p.m.warner, inc.

Epic anti-cat rant

2014-03-04T22:47:00.002-08:00

Posted by Reddit user Dr_Dudley_Dabble

My girlfriend wakes up at 9am. Snooze starts at 7:30am.

Such is my lot in life.

She also has this fucking cat that's the reincarnation of a lesser demon. Fucking thing slams my glass-sliding closet doors to wake me up, meows, knocks on the bedroom door or crawls all over my face until it's fed. No number of throw-offs, push-aways, batting ats or water sprays disables this little bastards' selfish appetite for even an hour. Why the fuck do people buy cats? People pay for cats. If you wanted to rescue it and save its life for free, like okay, but people pay to be abused and clean up an ungrateful little never-learning self-indulgent furry fucking gremlin's shit for 20 years. Buying a cat, to me, indicates you're a bloody masochist. He sleeps 20 hours a day, he poos in the house, his play time consists of me doing things he finds interesting until he feels i'm too fucking boring for him, he gets fur on everything, and I can barely leave something on the counter without this over-hyped raccoon of a pet trying to fucking lick and eat it. Dogs, I get dogs. Dogs do what you say, play with you don't just expect you to play with them only, can be pretty respectful, show some kind of amiable level of guilt at their mistakes and can typically be kind of useful like bringing you shit and barking at strangers and whatever, dogs are like stupid friends that always want to play sports but think you're the coolest fucking dude ever. Cat's suck bags of dicks.

99 Life Hacks to Make Your Life Easier!

2012-10-17T22:41:00.001-07:00

SHIALABEOWULF:

runaway twitter insurance poll & the power of social media & sharing stories

2012-10-16T02:51:00.000-07:00

hola comrades

so yesterday something extraordinary happened while i was diddling around on the train from philly to boston, coming home from an overnight trip to do a kickstarter house party, saturday night.

i was casually reading the sunday new york times (one of my very favorite combinations in life: train, coffee, ping-ponging between reading the newspaper, my twitter feed, and looking out the window at the new england coastline) and i read this article in the sunday review section: A Possibly Fatal Mistake. long story short: when you’re uninsured and the shit hits the fan, the shit….hits the fan. i had a to-do list of other things to focus on (a blog about my houseparty, for one, which was AWESOME…thanks ellen & michael!!), but….

it hit a nerve with me, and i sent a few musing tweets about my own experiences with insurance…

most small-to-mid-level musicians i know don’t have health insurance. some musicians find tricky ways, some pay, most take the risk & pray.

when i was in my early twenties, buying my own insurance would have been equal half my rent. it just didn’t seem like an option. (cont…)

my parents had just watched the death of my step-brother (uninsured when stricken with a disease) almost destroy the family bank…(cont).

…and so they DEMANDED i get insurance. we fought. they offered to pay half. i agreed. i was lucky. many aren’t. think about it. #AndVote.

…and then people starting musing back at me, in their own tweets, about their own experiences with insurance. i could tell i’d hit somewhat of a nerve with THEM, and then it occurred to me that’d it’d probably lead to a fascinating cross-section of information if i asked everybody on my feed what their current situation was:
quick twitter poll. 1) COUNTRY?! 2) profession? 3) insured? 4) if not, why not, if so, at what cost per month (or covered by job)?

…and my feed EXPLODED. EXPLODED. i found out that twitter has a twitter LIMIT (you can’t tweet more than 100 tweets/RTs in an hour – which is probably to prevent actual pornbots and such) and i went to “twitter jail” twice. but the force of what people wanted to share was unstoppable. i think i probably got more than 2k responses to the question. i only wish that i could have shared every single response, because the story it’s all telling is huge. deep. painful. crazy.

most eye-opening were the stories about people getting married and/or putting off having children due to insurance problems.

also this: people OUTSIDE the US were looking at all the tweets from the US and feeling really, really, really bad for us. and some younger tweeters (teenagers, i can only assume) were shocked that we americans don’t have what they have (the NHS was getting a lot of love and support from the brits, especially seeing as it’s under threat).
people INSIDE the US couldn’t believe what people OUTSIDE the US didn’t KNOW. this is the amazing power of twitter sometimes. we all think we share common knowledge, and then something like this pops up and BAM – you see a whole bunch of people in different countries shocking the hell out of each other. we all know that lance armstrong doped, that lady gaga gained weight, , etc….but tons of people in the UK/Finland/Australia/etc don’t know the extent to which US people FREAK OUT on a daily/monthly/yearly basis about insurance. how much it changes our lives. and how EVERYbody has a story.

i asked for a volunteer (that’s right folks, a volunteer. we can all send her virtual hugs and high fives later) who might be a geeky statistician wanting to compile the data to step forward and aubrey (@aubreyjaubrey) from michigan did – bless her heart. all of a sudden a total stranger was reaching out to the people on my feed, gathering extra data to put together an actual chart of information.

people really started pouring out their stories. the actual dollar amounts. lots of frustration and shame about jobs, choices, insurance, changing life courses.

the craziest thing that happened is that towards the end of the night, i simply could not keep up with the amount of info and i started seeing something i don’t USUALLY see, as i’m generally wrapped up in a twitter-y amanda-bubble, talking about things like….music and musicians and stuff. all sorts of onlookers started to wander over and talk about what we were doing. and people started saying “hey: there are real stories, HUNDREDS of them, being told over here. you should go look.”

and when they did, they saw things like this…

• 1. US 2. sah-mom 3. Yes after 3 yrs w/none,4. Spouse Union job/$0, b4- $1300.month/mammogram copay-$1700 #InsurancePoll. — Peg(@IowaPeg) (link)

• 1.USA 2. Teacher/private school 3. Shared by employer. I pay $700/ month for HMO for family of four. #InsurancePoll — Shannon Vermeeren (@ghostsandstars) (link)

• 1)US 2)Tech/freelance writer 3)No 4)Lost coverage 4 yrs ago when I left abusive husband, now can’t afford it #insurancepoll — Maggie Croft (@albionidaho) (link)

• 1)USA 2)NURSE 3) no 4) not offered through my agency and too expensive for private. (and I’m asthmatic) #InsurancePoll — Switch65 (@SwitchMe65) (link)

• 1)UK 2)Doctor 3)No 4)Free #nhs care, thank goodness. — David Griffith (@theplaguedoc) (link)

it was then that i realized we could probably hand this hashtag over to the world, take it off my feed (i don’t have the energy to moderate thousands and thousands of RTs…and i shouldn’t, we should ALL do it. so now (tomorrow morning, as i’m writing this) when the majority of the US and Europe are awake (and australia, you’ll be sleepy, but tune in), i’m going to hand this over to the people.

not bad for lettering left-handed, eh?

EVERYBODY can twitter the questions, and the hashtag, and EVERYBODY can share the results.

can you imagine what would happen if EVERYBODY in america (AND the world in contrast) shared their insurance stories and information, and got it trending on twitter, with everybody adding their stories to the pot??? hell, i can’t think of a better way to combat voter apathy, honestly.
this shit is real, yo.

and it’s non-partisan. no judgment. just tweet the question, share your story, and listen back & keep the conversation going.

again, the question to share/ask (and answer if you haven’t yet): quick #InsurancePoll 1) COUNTRY?! 2) profession? 3) insured? 4) if not, why not, if so, at what cost per month (or covered by job)?
and MAKE SURE TO INCLUDE THE HASHTAG #InsurancePoll TO HELP IT TREND

the collective conversation is what’s important, and what we will learn with the volume turned way up might really make a REALLY big noise. it already has. and if you wanna share more story, comment below in the blog itself. i wanna read, and seeing the twitter results, everybody else does.

especially heartbreaking: two separate women twittering that they couldn’t afford insurance BECAUSE they were breast cancer survivors (and therefore “high risk.” wow. that is truly fucked.)

let’s do it. it’d be amazing to see #InsurancePoll trending alongside bieber-fever.

i’ll post the gathered data as soon as it’s ready. the results, as DM’d to me a few hours ago by @aubreyjaubrey:
– preliminary info from first 156 responses indicates 24.5% of US respondents do not have insurance because of cost.
– 31.4% of responses were from outside of US. all but one person had some kind of compulsory of government supported healthcare – (that one person was denied)
– 24.4% of those abroad have some employer/private insurance for optometry and dental. individual costs from $45-$90/month. around $250/mo for a family.
– based on responses, Germany appears to be the only other country with extortionate health care costs.

a few hours ago aubrey posted she was off to bed but would continue today and that so far, 240 sets of data had been entered.
nice.
THANK YOU, AUBREY!!!!

and now………dig in…raise your voice…if you want to see/read more about what’s happening, you can also just go read my feed. it’d take you a while, but it’s ALL there.

to start you off, here’s a selection of it from the past twelve hours or so, the first of which is by the author of the times’ piece that got me going to begin with…this is what i love about twitter: strike a match. carry it to the world. pass it off. watch it SPREAD LIKE WILDFIRE. WE ARE THE MEDIA. this rocks.

• Thanks to @AmandaPalmer for following my health column http://nyti.ms/Ou087c with her #InsurancePoll http://bit.ly/blog101512 — Nicholas Kristof (@NickKristof) (link)

• Was working as a writer for Wired for 40 hours/week for several months, in an office. No health insurance given #insurancepoll — Geeta Dayal (@geetadayal) (link)

• I got married when I got pregnant at 18 for insurance. He was abusive but I stayed 17 years — flowerbudd (@flowerbudd) (link)

• Actor. Insured through my union, eligibility determined by earnings. I worry I won’t make it every single year. — Wil Wheaton (@wilw) (link)

• #insurancepoll USA/dance teacher/ yes/ 454 for myself and 2 sons. Husband covered by job for 100. For fam would be 800. — Karen Fullerton (@kafdancer) (link)

• we were going to get married anyways but she switched Jobs and pregnancy would have become pre-existing cond so we rushed it. — Geof W (@GeofW) (link)

• 1) USA 2) writer 3) Yes 4) Writers Guild of America. Free but I have to write a certain amount of films/TV a year to qualify. — Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) (link)

• Canada. Full-time student and part-time vet assistant. Insured for free because everyone is!! — Marley (@marleybones) (link)

• 1) US 2) artist 3) yes 4) $1800 a month for 2 of us under our small business plan (more than our rent!) #insurancepoll — armyoftoys (@armyoftoys) (link)

• #InsurancePoll 1 USA 2. HS teacher 3.insured PPO 4. I pay $350 a month+$150 meds a month+ after a $3k deductible. ER visit =$600 copay — elephantsgerald (@elephantsgerald) (link)

• 1) US 2) housewife 3) yes, though spouse’s work, ~$400/mo, inclds vision, dental; count myself damn lucky #insurancepoll — Deborah Kelch (@auntie_) (link)

• #InsurancePoll. 1. usa 2. unemployed/disabled 3. yes, COBRA 4. no,/ $700 (and hundreds more that isn’t covered) — Anna Calkins (@morrigan191) (link)

• #insurancepoll USA, chiropractor/library aide, $1000/mo with $6500 deductible for family, have never met deductible — Leah Osterberg (@LOsterberg) (link)

• Musician/freelancer, catastrophic from Anthem at $115/mo. Went to a walk-in clinic and it cost me $400. #insurancepoll — Nicole (@HelloTheFuture) (link)

• #insurancepoll 1. San Francisco, CA USA 2. blogger 3. Yes 4. $1,200/mo for family of 4 — jordanferney (@jordanferney) (link)

• Through mister’s grocery job, family of 4, around $250/month, but there’s still a lot of out of pocket $$. #InsurancePoll — Sara Habein (@sshabein) (link)

• US/AZ, unemployed, yes, free care on Indian Reservation #insurancepoll — Nadia (@LegionRainier) (link)

• #insurancepoll : 1) USA, 2) PT, 3) Y – Spouse’s work covers 4) $1300/mo for fam of 4, $1500 ind./$3000 fam deductible. Denied 2x private ins — Karen (@Submommy) (link)

• #InsurancePoll. 1. USA 2. Unemployed artist 3.Yes -thru COBRA 4. $625/month- looking for full-time job mostly for insurance — Erika I. (@nycowgirl_emi) (link)

