in his chest, actually called me on my cell the other day just to tell me that the store owner had finally taken down the little banner that passed for a sign, and replaced it with a real illuminated sign. He's trying. He really is. But still, his careworn Blazer sits alone in the lot.

Should we shop there? We could...but there's not really anything there we can't get for less money at the spanking new grocery store across the street. We could...but the only things that drew us there are no longer sold there. We could...but our business alone wouldn't sustain it. We could...but compassion isn't something that drives us to buy things we don't need or want.

And so we watch. And as I watch, I wonder whether this little store is some sort of metaphor for the thousands of tiny churches all around the country that are struggling to survive, my own included. It's not that they don't try. It's not for lack of effort, or earnestness, or even faith. It's just that they don't offer up something that people want or need.