grace

… filling in the negative space with positively everything

SXSW 2009 Post-Mortem : An Interactive Tale Full of Sound and Fury

Entering the Microsoft TechSet Bloggers Lounge at SXSW this year was like stepping into a living tag cloud: the words “social media,” “online,” “Twitter,” “Facebook,” “blog,”"twitterati,” “social media,” “retweet,” “startup,” “hashtag,” “social media,” and – did I already say this? – “social media” hovered over the laptop-and-cable crowded tables. Energy was high as people connected online and offline, sharing ideas, information, and the occasional gossip. You got the impression something big, something cutting edge, was happening there.

Then it hit me. During a visit to the lounge, I had a Daily Show “Moment of Zen.” As one blogger raced around the room asking for retweets, the room turned into a scene from Shakespeare’s Macbeth:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

The pomp, urgency, self-importance, adulation bordering on idolatry…it was all farce. If the Internet made the world flat, it also created a new class stratosphere: Web-Celebrity, populated by people whose biggest claims to fame are the numbers of followers and “friends” they have in online social networking sites. As James Wolcott said of self-styled celebrity Ann Coulter, the Web-Celeb is like “the Paris Hilton of postmodern politics, an elongated zero, a white-hot sex symbol symbolizing nothing” – after all, they may be hot, but what real substance, what genuine value, do they create?

How Did We Get Into This Economic Mess? By Banking on Gandhi’s Seven Sins

THE SEVEN SINS IN OUR WORLD  (Mahatma Gandhi)

  1. WEALTH WITHOUT WORK.
  2. PLEASURE WITHOUT CONSCIENCE.
  3. KNOWLEDGE WITHOUT CHARACTER.
  4. COMMERCE WITHOUT MORALITY.
  5. SCIENCE WITHOUT HUMANITY.
  6. WORSHIP WITHOUT SACRIFICE.
  7. POLITICS WITHOUT PRINCIPLES.

The collapse of American banks and corrupt corporations like Enron seems to be rooted in several of Gandhi’s Seven Sins. In the desire to generate wealth without work – that is, trying to boost profits without creating real value in exchange for it – corporate and investment stakeholders manipulated the system without conscience or due diligence. They set business and personal integrity aside, ignored sound principles and practices, and used fuzzy math (a la the Gaussian copula function) to toss risk around like a hot potato, without recognizing that someone always gets stuck with it at some point, and everyone eventually gets knocked out…or the game ends altogether.

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

  • Art Not Ads!

  • Flickr

    OrtizArtInHall2OrtizArtLobbyLoungeCrowdScene2Hotel Sorella - grand stairway version 2Hotel Sorella - Bistro AlexCollageInLoungeCityCentre streetscape pedestrian at Hotel SorellaCityCentre Sculptures by DesignCityCentre Houston Motor ClubBehindTheBar

  • tweets...

    Posting tweet...