• My answer: 1) US 2) doctor/writer 3)Yes 4)Yes: >$1000/mo for family of 5. #InsurancePoll — Atul Gawande (@Atul_Gawande) (link)

• 1. USA, 2. Author, 3. Yes, but 4. Only bc I’m still covered by my parents. Otherwise, too expensive. #InsurancePoll — Victoria Schwab (@veschwab) (link)

• 1) US 2) Physician 3) Yes 4) Free/employee benefit #InsurancePoll — Graham Walker (@grahamwalker) (link)

• 1)Around the world 2)composer/pianist 3) never 4)none #insurancepoll — Lance Horne (@LanceHorne) (link)

• 1) USA 2) Freelance Web/Mobile Developer 3) No. 4) Too expensive. #insurancePoll — Jon (@JustJon) (link)

• Same > RT @greeblemonkey: #insurancepoll 1. Denver CO USA 2. freelance designer 3. COBRA after pre-existing denials 4. $1,500/mo — Bryan Giese (@bugfrog) (link)

• 1) USA 2) UX Architect 3) Insured. 4) Yes, but covered through spouse’s employer. #InsurancePoll — Thomas L. Strickland (@thomasls) (link)

• USA /clerical worker at university lab/ I have ins through employer, but pay over $700/ mo to add family #InsurancePoll — Pixiestix1207 (@pixiestix1207) (link)

• 1)USA 2)Writer/Reporter &married to same 3)Yes 4)No/ self-pay $15K/yr+$5K deductible family of 4 #InsurancePoll @atul_gawande — Philip Gourevitch (@PGourevitch) (link)

• #InsurancePoll 1) USA 2) self-employed 3) yes 4) approx $500/mo for me (age 38) and two kids, 7 and 4. $3300 deductible. :( — Jill Arnold (@Unnecesarean) (link)

• I’m in Australia and pregnant. We have Medicare. Midwife appts all free. Anything goes wrong with my birth or baby it’s free. — Helen Perris (@helenperris) (link)

• 1. US 2.Brand new business owner 3 &4 SISC-free under parents insurance bc of Obamacare (under 26 otherwise couldn’t afford) #InsurancePoll — Luz Donahue (@luzdonahue) (link)

spread the word, tweet the question, share this blog………LET’S DO THIS…
LOVE.
afp

p.s. when i was in Philly, i stayed with my photographer friend kyle cassidy, who gave me his doctor who scarf and sonic screwdriver and took a picture. ACTIVATE!!!

http://www.amandapalmer.net/blog/20121015/

Unmasking Reddit’s Violentacrez, The Biggest Troll on the Web

2012-10-16T02:43:00.001-07:00

Adrian Chen

Last Wednesday afternoon I called Michael Brutsch. He was at the office of the Texas financial services company where he works as a programmer and he was having a bad day. I had just told him, on Gchat, that I had uncovered his identity as the notorious internet troll Violentacrez (pronounced Violent-Acres).

"It's amazing how much you can sweat in a 60 degree office," he said with a nervous laugh.

Judging from his internet footprint, Brutsch, 49, has a lot to sweat over. If you are capable of being offended, Brutsch has almost certainly done something that would offend you, then did his best to rub your face in it. His speciality is distributing images of scantily-clad underage girls, but as Violentacrez he also issued an unending fountain of racism, porn, gore, misogyny, incest, and exotic abominations yet unnamed, all on the sprawling online community Reddit. At the time I called Brutsch, his latest project was moderating a new section of Reddit where users posted covert photos they had taken of women in public, usually close-ups of their asses or breasts, for a voyeuristic sexual thrill. It was called "Creepshots." Now Brutsch was the one feeling exposed and it didn't suit him very well.

But Michael Brutsch is more than a monster. Online, Violentacrez has been one of Reddit's most reviled characters but also one of its most beloved users. The self-described "creepy uncle of Reddit" has played a little-known but crucial role in Reddit's development into the online juggernaut it is today. In real life, Brutsch is a military father and cat-lover. He lives with his wife in the Dallas suburb of Arlington, Texas. There are many sides to Violentacrez, and now that I had Michael Brutsch on the phone I hoped to find out where the troll ended and the real person began.

***

I first became aware of Violentacrez last year, when controversy erupted over a section, called "Jailbait," that Violentacrez had created on Reddit dedicated to sexualized images of underaged girls. (Brutsch adapted the name from "Violent Acres," a popular anonymous blogger he was fond of in the mid-2000s.) Reddit, for the uninitiated, is essentially a social news site; with a free username, anyone can submit and vote on content and can do so anonymously. And anyone can start a forum on Reddit dedicated to their interests, known as a subreddit. Today, there are about 10,000 active subreddits out of nearly 100,000 total, spanning a dizzying array of topics from funny pictures, to Power Rangers, to pooping. If a post gets enough "upvotes," as they're called, it can be propelled to the front page of Reddit and a massive audience.

The breadth of topics and dedication of users has made Reddit, which calls itself the "front page of the internet," the single dominant force in internet culture today, boasting over 3.4 billion pageviews this August. It reached a new level of legitimacy last month, when President Obamaheld a Q & A on Reddit. These days, Reddit is mentioned in the same breath as Twitter and Facebook by pundits expounding on the power of social media.

But Reddit's laissez-faire attitude towards offensive speech has led to a vast underbelly that rivals anything on the notorious cesspool 4chan. And with Jailbait, Violentacrez decided to create a safe space for people sexually attracted to underage girls to share their photo stashes. I would call these people pedophiles; the Jailbait subreddit called them "ephebophiles." Jailbait was the online equivalent of systematized street harassment. Users posted snapshots of tween and teenage girls, often in bikinis and skirts. Many of these were lifted from their Facebook accounts and thrown in front of Jailbait's 20,000 horny subscribers.

Violentacrez and his fellow moderators worked hard to make sure every girl on jailbait was underage, diligently deleting any photos whose subjects seemed older than 16 or 17. Violentacrez himself posted hundreds of photos. Jailbait became one of Reddit's most popular subreddits, generating millions of pageviews a month. "Jailbait" was for a time the second biggest search term bringing traffic to Reddit, after "Reddit." Eventually, Jailbait landed on CNN, where Anderson Cooper called out Reddit for hosting it, and Violentacrez for creating it. The ensuing outcry led Reddit administrators to reluctantly ban Jailbait, and all sexually suggestive content featuring minors.

Full size

Michael Brutsch at a Reddit meet-up.

On the phone, Michael Brutsch insisted he is not a pedophile but was unapologetic about Jailbait. He compared the photos of underage girls he posted to Britney Spears' sultry "Hit Me Baby One More Time" video. She was 16 at the time, he said—how was that different than what he was doing? Brutsch said he only reposted photos that he'd found elsewhere, mostly on 4chan, and that he promptly removed any outright child porn that was posted.

"I've always been upfront about the sorts of things that I find attractive," he said. Brutsch didn't create the creepshots subreddit which was launched earlier this year. But when it started to get heat after a teacher in Georgia was fired at the end of September for allegedly posting covert pictures of his underage students, it only made sense that the section's moderators would bring Violentacrez on to help deal with the newfound attention. He was a moderator until Creepshots was banned this week amid increasing controversy. (The circumstances surrounding Creepshots' ban is unclear, as Reddit's General Manager had told Buzzfeed they would not ban the subreddit because it wasn't breaking Reddit's rules.)

Having his screenname mangled by Anderson Cooper on CNN for Jailbait was Violentacrez's biggest moment as a troll, but it wasn't his first time in the spotlight. Since Brutsch stumbled on Reddit from a link on the internet culture blog Boing Boing in 2007, he has pushed the boundaries of Reddit's free-speech culture. He has done this mostly through creating offensive subreddits to troll sensitive users. Some of the sections Violentacrez created or moderated were called:

Chokeabitch
Niggerjailbait
Rapebait
Hitler
Jewmerica
Misogyny
Incest
You can look those up on Reddit and visit them if you'd like to ruin your day, but the content is self-explanatory.

Unlike Jailbait, which apparently sprung from a sincere interest, many of Violentacrez's most offensive subreddits were created just to enrage other Reddit users. At this they were very effective. What happened was, some do-gooder would stumble upon one of his offensive subreddits and expose it to the rest of Reddit in an outraged post. Then thousands more would vote the thing to the front page of Reddit. Cries to censor it would sound out, to be almost inevitably beaten back by cries of "free speech!" The idea of free speech is sacred to many Reddit users, a product of the free-wheeling online message board culture from which Reddit springs. If you criticize someone else for posting something you don't like, you are a whiny fascist.

Violentacrez explained his trolling philosophy to the internet culture website the Daily Dot inAugust of 2011. He had sparked yet another controversy by posting a graphic image of a partially clothed woman being brutally beaten by a large man, in "beatingwomen," a subreddit dedicated to glorifying violence against women. A Redditor had called out the picture in a post, and it was voted to the front page.

"People take things way too seriously around here," Violentacrez said. " I was not surprised by the outrage of the person who made the post, because I see it all the time. What was surprising was the community support for it. Most posts that complain about these things never do very well, and are quickly buried or deleted. I think it's interesting how many people defend my right to act the way I do, while decrying my posts themselves."

A troll exploits social dynamics like computer hackers exploit security loopholes, and Violentacrez calmly exploited the Reddit hive mind's powerful outrage machine and free speech values at the same time.

It was this pattern, repeated to various degrees dozens of times, that made Violentacrez an unlikely hero to many of the white male geeks who make up Reddit's hard core. They saw Violentacrez as a champion in the fight against the oppressive schoolmarms: "He upheld a certain amount of freedom for the worst of us to ensure freedom for all of us," wrote one user in a post mourning his departure. Fans followed him wherever he went on the site.

As his fame grew, Brutsch began selling T-shirts with an illustration of a zombified version of Reddit's alien logo, designed by a professional illustrator, that he had adopted as Violentacrez's logo. He created a subreddit called Violentacrez, dedicated to news and posts about himself. Last year, the Daily Dot named him the most important Redditor of the year. Violentacrez was the most influential user of one of the most influential websites on the internet.

Violentacrez was a troll, but he was a well-connected troll.

All the while, Violentacrez's critics cried out the same refrain: "How does he get away with this?" One reason Violentacrez continued to occupy such a high-profile position on Reddit was of course his free speech rhetoric. But Violentacrez has historically had a close relationship with Reddit's staff, a fact far less well-known than his controversial behavior. Violentacrez was a troll, but he was a well-connected troll. He told me he was close with a number of early Reddit employees—many of whom have now moved on—chatting with them on IRC or sometimes even on the phone. A few years ago, while Jailbait was still going strong, Reddit's administrators gave him a special one-of-a-kind "pimp hat" badge to honor his contributions to the site, which he proudly displayed on his profile. Brutsch said he was even in the final running for a job as a customer support representative at Reddit last year.

During the Jailbait controversy, Erik Martin, the site's General Manager, reached out to Violentacrez beforehand to warn him that they were going to have to shut down his prized possession, according to a chat conversation Violentacrez leaked at the time.

"Want to give you a heads up," Martin wrote. "We're making a policy change regarding jailbait type content. Don't really have a choice."

(Martin did not respond to requests for comment.)

Violentacrez's privileged position came from the fact that for years he had helped administrators deal with the massive seedy side of Reddit, acting almost as an unpaid staff member. Reddit administrators essentially handed off the oversight of the site's NSFW side to Violentacrez, according to former Reddit lead programer Chris Slowe (a.k.a. Keysersosa), who worked at Reddit from 2005 to the end of 2010. When Violentacrez first joined the site and started filling it with filth, administrators were wary and they often clashed. But eventually administrators and Violentacrez came to an uneasy truce, according to Slowe. For all his unpleasantness, they realized that Violentacrez was an excellent community moderator and could be counted on to keep the administrators abreast of any illegal content he came across.

"Once we came to terms he was actually pretty helpful. He would come to us with things that we hadn't noticed," said Slowe. "At the time there was only four of us working so that was a great resource for us to have."

Administrators realized it was easier to outsource the policing of questionable content to Violentacrez than to dirty their hands themselves, or ostracize him and risk even worse things happening without their knowledge. The devil you know. So even as Jailbait flourished and became an ever-more-integral part of Reddit's traffic and culture—in 2008 it won the most votes in a "subreddit of the year" poll—administrators looked the other way. "We just stayed out of there and let him do his thing and we knew at least he was getting rid of a lot of stuff that wasn't particularly legal," Slowe said. "I know I didn't want it to be my job."

Violentacrez's close relationship to administrators made him an elite member of Reddit's army of moderators, known as "mods" on the site. Though much is made of the millions of users who submit content to Reddit, it's Reddit's over 20,000 volunteer mods who are the real secret behind its success. They act as janitors and editors, keeping their subreddits clean and well-stocked with content. Reddit's main innovation has been to move these users up the food chain, from simple content-generators to management positions. This allows Reddit's mind-boggling breadth of content and users to be overseen by just a few paid employees. The downside is that it requires Reddit's official management to enter into uneasy symbiotic relationships with sketchy but effective moderators like Violentacrez.

And sometimes those relationships become more trouble than they're worth. After the Jailbait controversy, Violentacrez claimed repeatedly on Reddit, he was cut off from administrators who had been burned by the controversy. In fact, when I spoke to him, Brutsch said Reddit admins had been keeping their distance for a while. He suggested that the site wasn't what it used to be. In recent days, he has been posting less, stirring up less drama.

When it comes to mods, the political model of Reddit is not so much a vast digital democracy, as it's often framed by fans and users, as online feudalism. Moderators like Violentacrez are given absolute control over their turf in exchange for keeping the kingdom of Reddit strong. Moderators become more or less powerful in direct relation to the number and popularity of the subreddits they moderate, so they try to take over other subreddits to boost their profile in the community. Inevitably, Reddit's administrators develop relationships with the most influential moderators. Like feuding medieval lords vying for the king's favor, moderators form alliances or wage epic flame wars over power struggles.

This is how Violentacrez, Reddit's creepiest user, also became its most powerful. Sure, he was responsible for the absolute worst stuff on Reddit, and by extension, some of the worst stuff on the internet. But Violentacrez was also seen to be, as Chris Slowe put it to me, "a trustworthy and a positive member of the community." He moderated more than 400 subreddits and had many high-profile friends, amassed over many years. His stable at times included hundreds of popular mainstream subreddits, like Funny and WTF, that reach audiences of millions. Violentacrez further solidified his reach by becoming a mentor to other moderators. He created the first FAQ for Reddit's rather unintuitive moderator interface. He also helmed a number of subreddits dedicated to providing guidance and camaraderie for other moderators, including the essentialmodhelp.

So it was no surprise that when news got out earlier this week that I was working on a story that would expose Violentacrez's real identity, other moderators on Reddit rallied to defend him. The popular politics subreddit led the charge, by banning all Gawker links.

"As moderators, we feel that this type of behavior is completely intolerable," they wrote. "We volunteer our time on Reddit to make it a better place for the users, and should not be harassed and threatened for that. We should all be afraid of the threat of having our personal information investigated and spread around the internet if someone disagrees with you."

Some have taken this as an expression of Reddit's users' fondness of Violentacrez's pornographic generosity. In fact the ban was probably more an expression of friendship by the Politics subreddit moderators. Violentacrez probably trained some of them. They were mad that their buddy was going to be outed for simply, in their mind, exercising his free speech—his unalienable right to anonymously post stalker shots of women.
***
When I called Brutsch that Wednesday afternoon and told him I knew who he was, I was a little taken aback by how calm he remained during our intense but civil hour-long conversation. I had figured that a man whose hobby was saying horrible shit just to screw with people online would rise to some new horrible level when conditions on the ground actually called for it. Instead he pleaded with me in an affectless monotone not to reveal his name.

"My wife is disabled. I got a home and a mortgage, and if this hits the fan, I believe this will affect negatively on my employment," he said. "I do my job, go home watch TV, and go on the internet. I just like riling people up in my spare time."

I asked if he regretted anything he had posted, now that he'd be found out. No, he said. "I would stand by exactly what I've done." The problem was, he explained, that if his identity got out, his many enemies would start attaching lies to his name because they simply don't like his views. They would say he was a child pornographer, when all he had done was spearhead the distribution of thousands of legal photos of underage girls. They would say the fact that he created a subreddit dedicated to Hitler meant he was anti-Semitic, when really it was just trolling. (Brutsch says he's got Jewish blood himself: "If you see a picture of me, I'm about as Jewish looking as they get.") They would Google-bomb his name and the word "pedophile" along with his publicly-traded company's name.

I asked if he regretted anything he had posted, now that he'd be found out. No, he said. "I would stand by exactly what I've done."

He needed to keep his anonymity to protect his ability to express things many people think but hardly anyone says. With Violentacrez, "I got the freedom to talk about my personal life, my personal feelings... I'm sure there's more than one person in this building who's a pervert," he said, referring his office building.

He asked a number of times if there was anything he could do to keep me from outing him. He offered to act as a mole for me, to be my "sockpuppet" on Reddit. "I'm like the spy who's found out," he said. "I'll do anything. If you want me to stop posting, delete whatever I posted, whatever. I am at your mercy because I really can't think of anything worse that could possibly happen. It's not like I do anything illegal."

I told him it wasn't my place to tell him what to do, that I was just reporting on what he'd already done, but this did shake me a bit. It didn't help that our phone call had been unplanned and I hadn't properly steeled myself for a tough conversation. In the beginning it was just supposed to be a friendly gchat conversation with Violentacrez, not a confrontation with Brutsch himself.

I had initially told Violentacrez I was interested in profiling him in light of the new controversy surrounding creepshots. I arranged the Gchat interview without hinting that a former online friend had tipped me off to his real identity during the Jailbait scandal, after the friend had become disgusted with his obsession with underage girls. Since then, Violentacrez had recorded the geek podcast The Drill Down with other high-profile Reddit moderators, outing his voice. All I had to do was call up Michael Brutsch and match his voice to Violentacrez's. My plan that Wednesday was to have the chat with Violentacrez before calling Brutsch. I didn't want to risk calling Brutsch first, only to have him shut down completely once he realized he was outed.

Unfortunately, I've never been good at keeping secrets. My poker face is so bad it can be read even through a computer screen, apparently. In our Gchat, I pressed Violentacrez about his anonymity enough that he grew suspicious. We were chatting about why he feels comfortable attending IRL meet-ups of Redditors if his anonymity was so important to him when he caught on.

me: it seems like you're not super careful about keeping your identity under wraps, if you meet people in real life. A lot of trolls I've talked to would never do that or give out as many details about themselves as they do.

violentacrez: have you been given my real name?

me: yeah

violentacrez: that's not good

me: it seems like you've told a lot of people. Are you surprised it would get out?

violentacrez: yes, I thought I could trust those who know. Are you going to out me?

Panicking a bit, I quickly picked up the phone and dialed the number I had found on Brutsch's online resume so I could hear Brutsch's voice to see if it matched Violentacrez. It did.

"So, are you going to out me?" he said.
***
One thing that Brutsch wasn't worried about when I talked to him on the phone was his immediate family finding out about his online habits.

"He won't really care," said Brutsch of his teenage son, the one about to join the Marines. "He thinks I'm creepy as it is."

The Violentacrez clan seems to have walked out of a Todd Solondz movie, and a significant part of Violentacrez's mythos on Reddit comes from the details he's shared about his family. In 2010, Violentacrez hosted a legendary "Ask Me Anything" thread"—the same Q & A feature Barack Obama took part in last month. He was asked what was the creepiest thing he'd done "IRL" and delighted readers with a tale ripped out of Penthouse letters. "That'd be a tough call," Violentacrez wrote, "Perhaps oral sex with my 19-year-old stepdaughter." It was completely consensual, he claimed in the post, and went on to brag about how awesome it had been in graphic detail.

This happened over ten years ago, Violentacrez claimed. When his then-wife, the girl's mother, found out, she "got mad, then got over it," Violentacrez wrote. He says they were married for ten more years.

His current wife is similarly accepting of Brutsch's unsavory side, according to Brutsch. She is not only aware of his online habits, she's also a prolific Redditor under the handlenot_so_violentacrez. She is a founder of the Fibromyalgia subreddit. She has diabetes and plays the online game Kingdom of Camelot. Violentacrez said that at home, the two would lie in bed together with their laptops, both on Reddit, him posting his porn, she posting cute animal videos and pictures of dolphins.

About a year ago, Violentacrez's teenage son did his own Ask Me Anything thread. His son uses the handle Spawn_of_VA and he is dad's biggest fan. Interspersed among talk of family game night, Spawn_of_VA regaled readers with more weird tidbits about his father, including the factthat he has a "suitcase full of dildos in his closet" and a "roller type thing with spikes on it, he uses that to roll on his balls."

When I first read Violentacrez's and his son's AMAs I, like many other readers, figured this was just some next-level trolling. Violentacrez's wife and his son were probably just sockpuppets, right? But on the phone, I asked Brutsch if Spawn_of_VA was really his son. He is, Brutsch said. I asked if everything he and his son had said in their AMAs were real. As far as he could remember, he said, it was.
***
The extent to which trolls separate, or fail to separate, their online and IRL lives is as varied as people themselves. There's an idea of the troll as an information age Jekyll & Hyde, with the anonymity provided by the internet playing the role of Hyde's serum that transforms the mild-mannered geek into a monster. Observers often cite the psychological theory calleddeindividuation, which argues people literally lose themselves when granted anonymity.

But Violentacrez/Michael Brutsch upset this idea by blurring his online and offline lives. Brutsch adopted a new name for trolling, but he built his horrible character on many details from his real life. In real life, Brutsch is an unabashedly creepy old man with seven cats and two dogs and a disabled wife and a teenage son about to join the Marines. He was all of that online, too—only he was famous for it.

Both offline and online he could be either a creepy uncle, or a loyal friend and helpful guide. Violentacrez had a surprising number of friends on Reddit, for someone who once created an entire subreddit dedicated to pictures of dead teenage girls (Picsofdeadjailbait). He helped organize IRL meet-ups, where he showed up in a t-shirt with his zombie logo on it, and told everyone there to call him "VA." Attendees agreed to blur his face in any resulting pictures before posting them to Reddit. Brutsch is an internet minister, and he said he once married a pair of Redditors in real life, though they only knew him by his "clean" handle: mbrutsch.

One longtime Redditor I spoke to talked about Violentacrez with the warmth of an old college friend.

"He's a really a good guy," she said. This user was in the Arlington area for business once, and she stopped by Brutsch's house for lunch. "He has the manners of a Southern gentleman," she said. "A bunch of neighborhood kids were over playing at his house."

The only thing missing was joining the name Violentacrez to the name Michael Brutsch, and even that information he had given to many of his online friends. Reddit administrators have long known his real identity, Brutsch said, which he gave them in order to prove that he had nothing to hide. But Brutsch was still anonymous to the people he wanted to be, mainly his employers, and by unmasking him I am sure to get criticism for supposedly violating his privacy.

Even before I published this article, Reddit had already exploded in outrage. (Gawker sites are now banned from over 60 subreddits, and some pissed off user has signed me up for approximately two dozen mailing lists.) The irony of being upset that a noted custodian of "creepshots" is getting some unwanted attention himself is obvious. Jailbait defenders would often argue that if 14-year-olds didn't want their bikini pictures to be posted to Reddit, they should not have taken them and uploaded them to their Facebook accounts in the first place. If Brutsch did not want his employers to know that he had become a minor internet celebrity through spending hours every day posting photos of 14-year-olds in bikinis to thousands of people on the internet, he should have stuck to posting cat videos.

But for Reddit, the stakes are higher than just one man having to answer for things he's done online. To them, the "doxing" of Violentacrez—"doxing" is hacker slang for publishing someone's personal information in order to intimidate or punish them—is an assault on the very structure of Reddit itself. The Daily Dot sums up their logic:

At Web communities like Reddit, which thrive because users are free to say and do anything they want, doxing is a severe crime, both to users and the site's staff. It's far worse than offensive speech like racism and homophobia or, yes, even posting surreptitiously snapped photos of innocent women for creeps to perv over. Why? Because doxing undermines the community's structural integrity: Reddit simply would not exist as we know it if users weren't operating under the freedom of a flexible identity. So redditors aren't banning Gawker to protect violentacrez, they're doing it to protect themselves.

Under Reddit logic, outing Violentacrez is worse than anonymously posting creepshots of innocent women, because doing so would undermine Reddit's role as a safe place for people to anonymously post creepshots of innocent women.

I am OK with that.
***
Brutsch shut down the Violentacrez account abruptly this past Tuesday, six days after we spoke. When I Gchatted him that night, Brutsch told me, "I guess I just got tired of all the hassle." He said he was done with Reddit for good. "Reddit ceased being fun a while ago," he said.

Now he's going to spend the hours he used to lose to Reddit on work. "Oh, and possibly looking for a job will obviously keep me busy ;)"

I asked what he'll miss most about Reddit. "The people," he said. "Reddit is nothing without the community. I've already gotten a few cheery goodbyes from people: 'Keep in touch. You are still a good friend.'"

But he didn't stay away long. In the past couple days, he apparently popped up in a private subreddit called "modtalk," where moderators and administrators talk clear up some misconceptions about why he'd left. (Including one rumor that I had somehow "blackmailed" him into quitting.) In the ensuing discussion, a user named themanwithnoname wrote, "VA, I don't know you personally, but I've appreciated some of your comments over the years. I hope your life rocks from here out."

To which Violentacrez replied, under the handle VA_11102012: "I miss posting porn."

Update, Monday 10/15: Reddit's Biggest Troll Fired From His Real-World Job; Reddit Continues to Censor Gawker Articles

What role for journalists in holding the powerful to account?

2012-04-17T03:12:00.001-07:00

GUEST INFORMANT: Laurie Penny

April 16th, 2012 | guest informant

I’ve spoken about Laurie Penny here so many times before that I’m not sure she needs an introduction. British firebrand journalist working in newspapers, books and television. Currently, I believe, a regular reporter for The Independent after a long session at The New Stateman. I wrote the foreword for her most recent book, PENNY RED: Notes From The New Age Of Dissent. She’s in America right now, covering the dissent movement and election politics (and writing a book, and acting as a contributing editor to The New Inquiry, and several other things). When I asked her to write you about whatever was in her head today, she said this:

A little over a year ago, before Occupy Wall Street began but well after the first wave of student riots had made political resistance more than a storybook fantasy in Britain, I found myself at a gathering of activists and anarchists. The occasion was the opening of a free university in an empty pub in central London, and journalists were strictly forbidden in the space. I had been let in on the condition that I hand in all my recording equipment before I was allowed to drink, which is a cruel thing to do to anyone who writes for a living.

Nonetheless, just after midnight, a man with dreadlocks who I had never met before in my life started jabbing a less than entirely sober finger in my face, calling me scum, asking how I dared to speak on behalf of others, and attempting to assault me gently with a rusty bicycle. I was moved by the idiosyncracy of this attack, but far more perturbed by the fact that five or six comrades, people I had stood beside as police horses charged into lines of protesters in Parliament square, people I would have trusted if not with my life, then at least with my dignity – they turned away, and they pretended not to see.

I was bewildered, and heartbroken. More than any other print journalist working in the mainstream media in Britain at that point, I understood what these people were trying to do. I was the same age, I had read the same books, I went to the same meetings, I declined to name names when to do so might have endangered activists, I stepped outside my job description to report faithfully on protests and incidents of police violence that the rest of the press ignored. None of this, by the way required any special cookies for effort - but I thought it might at least be enough to prevent me getting thrown out of a party by drunk hippies.

I thought wrong. The abrupt realisation that solidarity is not extended to members of the mainstream press was less upsetting than the realisation there are entirely good reasons for this. Some members of the collective who tossed me out of the pub had already had their names and personal histories dragged messily through the tabloids, and when I was informed that AJAB – all journalists are bastards – I was hardly in a position to plead for nuance.

I thought I got into journalism to tell truths and right wrongs and occasionally get into parties I wouldn’t normally be cool enough to go to. Right now though, with a few exceptions, professional journalism is rarely seen as an exercise in holding power to account. Justly or unjustly, the media, especially but not exclusively the mainstream, corporate-controlled press, has come to be seen as the enemy of the voiceless rather than their champion. Justly or unjustly, few people believe what they read in the papers or watch on the news anymore, because belief has long ceased to be quite as important as complicity when it comes to the Daily Mail, the Daily Post or News International. On the streets of Athens and Madrid as well as during the London riots of August 2011, journalists have been threatened and attacked by desperate young people making havoc in the streets. Why? Not because these young people don’t want to be seen, but because they don’t want to be seen through the half-closed eyes of privilege.

Journalists are losing any case we ever had for special pleading. For the younger generation of digital natives, there is no particular reason to be deferential towards anyone who happens to be at a protest with a phone that can get the internet and an audience of thousands: it’ll be you and a hundred others, and unless the police have given you special privileges to write precisely what they want and nothing else, your press pass is less and less likely to keep you safe from arrest. As more and more ordinary men, women and children without degrees in journalism acquire the skills and technology to broadcast text and video, the media has become another cultural territory which is gradually being re-occupied. Those on the ground do not have to wait for the BBC and MSNBC to turn up with cameras: they make the news and the reporters follow. They have grown up in a world of branding and they know how to create a craze and set the agenda. They occupy the media. And the media is starting to worry.

Let’s not be naive, though: the professional press still has power, and lots of it. If it didn’t, activists wouldn’t be frantically writing press releases in one occupation and beating up Newsnight cameramen in another. The success or failure of any political action outside the ballot box depends on the participation of the press, and that’s a source of resentment as well as suspicion. Most journalists are employed to produce stories that will sell. If we write for tabloids, we are encouraged to feign a species of objectivity that often includes giving equal weight to the voices of the one percent of the population who believe that all billionaires were sent by Adam Smith to save the free world from socialism and should be rewarded with fruit baskets, tax exemptions and the comeliest of our firstborn children. The best I can do is what I always do: write what I see and believe to be true, and be prepared to take the consequences on either side.

The relationship between activism, journalism and truth-telling has always been complicated. If you do it honestly, you can expect to be attacked by almost everybody, since fearless political writing cannot co-exist with orthodoxy of any sort. George Orwell, caller of bullshit on left and right par excellence, made few friends in his day, and a passage from his essay The Prevention of Literature (1946) is worth quoting at length:

Any writer or journalist who wants to retain his (sic) integrity finds himself (sic) thwarted by the general drift of society rather than by active persecution. The sort of things that are working against him are the concentration of the press in the hands of a few rich men, the grip of monopoly on radio and the films, the unwillingness of the public to spend money on books, making it necessary for nearly every writer to earn part of his living by hackwork, the encroachment of official bodies like the M.O.I. and the British Council, which help the writer to keep alive but also waste his time and dictate his opinions, and the continuous war atmosphere of the past ten years, whose distorting effects no one has been able to escape. Everything in our age conspires to turn the writer, and every other kind of artist as well, into a minor official, working on themes handed down from above and never telling what seems to him the whole of the truth.

Reading this seventy years later, it seems a wonder that fearless journalism has survived, that reports and commentary are not produced, as Orwell imagined in ’1984′ entirely by machine. Perhaps, though, it is not such a wonder. Human beings have a refreshing tendency to pursue truth and excellence in the face of staggering hurdles – and for every professional hack who resigns him or herself to a living as a greased gear in the corporate press factory, there is another for whom the challenge of carving out a space for honest, rigorous reportage and inspiring, imaginative wordcraft is a reason to get up and put the coffee on of a morning.

Not that it isn’t a bloody pain sometimes. Anyone can write, but to write well and often and for pay can be a hard and lonely job, because to do it honestly requires, at least at the beginning, a certain amount of boring self-analysis whereby professional and existential crisis feed exhaustingly off one another. To be an honest political writer or journalist today is constantly to negotiate and re-negotiate the complicated relationship between conviction and orthodoxy, between critical reportage and activism-as-journalism.

That relationship never been more fraught than it is now, because the line between activism and media production has become smudged to the point of irrelevance. Anyone with a camera-phone that does the internet can report from a protest; anyone with a blog can write commentary about mortgage foreclosure and financial feudalism. But there’s a line in the sand, and you cross it when you start making most of your living writing about politics. Because once you have decided that you will always tell the truth you see in front of you, no matter what your bosses say, you have to decide what’s more important: your career or your conscience.

It is extremely hard to get into journalism. Even before the recession and the jerky transition to online publishing made new staff reporter jobs harder to get than an NYPD press pass, J-schools were consistently churning out several times as many talented, energetic, hopelessly indebted young people than there were salaried positions at even the smallest papers. So many people want to make a living writing that we are encouraged to accept tiny salaries and terrible working conditions, and breaking into the industry often involves years of underpaid or unpaid interning – closing off the most prestigious jobs to all but a wealthy few. We are expected to be grateful for any opportunities we are thrown, and encouraged to see ourselves as future members of a social elite rather than workers with a living to make and a job to do. In the United States, where healthcare coverage is contingent on salaried employment, it’s even harder to make a living as a freelance writer, and so more young people are under pressure to self-censor, to produce copy and footage that their bosses think will play to the prejudices of their readership.

You’ll have gathered by now that I hold no truck with the notion of ‘objective’ reporting – the idea that there is any such thing in a world where Fox News and the Daily Mail are considered serious press outlets seems to me too ridiculous to seriously countenance. To my mind the best one can ever do as a writer is be honest about your background and partialities and try to understand how they affect your outlook, to do violence to your own cliches, to practice compassion over caricature.

That’s what I’ve tried to do, whilst learning on the job, where practical skills – how to take quotes properly, how to wriggle around libel laws – count for no more or less than emotional skills, like scoring out a line between propaganda and cowardice that you can walk along in good conscience and then, whatever the insults and death threats and character assassinations thrown at you from either side, continuing to put one goddamned foot in front of the other. The best journalists I know have found a way to walk their own line. But for some of us that postion comes with a cost. My friend Natasha Lennard lost her job as a stringer at the New York times simply for being honest about her political affiliations, and responded bravely by declaring that she had no interest in producing that sort of objective journalism anyway.

So the question is: if all reporting is partial, if the mainstream press is hopelessly undermined by advertising, self-censorship and police complicity, if anyone with a camera phone can create a media sensation, then what is a journalist for? Why is it that in London, in New York, in California, in Egypt and across the world, it is young journalists who have come to be identified, in the absence of named leaders, as figureheads in these new movements? Why not orators, organisers, artists, musicians, singer-songwriters? Why journalists?

Because people are sick of being lied to. Because young people want to be told the truth – that’s why they became part of movements that are, more than anything, about finally speaking truth to power. Because in a world of 24-hour news cycles and instagram, good writing, and good, clear, original thinking, still matter, are still worth something. At least, that’s what I’m telling myself, because I’ve got a good fifty years of rent checks still to make.

I don’t have all the answers. I don’t know whether what I’m trying to do, and what some of the most audacious, inspiring young people I’ve had the privilege to meet over the past two years are trying to do is worth all that much in the long run. There’s always a chance, isn’t there, that my affection for my friends and colleagues makes the best efforts of our young lives loom larger in the heart than their ultimate significance deserves. Privately, though, I doubt it. I believe in fearless journalism, and I believe that it will continue, and I have seen it change the world in the most daring and intimate ways. I am still inspired by the brave reporters and polemicists who laid the path we run on, I still look to my peers to give me courage, and I still wake up in the night dreaming of the perfect paragraph – the one yet to be written. Some day, I will get old, but I don’t think honest writing ever will.

You can find Laurie in various places, most especially her blog and her twitter, and I want to thank her right here for taking so much time out of her insane writing and publishing schedule to produce the above epic.

Special thanks to:

warrenellis.com

boingboing.net

What is the Monkeysphere?

2012-04-13T00:33:00.002-07:00

"One death is a tragedy. One million deaths is a statistic."
-Kevin Federline

What do monkeys have to do with war, oppression, crime, racism and even e-mail spam? You'll see that all of the random ass-headed cruelty of the world will suddenly make perfect sense once we go Inside the Monkeysphere.

"What the Hell is the Monkeysphere?"

First, picture a monkey. A monkey dressed like a little pirate, if that helps you. We'll call him Slappy.

Imagine you have Slappy as a pet. Imagine a personality for him. Maybe you and he have little pirate monkey adventures and maybe even join up to fight crime. Think how sad you'd be if Slappy died.

Now, imagine you get four more monkeys. We'll call them Tito, Bubbles, Marcel and ShitTosser. Imagine personalities for each of them now. Maybe one is aggressive, one is affectionate, one is quiet, the other just throws shit all the time. But they're all your personal monkey friends.

Now imagine a hundred monkeys.

Not so easy now, is it? So how many monkeys would you have to own before you couldn't remember their names? At what point, in your mind, do your beloved pets become just a faceless sea of monkey? Even though each one is every bit the monkey Slappy was, there's a certain point where you will no longer really care if one of them dies.

So how many monkeys would it take before you stopped caring?

That's not a rhetorical question. We actually know the number.

"So this whole thing is your crusade against monkey overpopulation? I'll have my monkey castrated this very day!"

Uh, no. It'll become clear in a moment.

You see, monkey experts performed a monkey study a while back, and discovered that the size of the monkey's monkey brain determined the size of the monkey groups the monkeys formed. The bigger the brain, the bigger the little societies they built.

They cut up so many monkey brains, in fact, that they found they could actually take a brain they had never seen before and from it they could accurately predict what size tribes that species of creature formed.

Most monkeys operate in troupes of 50 or so. But somebody slipped them a slightly larger brain and they estimated the ideal group or society for this particular animal was about 150.

That brain, of course, was human. Probably from a homeless man they snatched off the streets.

"So that's the big news? That humans are God's big-budget sequel to the monkey? Who didn't know that?"

It goes much, much deeper than that. Let's try an example.

Famous news talking guy Tim Russert tells a charming story about his father, in his book Big Russ and Me (the title referring to his on-and-off romance with actor Russell Crowe). Russert's dad used to take half an hour to carefully box up any broken glass before taking it to the trash. Why? Because "The trash guy might cut his hands."

That this was such an unusual thing to do illustrates my monkey point. None of us spend much time worrying about the garbage man's welfare even though he performs a crucial role in not forcing us to live in a cave carved from a mountain of our own filth. We don't usually consider his safety or comfort at all and if we do, it's not in the same way we would worry over our best friend or wife or girlfriend or even our dog.

People toss half-full bottles of drain cleaner right into the barrel, without a second thought of what would happen if the trash man got it splattered into his eyes. Why? Because the trash guy exists outside the Monkeysphere.

"There's that word again..."

The Monkeysphere is the group of people who each of us, using our monkeyish brains, are able to conceptualize as people. If the monkey scientists are monkey right, it's physically impossible for this to be a number much larger than 150.

Most of us do not have room in our Monkeysphere for our friendly neighborhood sanitation worker. So, we don't think of him as a person. We think of him as The Thing That Makes The Trash Go Away.

And even if you happen to know and like your particular garbage man, at one point or another we all have limits to our sphere of monkey concern. It's the way our brains are built. We each have a certain circle of people who we think of as people, usually our own friends and family and neighbors, and then maybe some classmates or coworkers or church or suicide cult.

Those who exist outside that core group of a few dozen people are not people to us. They're sort of one-dimensional bit characters.

Remember the first time, as a kid, you met one of your school teachers outside the classroom? Maybe you saw old Miss Puckerson at Taco Bell eating refried beans through a straw, or saw your principal walking out of a dildo shop. Do you remember that surreal feeling you had when you saw these people actually had lives outside the classroom?

I mean, they're not people. They're teachers.

"So? What difference does all this make?"

Oh, not much. It's just the one single reason society doesn't work.

It's like this: which would upset you more, your best friend dying, or a dozen kids across town getting killed because their bus collided with a truck hauling killer bees? Which would hit you harder, your Mom dying, or seeing on the news that 15,000 people died in an earthquake in Iran?

They're all humans and they are all equally dead. But the closer to our Monkeysphere they are, the more it means to us. Just as your death won't mean anything to the Chinese or, for that matter, hardly anyone else more than 100 feet or so from where you're sitting right now.

"Why should I feel bad for them? I don't even know those people!"

Exactly. This is so ingrained that to even suggest you should feel their deaths as deeply as that of your best friend sounds a little ridiculous. We are hard-wired to have a drastic double standard for the people inside our Monkeysphere versus the 99.999% of the world's population who are on the outside.

Think about this the next time you get really pissed off in traffic, when you start throwing finger gestures and wedging your head out of the window to scream, "LEARN TO FUCKING DRIVE, FUCKER!!" Try to imagine acting like that in a smaller group. Like if you're standing in an elevator with two friends and a coworker, and the friend goes to hit a button and accidentally punches the wrong one. Would you lean over, your mouth two inches from her ear, and scream "LEARN TO OPERATE THE FUCKING ELEVATOR BUTTONS, SHITCAMEL!!"

They'd think you'd gone insane. We all go a little insane, though, when we get in a group larger than the Monkeysphere. That's why you get that weird feeling of anonymous invincibility when you're sitting in a large crowd, screaming curses at a football player you'd never dare say to his face.

"Well, I'm nice to strangers. Have you considered that maybe you're just an asshole?"

Sure, you probably don't go out of your way to be mean to strangers. You don't go out of your way to be mean to stray dogs, either.

The problem is that eventually, the needs of you or those within your Monkeysphere will require screwing someone outside it (even if that need is just venting some tension and anger via exaggerated insults). This is why most of us wouldn't dream of stealing money from the pocket of the old lady next door, but don't mind stealing cable, adding a shady exemption on our tax return, or quietly celebrating when they forget to charge us for something at the restaurant.

You may have a list of rationalizations long enough to circle the Earth, but the truth is that in our monkey brains the old woman next door is a human being while the cable company is a big, cold, faceless machine. That the company is, in reality, nothing but a group of people every bit as human as the old lady, or that some kind old ladies actually work there and would lose their jobs if enough cable were stolen, rarely occurs to us.

That's one of the ingenious things about the big-time religions, by the way. The old religious writers knew it was easier to put the screws to a stranger, so they taught us to get a personal idea of a God in our heads who says, "No matter who you hurt, you're really hurting me. Also, I can crush you like a grape." You must admit that if they weren't writing words inspired by the Almighty, they at least understood the Monkeysphere.

It's everywhere. Once you grasp the concept, you can see examples all around you. You'll walk the streets in a daze, like Roddy Piper after putting on his X-ray sunglasses in They Live.

But wait, because this gets much bigger and much, much stranger...

"So you're going to tell us that this Monkeysphere thing runs the whole world? Also, They Live sucked."

Go flip on the radio. Listen to the conservative talk about "The Government" as if it were some huge, lurking dragon ready to eat you and your paycheck whole. Never mind that the government is made up of people and that all of that money they take goes into the pockets of human beings. Talk radio's Rush Limbaugh is known to tip 50% at restaurants, but flies into a broadcast tirade if even half that dollar amount is deducted from his paycheck by "The Government." That's despite the fact that the money helps that very same single mom he had no problem tipping in her capacity as a waitress.

Now click over to a liberal show now, listen to them describe "Multinational Corporations" in the same diabolical terms, an evil black force that belches smoke and poisons water and enslaves humanity. Isn't it strange how, say, a lone man who carves and sells children's toys in his basement is a sweetheart who just loves bringing joy at Christmas, but a big-time toy corporation (which brings toys to millions of kids at Christmas) is an inhuman soul-grinding greed machine? Strangely enough, if the kindly lone toy making guy made enough toys and hired enough people and expanded to enough shops, we'd eventually stop seeing it as a toy-making shop and start seeing it as the fiery Orc factories of Mordor.

And if you've just thought, "Well, those talk show hosts are just a bunch of egomaniacal blowhards anyway," you've just done it again, turned real humans into two-word cartoon characters. It's no surprise, you do it with pretty much all six billion human beings outside the Monkeysphere.

"So I'm supposed to suddenly start worrying about six billion strangers? That's not even possible!"

That's right, it isn't possible. That's the point.

What is hard to understand is that it's also impossible for them to care about you.

That's why they don't mind stealing your stereo or vandalizing your house or cutting your wages or raising your taxes or bombing your office building or choking your computer with spam advertising diet and penis drugs they know don't work. You're outside their Monkeysphere. In their mind, you're just a vague shape with a pocket full of money for the taking.

Think of Osama Bin Laden. Did you just picture a camouflaged man hiding in a cave, drawing up suicide missions? Or are you thinking of a man who gets hungry and has a favorite food and who had a childhood crush on a girl and who has athlete's foot and chronic headaches and wakes up in the morning with a boner and loves volleyball?

Something in you, just now, probably was offended by that. You think there's an effort to build sympathy for the murderous fuck. Isn't it strange how simply knowing random human facts about him immediately tugs at your sympathy strings? He comes closer to your Monkeysphere, he takes on dimension.

Now, the cold truth is this Bin Laden is just as desperately in need of a bullet to the skull as the raving four-color caricature on some redneck's T-shirt. The key to understanding people like him, though, is realizing that we are the caricature on his T-shirt.

"So you're using monkeys to claim that we're all a bunch of Osama Bin Ladens?"

Sort of.

Listen to any 16 year-old kid with his first job, going on and on about how the boss is screwing him and the government is screwing him even more ("What's FICA?!?!" he screams as he looks at his first paycheck).

Then watch that same kid at work, as he drops a hamburger patty on the floor, picks it up, and slaps in on a bun and serves it to a customer.

In that one dropped burger he has everything he needs to understand those black-hearted politicians and corporate bosses. They see him in the exact same way he sees the customers lined up at the burger counter. Which is, just barely.

In both cases, for the guy making the burger and the guy running Exxon, getting through the workweek and collecting the paycheck are all that matters. No thought is given to the real human unhappiness being spread by doing it shittily (ever gotten so sick from food poisoning you thought your stomach lining was going to fly out of your mouth?) That many customers or employees just can't fit inside the Monkeysphere.

The kid will protest that he shouldn't have to care for the customers for minimum wage, but the truth is if a man doesn't feel sympathy for his fellow man at $6.00 an hour, he won't feel anything more at $600,000 a year.

Or, to look at it the other way, if we're allowed to be indifferent and even resentful to the masses for $6.00 an hour, just think of how angry the some Pakistani man is allowed to be when he's making the equivalent of six dollars a week.

"You've used the word 'monkey' more than 50 times, but the same principle hardly applies. Humans have been to the moon. Let's see the monkeys do that."

It doesn't matter. It's just an issue of degree.

There's a reason why legendary monkeytician Charles Darwin and his assistant, Jeje (pronounced "heyhey") Santiago deduced that humans and chimps were evolutionary cousins. As sophisticated as we are (compare our advanced sewage treatment plants to the chimps' primitive technique of hurling the feces with their bare hands), the inescapable truth is we are just as limited by our mental hardware.

The primary difference is that monkeys are happy to stay in small groups and rarely interact with others outside their monkey gang. This is why they rarely go to war, though when they do it is widely thought to be hilarious. Humans, however, require cars and oil and quality manufactured goods by the fine folks at 3M and Japanese video games and worldwide internets and, most importantly, governments. All of these things take groups larger than 150 people to maintain effectively. Thus, we routinely find ourselves functioning in bunches larger than our primate brains are able to cope with.

This is where the problems begin. Like a fragile naked human pyramid, we are simultaneously supporting and resenting each other. We bitch out loud about our soul-sucking job as an anonymous face on an assembly line, while at the exact same time riding in a car that only an assembly line could have produced. It's a constant contradiction that has left us pissed off and joining informal wrestling clubs in basements.

This is why I think it was with a great burden of sadness that Darwin turned to his assistant and lamented, "Jeje, we're the monkeys."

"Oh, no you didn't."

If you think about it, our entire society has evolved around the limitations of the Monkeysphere. There is a reason why all of the really phat-ass nations with the biggest SUV's with the shiniest 22-inch rims all have some kind of representative democracy (where you vote for people to do the governing for you) and all of them are, to some degree, capitalist (where people actually get to buy property and keep some of what they earn).

Above: Democracy

A representative democracy allows a small group of people to make all of the decisions, while letting us common people feel like we're doing something by going to a polling place every couple of years and pulling a lever that, in reality, has about the same effect as the darkness knob on your toaster. We can simultaneously feel like we're in charge while being contained enough that we can't cause any real monkey mayhem once we fly into one of our screeching, arm-flapping monkey frenzies ("A woman showed her boob at the Super Bowl! We want a boob and football ban immediately!")

Conversely, some people in the distant past naively thought they could sit all of the millions of monkeys down and say, "Okay, everybody go pick the bananas, then bring them here, and we'll distribute them with a complex formula determining banana need! Now go gather bananas for the good of society!" For the monkeys it was a confused, comical, tree-humping disaster.

Later, a far more realistic man sat the monkeys down and said, "You want bananas? Each of you go get your own. I'm taking a nap." That man, of course, was German philosopher Hans Capitalism.

As long as everybody gets their own bananas and shares with the few in their Monkeysphere, the system will thrive even though nobody is even trying to make the system thrive. This is perhaps how Ayn Rand would have put it, had she not been such a hateful bitch.

Then, some time in the Third Century, French philosopher Pierre "Frenchy" LaFrench invented racism.

Above: The French

This was a way of simplifying the too-complex-for-monkeys world by imagining all people of a certain race as being the same person, thinking they all have the same attitudes and mannerisms and tastes in food and clothes and music. It sort of works, as long as we think of that person as being a good person ("Those Asians are so hard-working and precise and well-mannered!") but when we start seeing them as being one, giant, gaping asshole (the French, ironically) our monkey happiness again breaks down.

It's not all the French's fault. The truth is, all of these monkey management schemes only go so far. For instance, today one in four Americans has some kind of mental illness, usually depression. One in four. Watch a basketball game. The odds are at least two of those people on the floor are mentally ill. Look around your house; if everybody else there seems okay, it's you.

Is it any surprise? You turn on the news and see a whole special on the Obesity Epidemic. You've had this worry laid on your shoulders about millions of other people eating too much. What exactly are you supposed to do about the eating habits of 80 million people you don't even know? You've taken on the pork-laden burden of all these people outside the Monkeysphere and you now carry that useless weight of worry like, you know, some kind of animal on your back.

"So what exactly are we supposed to do about all this?"

First, train yourself to get suspicious every time you see simplicity. Any claim that the root of a problem is simple should be treated the same as a claim that the root of a problem is Bigfoot. Simplicity and Bigfoot are found in the real world with about the same frequency.

So reject binary thinking of "good vs. bad" or "us vs. them." Know problems cannot be solved with clever slogans and over-simplified step-by-step programs.

You can do that by following these simple steps. We like to call this plan the T.R.Y. plan:

First, TOTAL MORON. That is, accept the fact THAT YOU ARE ONE. We all are.

That really annoying person you know, the one who's always spouting bullshit, the person who always thinks they're right? Well, the odds are that for somebody else, you're that person. So take the amount you think you know, reduce it by 99.999%, and then you'll have an idea of how much you actually know regarding things outside your Monkeysphere.

Second, UNDERSTAND that there are no Supermonkeys. Just monkeys. Those guys on TV you see, giving the inspirational seminars, teaching you how to reach your potential and become rich and successful like them? You know how they made their money? By giving seminars. For the most part, the only thing they do well is convince others they do everything well.

No, the universal moron principal established in No. 1 above applies here, too. Don't pretend politicians are somehow supposed to be immune to all the backhanded fuckery we all do in our daily lives and don't laugh and point when the preacher gets caught on video snorting cocaine off a prostitute's ass. A good exercise is to picture your hero--whoever it is--passed out on his lawn, naked from the waist down. The odds are it's happened at some point. Even Gandhi may have had hotel rooms and dead hookers in his past.

And don't even think about ignoring advice from a moral teacher just because the source enjoys the ol' Colombian Nose Candy from time to time. We're all members of varying species of hypocrite (or did you tell them at the job interview that you once called in sick to spend a day leveling up on World of Warcraft?) Don't use your heroes' vices as an excuse to let yours run wild.

And finally, DON'T LET ANYBODY simplify it for you. The world cannot be made simple. Anyone who tries to paint a picture of the world in basic comic book colors is most likely trying to use you as a pawn.

So just remember: T-R-Y. Go forth and do likewise, gents. Copies of our book are available in the lobby.

David Wong is the editor of Cracked.com and the author of the dong-filled horror novel John Dies at the End.

Deadmau5 Slams Madonna Over 'Molly,' Ecstasy Reference At Ultra Music Festival

2012-03-27T02:28:00.000-07:00

Deadmau5, left, criticized Madonna's cavalier drug references early Monday morning.

When Madonna took to the stage Saturday night to introduce Avicii at Miami's Ultra Music Festival, she asked, "How many people in this crowd have seen molly?"

Molly is a slang term for MDMA, the active chemical in ecstasy, a drug often associated with electronic dance music (EDM) concerts. The crowd erupted in cheers after Madge asked the question (see video of Madonna on stage at the bottom of this article), but not everyone in the EDM community was happy.

UPDATE: Madonna responded to Deadmau5's comments. For the new developments in the story, please see this article.

The original article continues below.

Deadmau5, one of the leading producers of progressive house music, took to Twitter and Facebook to rail against the pop star for what he called grossly irresponsible behavior.

"Very classy there madonna. "HUR DUR HAS ANYONE SEEN MOLLY???" such a great message for the young music lovers at ultra," he posted on Facebook early Monday morning. "quite the f'n philanthropist. but hey, at least yer HIP AND TRENDY! fucking cant smack my head hard enough right now."

Madonna, whose album MDNA was released today, has yet to respond to the Canadian producer.

To Deadmau5 (whose real name is Joel Zimmerman), Madonna was trading on a negative association to appear relevant. By casually referencing MDMA usage at an event attended by 150,000 concertgoers and streamed online to tens of thousands more, the pop star helped cement an association that Zimmerman and other performers have fought to disprove.

Some fans, however, didn't take Zimmerman's side. When one Twitter user suggested that Deadmau5's music is enjoyed by ecstasy users, the artist quickly said he doesn't condone that behavior:

"I can appriciate her meteoric career, and all good deeds done, but WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?" he added on Facebook. "That's your big contribution to EDM? Thats your big message to ultra attendies? hipsterspeak for looking for drugs? fuck off you fucking IDIOT."

In a follow-up blog post, Zimmerman clarified his remarks and insisted that the discussion was about responsibility. Responding to criticism that he was a hypocrite for having smoked cigarrettes while live-streaming from his studio, Zimmerman said never tries to make his "vices" look cool or appealing, especially to his younger fans.

He also expressed concern about what comments like Madonna do to the EDM community:

It really hurts me to see rampant ADVOCATION of extreme bullshit lifestyles to a genre that spans pretty much any age gap these days ...
I just feel like ive been kicked in the balls for a dollar. I’ve always been into electronic music, as far back as i can remember… and around the beginning, i really do remember the times the events i loved were pretty much outlawed by my city simply due to its speculated over-excessive drug use, and the media coverage that everyone loves to lap up around it. Yeah, that bummed me out… kinda made me feel like… how could something so damn interesting, artful, fun and just plain cool, be frowned upon by most….
but look at us now, allthough not completely, and never like to be completely, the dark veil has been lifted slightly and the music and good times and technology is starting to shine through more and more than “the latest breaking news about such and such a drug found only at these underground TECHNO RAVES - Tonight on fox!”

Zimmerman recently collaborated with Chris James, a fan who submitted vocals for Zimmerman's new song, "The Veldt," on Twitter. Since Zimmerman has taken to live-streaming any work he does in his new home studio, the entire process was captured on camera. After being inspired by James' lyrics, Zimmerman took to his blog to explain why he shuns collaborations with big name artists in favor of more organic projects like "The Veldt."

Avicii, the DJ and producer Madonna was introducing, just announced his first batch of summer tour dates. The young artist is embarking on his first all-arena tour. He will also be playing at Coachella.

Madonna at Ultra:

What People Are Saying About MDNA:

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"Still can't help feeling this is a little bit like granny dancing at Christmas" #Madonna maybe it's time to retire? http://t.co/FIcSJ7HP

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Drinkify your music and useful admonishments

2012-03-13T01:34:00.000-07:00

Ever wondered what drink you should be pairing with your musical preferences? Well the wait is over:

Drinkify

Also, this:

Ten Years After Decriminalization, Drug Abuse Down by Half in Portugal

2012-02-13T21:56:00.000-08:00

Drug warriors often contend that drug use would skyrocket if we were to legalize or decriminalize drugs in the United States. Fortunately, we have a real-world example of the actual effects of ending the violent, expensive War on Drugs and replacing it with a system of treatment for problem users and addicts.

Ten years ago, Portugal decriminalized all drugs. One decade after this unprecedented experiment, drug abuse is down by half:

Health experts in Portugal said Friday that Portugal’s decision 10 years ago to decriminalise drug use and treat addicts rather than punishing them is an experiment that has worked.

“There is no doubt that the phenomenon of addiction is in decline in Portugal,” said Joao Goulao, President of the Institute of Drugs and Drugs Addiction, a press conference to mark the 10th anniversary of the law.

The number of addicts considered “problematic” — those who repeatedly use “hard” drugs and intravenous users — had fallen by half since the early 1990s, when the figure was estimated at around 100,000 people, Goulao said.

Other factors had also played their part however, Goulao, a medical doctor added.

“This development can not only be attributed to decriminalisation but to a confluence of treatment and risk reduction policies.”

Many of these innovative treatment procedures would not have emerged if addicts had continued to be arrested and locked up rather than treated by medical experts and psychologists. Currently 40,000 people in Portugal are being treated for drug abuse. This is a far cheaper, far more humane way to tackle the problem. Rather than locking up 100,000 criminals, the Portuguese are working to cure 40,000 patients and fine-tuning a whole new canon of drug treatment knowledge at the same time.

None of this is possible when waging a war.

Follow me on Twitter or Facebook. Read my Forbes blog here.

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She doesn't answer the phone

2012-02-08T10:09:00.000-08:00

In 1951, E. B. White — the novelist responsible for, most notably, Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little — was accused by the ASPCA of not paying his dog tax and, as a result, "harboring" an unlicensed dog. He responded by way of the following delightful letter.

(Source: Letters of a Nation; Image: E. B. White with his dachshund, Minnie, via Mister Crew.)

12 April 1951

The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
York Avenue and East 92nd Street
New York, 28, NY

Dear Sirs:

I have your letter, undated, saying that I am harboring an unlicensed dog in violation of the law. If by "harboring" you mean getting up two or three times every night to pull Minnie's blanket up over her, I am harboring a dog all right. The blanket keeps slipping off. I suppose you are wondering by now why I don't get her a sweater instead. That's a joke on you. She has a knitted sweater, but she doesn't like to wear it for sleeping; her legs are so short they work out of a sweater and her toenails get caught in the mesh, and this disturbs her rest. If Minnie doesn't get her rest, she feels it right away. I do myself, and of course with this night duty of mine, the way the blanket slips and all, I haven't had any real rest in years. Minnie is twelve.

In spite of what your inspector reported, she has a license. She is licensed in the State of Maine as an unspayed bitch, or what is more commonly called an "unspaded" bitch. She wears her metal license tag but I must say I don't particularly care for it, as it is in the shape of a hydrant, which seems to me a feeble gag, besides being pointless in the case of a female. It is hard to believe that any state in the Union would circulate a gag like that and make people pay money for it, but Maine is always thinking of something. Maine puts up roadside crosses along the highways to mark the spots where people have lost their lives in motor accidents, so the highways are beginning to take on the appearance of a cemetery, and motoring in Maine has become a solemn experience, when one thinks mostly about death. I was driving along a road near Kittery the other day thinking about death and all of a sudden I heard the spring peepers. That changed me right away and I suddenly thought about life. It was the nicest feeling.

You asked about Minnie's name, sex, breed, and phone number. She doesn't answer the phone. She is a dachshund and can't reach it, but she wouldn't answer it even if she could, as she has no interest in outside calls. I did have a dachshund once, a male, who was interested in the telephone, and who got a great many calls, but Fred was an exceptional dog (his name was Fred) and I can't think of anything offhand that he wasn't interested in. The telephone was only one of a thousand things. He loved life — that is, he loved life if by "life" you mean "trouble," and of course the phone is almost synonymous with trouble. Minnie loves life, too, but her idea of life is a warm bed, preferably with an electric pad, and a friend in bed with her, and plenty of shut-eye, night and days. She's almost twelve. I guess I've already mentioned that. I got her from Dr. Clarence Little in 1939. He was using dachshunds in his cancer-research experiments (that was before Winchell was running the thing) and he had a couple of extra puppies, so I wheedled Minnie out of him. She later had puppies by her own father, at Dr. Little's request. What do you think about that for a scandal? I know what Fred thought about it. He was some put out.

Sincerely yours,

E. B. White

If You Were Going to Die Today, What Would You Regret Most (and How Would You Change for the Better)?

2012-02-07T15:37:00.000-08:00

If you've lived you've made mistakes, and that likely means you've accumulated a few regrets along the way. How damaging would those regrets be if your life was about to end? What would you wish you'd have done differently? Susie Steiner, writing for The Guardian, reports on the most common regrets of the dying and they're mostly things that could've been easily remedied. Do your regrets coincide?

Here are the top five:

I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
I wish I hadn't worked so hard.
I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.
I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Do you share any of those regrets? Do you have others? Most importantly, what would you do to change things before it's too late? Often times this is easier said than done, and the process can be long and involve many unknowns, but chances are at least a few of you have preemptively avoided these regrets and can share your experiences with others. If you've got advice, share it in the comments.

Photo by LeventeGyori (Shutterstock).

Top five regrets of the dying | The Guardian via Swissmiss

Contact Adam Dachis:

19 Web Sites for Travel Savings in 2012

2012-01-10T15:54:00.000-08:00

HIGHER hotel prices, airline capacity cuts and rising travel demand mean travelers will have to work harder to find a good deal in 2012. But there are plenty of online tools to help keep your vacation expenses in check. Here are 19 go-to Web sites to help you save money this year.

Enlarge This Image

FLIGHTS

Looking for sales on a specific route, or just want to go somewhere cheap?AirfareWatchdog.com hunts down deals computers tend to miss, like promo codes airlines include in e-mail newsletters. It also finds sales from Allegiant and Southwest, which typically aren’t listed on major airfare search engines. You can sign up for specific fare alerts or a list of all the cheap round-trip fares from your local airport.

Where can you go for $500 or less? Kayak.com/explore will show you where you can vacation for a particular price and display the results on a map. You can narrow your search by month, region, flight length, weather or activity. Clicking on a price reveals dates the fare is available.

If you already know where you want to go, use Itasoftware.com to find the cheapest dates to fly. Click on “airfare search” in the middle of the home page, then enter your departure date and destination and select “see calendar of lowest fares.” To purchase, you must go to the airline’s Web site or online agencies like Travelocity.

To figure out whether to buy that plane ticket now or wait, go to Bing.com/travel. Its Price Predictor can determine how likely a fare is to rise or fall during the next seven days from more than 250 cities in the United States to top domestic destinations and major hubs in Europe. The site claims that its predictions are about 75 percent accurate and save customers more than $50 on average for a round trip.

After you’ve booked your tickets at an airline site, enter your flight information atYapta.com to track the price so you don’t miss out on savings if the price drops. If the difference in price exceeds the rebooking fee (typically $75 to $150), Yapta will send you, without charge, an e-mail or tweet so you can call the airline to claim the credit.

HOTELS

To get the best deal on Priceline.com, where travelers name their own price and pay before learning the hotel’s name, sites like Biddingfortravel.com andBetterbidding.com have long offered strategic advice on how to game the system. Now, a new site, Biddingtraveler.com, goes a step further. Enter the city, dates, neighborhood and star ratings for the hotel you want. Then, after reviewing the site’s recommendations, enter a “lowball” bid and “final offer.” The Bidding Traveler then calculates and helps you execute the optimal bidding strategy on Priceline.

Not willing to gamble? Hotels.com offers nearly 145,000 properties in more than 60 countries from national chain hotels and all-inclusive resorts to bed-and-breakfasts. You can find particularly good last-minute deals on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And the site has a loyalty program through which members earn a free-night voucher after they book 10 nights.

For hotel fanciers, Luxurylink.com, offers discounts on high-end hotels and villas through online auctions and deals. Just last month the site was auctioning off a five-night package at La Samanna on St. Martin in the Caribbean that included a deluxe ocean-view room with a private terrace, airport transfers, a bottle of rum upon arrival, two 45-minute massages and a one-day car rental with a minimum starting bid of $2,475. The package normally costs $6,171.

VACATION RENTALS

As hotel prices rise, vacation rentals can be the better deal. HomeAway.com offers more than 290,000 listings in 145 countries, including rentals by owners that cut out the middleman.

Airbnb.com connects travelers with locals who are offering a place to stay, whether it is a couch, a private apartment or a castle. It currently has about 100,000 listings in 19,000 cities and towns in 192 countries, and charges booking fees from 6 to 12 percent.Wimdu.com offers a similar service focused mostly on places in Europe with 35,000 listings across 100 countries. Do as much due diligence as you can when using such sites; some hosts have been known to cancel confirmed reservations at the last minute.

For luxury seekers, Jetsetter.com/homes, a members-only site, offers discounts of up to 50 percent on 5 to 10 carefully selected vacation rentals. Membership is free and by invitation only. You can also request a free membership on Jetsetter.com.

EVERYTHING ELSE

Tired of sifting through daily-deal or group-shopping sites like Groupon and LivingSocial for local bargains? YipIt.com, collects those deals from 787 services in 118 North American cities. Travelers who sign up with an e-mail can filter results by checking categories like wine tasting, museum, golf or other activities. A recent search for restaurant and spa deals in New York turned up a $60 three-course dinner for two with wine (worth $136) at Tenpenny, the Gotham Hotel’s restaurant, and a $199 Moroccan Spa treatment at the Trump SoHo, worth $339. Pay close attention to expiration dates to be sure the deals will be good for your travel plans.

Autoslash.com searches the Web for discount coupons on car rentals and applies them after you book. It then continually checks for lower rates and coupons until your trip date and automatically applies any discounts it finds.

Cayole.com lets you search cruises by price, destination, room type or cruise line, then offers price predictions to give cruisers an idea of whether they should buy now or wait for a possible price drop. For example, by clicking “get more details” for a five-night Western Mediterranean cruise in September, the site recommended that travelers booking balcony cabins buy “as soon as possible, because prices are likely to increase.” For interior ocean-view rooms or suites it suggested waiting.

If you’re willing to swap places with a stranger, list your home and find travelers willing to trade on Homeexchange.com, which facilitates about 60,000 swaps a year. Recent listings included a two-bedroom apartment on Lake Como in Italy and a six-bedroom oceanfront lodge in Cape Town with a resident game ranger. Members pay $119.40 to list their home for a year or $47.85 for three months.

By MICHELLE HIGGINS

Does 'Devil Inside' suggest a new studio-filmmaker relationship?

2012-01-09T11:50:00.001-08:00

Say what you will about "The Devil Inside" -- and judging by its "F" CinemaScore, plenty of people did -- but however harsh the words, the movie is an unusual phenomenon. Hidden beneath the box-office puns and the industry euphemisms is something rare: an out-of-nowhere, did-that-really-just-happen, Tim Tebow-style success.

Films can quietly build word of mouth, especially in the genre community. But not like this.

"Devil," an exorcism tale that an obscure filmmaker named William Brent Bell made on a shoestring before a pair of Hollywood producers helped him sell it to Paramount, featured no stars. Nor did it boast any festival-enabled grass-roots support a la "Saw" or "Paranormal Activity." And critics? Forget about them. They gave the film -- which uses the shopworn "Blair Witch"-like found-footage conceit to tell of a woman who travels to Italy to explore the mystery of her murderous and possessed mother -- a 7% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Yet the film attracted a constituent base that would make any Republican nominee envious. So robust was its audience, in fact, that "Devil" not only won the weekend with an eye-popping $34.5 million -- it became the third-biggest January opening in history.

That would have been an astonishing feat even if the movie hadn't been so vehemently disliked; as it was, the numbers were even more impressive. (By comparison, the 2009 Cameron Diaz thriller "The Box," the last wide release to be given the scarlet "F" by CinemaScore respondents, opened only to $7.5 million.)

The "Devil" base was not only strong, it was hidden -- so much so that pre-release projections underestimated the total audience by as much as half.

Pundits have understandably been struggling to make sense of it all. No matter what explanation one settles on, it's clear that the marketing team at Paramount, which retailed the movie from its low-budget Insurge division, pulled off some nifty tricks.

A haunting image of a nun whose eyes lacked pupils was pretty much unavoidable to
anyone who stepped outside in recent weeks. So was an enticingly simple, if dubious, message that this was one of the scariest movies you'll ever see.

And the Twitter volume coming into the weekend was both a reason for and a symptom of pre-release interest. (Paramount deployed social media in a number of ways, including with a clever "Tweet Your Scream" promotion that it also used for "Paranormal Activity 3.")

But in pulling off its box-office coup, the team behind "Devil" did something else besides just persuade a lot of people to see a derivative movie: They departed from the typical micro-budget success story. Those successes, after all, usually involve a strong or novel film -- as the trope these days goes, anyone with a camera, editing software and a story to tell can make a good movie. The question is whether they can find an audience.

But "The Devil Inside" did things backward. The people with a camera and editing software made a movie that wasn't very good, judging by both populist and critical responses. Yet the movie found a huge audience.

There's an interesting, even daring, model tucked away in all this. For decades, studios have sought to discover filmmakers in unlikely places -- shorts, low-budget features -- and then make them part of the system. They pluck these people from their marginal work and put them to work on mainstream movies already in their pipeline.

"Devil" suggests something different and a lot more decentralized, in which a studio simply acquires the low-budget movie and goes to work marketing it. The filmmaker feels like he or she won the lottery. And the studio pulls in cash while taking very little risk, instead just inexpensively tapping in to the thousands of film-school grads who want access to that distribution system.

Of course, some of this has been attempted before, particularly at Paramount, which turned the first "Paranormal" into a major hit in a similar way. But "Devil" offers a new twist. "Paranormal" showed that a studio could find a gem of a movie, acquire it, and bring people in to see it. "Devil" shows a studio can get people to see a movie even when they really don't want to.

RELATED:

Movie review: "The Devil Inside"

Moviegoers are possessed by "The Devil inside"

--Steven Zeitchik
twitter.com/ZeitchikLAT

Photo: A scene from "The Devil Inside." Credit: Paramount Pictures

Hobbits, aliens, Batman and more: Which is the most anticipated movie of 2012?

2012-01-04T10:20:00.000-08:00

From left: 'Brave,' 'The Dark Knight Rises,' 'Prometheus,' 'The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey' (Pixar/Disney, Warner Bros., Twentieth Century Fox, MGM)

All the gifts are finally unwrapped and the cinematic class of 2011 has finally been presented. There’s not much left to do now but watch as the clock counts down until 2012.

It should be a quiet time to backtrack and catch up on all those movies that went unviewed opening weekend, but are now present on nearly every critics’ top 10 list. But the studios have kick-started the anticipation for the new year with a herd of new trailers for some of 2012′s biggest potential blockbusters — three in the last week alone.

Holiday moviegoers (or anyone with a decent Internet connection) got their first peeks at “The Hobbit,” “Prometheus” and an extended look at “The Dark Knight Rises.” These trailers joined the already-released group, which includes “The Avengers” and “John Carter” and “The Hunger Games,” among others.

So what big, expensive, effects-laden 2012 movie are you most anticipating? Review the trailers below and then cast your vote in the poll.

“The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey”

“Prometheus”

“The Dark Knight Rises”

“The Amazing Spider-Man”

“The Avengers”

“John Carter”

“The Hunger Games”

“Men in Black 3″

“Brave”

What movie are you most anticipating in 2012?

http://herocomplex.latimes.com/2011/12/27/hobbits-aliens-batman-and-more-which-is-the-most-anticipated-movie-of-2012/

Empty London on Christmas morning

2012-01-01T14:22:00.000-08:00

Photos of an Empty London on Christmas Morning

For the third — and judging by my track record of being ill at Xmas — the last time, I got up early and walked into central London to hire a bike and cycle around taking photos of the city minus its human population.

Well, almost deserted, and by 10am, while still incredibly empty, most of the main areas had people walking around enjoying the atmosphere of a silent city.

Apart from the emptiness of the city, it is the silence that makes the experience such an addictive one for me.

London is never silent, not even at 3am, but on Xmas morning, it is almost silent. The background drone of aircraft approaching Heathrow has gone, and away from main roads, the streets lack the sound of car tyres rolling over tarmac.

Heading home, also a sound you never really hear now – the pealing of church bells. Not just coming from a single church you are nearby, but from all over the city as the sound carries far further than usual and surrounds you from all sides. Magical.

This year though – Christmas Eve was on a Saturday, so I thought it might be possible to photograph the City of London on Saturday and save time. Despite what people might say, the City is never empty and quiet at weekends, as builders and maintenance workers displace office workers, and road traffic is still fairly high along the main roads.

This year though, the city was unusually empty for a Saturday, and worth the effort.

A few of my favourite “Deserted London” photos below – the full set from 2011 available here. Also, theoriginal set from 2008 and some more from 2010.

Enjoy!

Well, you just have to try and recreate that famous scene from 28 Days Later.

I rather like the combination of old and new buildings, and taking it in B&W seems to work better than in colour, especially for the older buildings.

You don’t need to know anything about where this street is for it to work – as you see four lanes on the road and wide pavements and instinctively know it should be busy, but isn’t.

One of the busiest bridges across the Thames.

Again, this one seems to work better in black-and-white and the area seems to look more desolate as a result.

Busy Bank with Mansion House standing alone over one of the main road junctions in the area.

This was taken just as the sun was rising, so it lacks the “middle of the day” lighting effects of the other photos, but the empty street lined with so many shops and offices feels right for this.

Not that good technically as it was just too early in the morning – but I did have a nice chat with three policemen who also turned up to take photos in the morning.

Empty Trafalgar Square – although there were a couple of security guards huddled in a doorway nearby.

Hyde Park Corner – London’s scariest road junction looking a little safer than usual.

A giant pigeon in Picadilly Circus – presumably that advert isn’t a serving suggestion?

And the new X-Crossing at Oxford Circus. Actually not as empty as it looks, I just had to wait a while for the cars to go away. I also had a nice chat with three Chinese tourists who were stunned at the lack of public transport.

You can see the full set of 89 photos here.

http://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2011/12/25/photos-of-an-empty-london-on-christmas-morning/

Guantánamo Forever?

2011-12-31T04:01:00.000-08:00

IN his inaugural address, President Obama called on us to “reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.” We agree. Now, to protect both, he must veto the National Defense Authorization Act that Congress is expected to pass this week.

Related in Opinion

Editorial: Hobbling the Fight Against Terrorism (December 8, 2011)

This budget bill — which can be vetoed without cutting financing for our troops — is both misguided and unnecessary: the president already has the power and flexibility to effectively fight terrorism.

One provision would authorize the military to indefinitely detain without charge people suspected of involvement with terrorism, including United States citizens apprehended on American soil. Due process would be a thing of the past. Some claim that this provision would merely codify existing practice. Current law empowers the military to detain people caught on the battlefield, but this provision would expand the battlefield to include the United States — and hand Osama bin Laden an unearned victory long after his well-earned demise.

A second provision would mandate military custody for most terrorism suspects. It would force on the military responsibilities it hasn’t sought. This would violate not only the spirit of the post-Reconstruction act limiting the use of the armed forces for domestic law enforcement but also our trust with service members, who enlist believing that they will never be asked to turn their weapons on fellow Americans. It would sideline the work of the F.B.I. and local law enforcement agencies in domestic counterterrorism. These agencies have collected invaluable intelligence because the criminal justice system — unlike indefinite military detention — gives suspects incentives to cooperate.

Mandatory military custody would reduce, if not eliminate, the role of federal courts in terrorism cases. Since 9/11, the shaky, untested military commissions have convicted only six people on terror-related charges, compared with more than 400 in the civilian courts.

A third provision would further extend a ban on transfers from Guantánamo, ensuring that this morally and financially expensive symbol of detainee abuse will remain open well into the future. Not only would this bolster Al Qaeda’s recruiting efforts, it also would make it nearly impossible to transfer 88 men (of the 171 held there) who have been cleared for release. We should be moving to shut Guantánamo, not extend it.

Having served various administrations, we know that politicians of both parties love this country and want to keep it safe. But right now some in Congress are all too willing to undermine our ideals in the name of fighting terrorism. They should remember that American ideals are assets, not liabilities.

By CHARLES C. KRULAK and JOSEPH P. HOAR

Charles C. Krulak and Joseph P. Hoar are retired four-star Marine generals.

7 Habits of Highly Effective Marketing

2011-12-28T15:49:00.000-08:00

1. The Customer Is Usually Wrong. Ensure they understand this by sending them illiterate, angry emails. That bitch got told.

2. It's Not A Lie If You Believe It. Mayor of Boston come on Bud you run a show that’s all you do.

3. Devote your hypothetical 125-strong PR team to a smear campaign of the gatekeeper who runs a key conference where you sell your clients' products.

4. When pretending to be your own former business associates, reply from your personal email address; bonus points for using this address on anabolic steroid advice forums.

5. If You're Wrong, Be Boldly Wrong. Bloggers never pay attention to carbon copied customer service complaints!

6. Name drop people who already loathe you, in a medium with a permanent record.

7. When cornered, claim that it's everyone else who is being unprofessional.

BONUS: 3 rules for Twitter stratagy.

1. If your name is not available on Twitter, change a random consonant or vowel until it becomes available. No-one will notice the difference.

2. Buy 20,000 followers, but only use the account to harangue abused customers.

3. Instead of changing your account handle when the heat is on, abandon it completely so that someone else might take it.

By Rob Beschizza

The Top 10 PR Blunders Of 2011

2011-12-23T22:27:00.000-08:00

Some blunders are unavoidable; often they are self-inflicted. One thing's for certain: 2011 provided some stunning examples of public relations disasters.

10. There are no claw backs in PR. Back in January, a guy named Mitch Delaplane thought it would be cool to write a press release that touted his brilliance as a publicist. He penned a shamelessly self-aggrandizing essay in flack-ese, calling it 'The Most Amazing Press Release Ever Written,' and then dropped a couple of hundred bucks to distribute it through PR Newswire. In it, the writer quotes himself: "I've been in the business for over ten years and have to say, I'm speechless," he said. "The title alone grabs you and demands that it be read. Then there's this quote that completely takes things to an entirely new level. I'm proud of this press release. In fact, I think it is [really] amazing." Some of the flack blogs picked up on it and a few thought his stunt was fresh and funny. In reality, it was sophomoric, unprofessional and completely cringe-worthy.

9. A Mogul's Media Meltdown. Alleged phone hacking by people on the payroll of British newspaperNews of the World turned out to be a major scandal for media mogul Rupert Murdoch, his son James, and other officials. Reporters and editors at NOTW were accused of bribing police, hacking the private voicemails of everyone from the parents of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan to the Royal Family, andpaying more than $2 million in gag settlements to victims. After numerous investigations and government hearings (including one where Rupert got a cream pie in the face), the fallout was far and wide. The sackings and resignations affected journalists and law enforcement officials alike. The scandal cost Murdoch his bid for British Sky Broadcasting and even the News of the World itself, which was shuttered in July.

8. Reality Show Nuptials. It lasted a mere two and a half months -- 72 whole days of matrimony for reality TV "star" Kim Kardashian and her pro basketball player boyfriend, Kris Humphries. Entertainment Weekly.com breathlessly reported, "Ryan Seacrest, who serves as executive producer on "Keeping Up with the Kardashians," confirmed the news via his Twitter feed earlier today: "Yes @kimkardashian is filing for divorce this morning. I touched base with her, getting a statement in just a few mins." The "storybook" wedding hauled in about $18 million, according to reports that E! shelled out $15 million for the couple's two-part TV wedding special while the wedding photos brought in another $3 million. And conservatives are still using the "sanctity of marriage" excuse to argue against gay people marrying? Really?

7. Twitter #fail. It seems like now that Twitter is part of the public discourse, there will be a constant parade of idiots screwing up in measures of 140 characters or less. So I guess it's no surprise this has now become a permanent category. OK, who's first? How about @KennethCole, who couldn't resist using the Arab Spring Uprising for some shameless marketing: "Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they hear our new spring collection is now available online at http://..."; a succession of tweets made by three members of Rep. Rick Larsen's (D-Wash.) legislative staff -- Seth Burroughs, legislative assistant (@therocketship1); Elizabeth Robblee, legislative assistant (@betsysbites); and Ben Byers, legislative correspondent (@byers_remorse) described on-the-job drinking, misuse of office time and resources, and public insults aimed at Larsen. The trio of numbskulls was fired -- and of course, the Big Kahuna, Rep. Anthony Weiner, who couldn't resist tweeting photos of his junk to a young woman (somehow forgetting he is married to Huma Abedin, a long-time aide to Hillary Clinton). Weiner resigned in disgrace. People, remember: if it's online, others will see it!

6. Most awesome episode of "Punked" ever. While Gov. Scott Walker (R-Wis.) was stripping away union collective bargaining rights to state employees, he was busy scheming how to discredit the tens of thousands of very pissed-off Wisconsinites who descended on the state capitol. That's when Buffalo Beast's Ian Murphy got the great idea to get Walker on the phone. He rang up the guv, posing as David Koch, half of the evil twin set known as the Koch Brothers. When "Koch" suggested planting 'troublemakers' amongst the protesters, Walker didn't blanch for a moment, even admitting that his team "had thought about that." Walker probably doesn't have much longer to ruin Wisconsin -- his recall looks imminent.

5. The return of the Know-Nothings. The Republican primary season is in full swing, and the gazillion debates so far have only made the whole exercise seem like a really bad reality show. From Rick Perry forgetting one of the three federal agencies he's cut if he were elected, to the audiences booing a gay American soldier and cheering the death of a hypothetical citizen who didn't have health insurance, anyone who was paying attention couldn't help but wonder what the hell happened to the GOP? Then in an editorial board meeting with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Herman Cain was asked what he thought about President Obama's handling of the Libya situation. He sat there dumbfounded and finally revealed his candidacy was more about performance art than it was about getting the most important job in the world.

4. Sarah Palin's Blood Libel. The Quitter from Wasilla just had to pipe in on the shooting of Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-Ariz). Her ugly map that contained cross hair targets on several congressional districts across the country was duly noted in the shooting's aftermath -- one of the cross hairs hovered over Gifford's district. She managed to keep her yap shut for four days. But instead of keeping her head low, our fave hockey mom/grifter recorded a video and used an incendiary phrase in describing how she had been portrayed in the tragedy's fallout. "Journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn," Palin said in the video. "Blood libel" is the centuries-old anti-Semitic myth that Jews use the blood of Christian children for certain religious rituals and holidays. It was used to justify the persecution of Jews. I believe historians will cite this as the moment that Sarah Palin became inconsequential in American politics.

3. Winning in reverse. Props to Charlie Sheen for going full-on, pedal-to-the-metal batpoop crazy in the most entertaining PR meltdown of the year. A series of insanity-laced interviews brought us all into the cramped quarters of his mind, where we learned about warlocks, tiger blood and of course, winning! Charlie might have thought he was winning, but if winning means getting fired from the best-paying gig in television, then the man has a twisted sense of scoreboard. I've met Charlie before... he seemed like a decent guy. But then again, I never had to shoot a sitcom with him. I'm guessing Jon Cryer is pretty happy these days. Pretty sure "Two and a Half Men" creator Chuck Lorre is too.

2. GOP holds the U.S. economy hostage. Republican intransigence over a simple legislative maneuver nearly brought our economy to the brink of total collapse, and certainly caused a downgrade in the nation's credit rating. And as of this writing, THEY'RE AT IT AGAIN! Please vote these jerks out of office, America.

1. Penn State loses it soul. Ohio State University recently found out its punishment for violation of NCAA rules (lying to officials about infractions): ineligible for a bowl game in 2012, loss of a few scholarships, etc. What it did, what the University of Southern California did to receive its punishment (Reggie Bush's improper benefits), what even Southern Methodist University did back in the 80s to get the NCAA's "Death Penalty" (under the table payments to players) pale in comparison to what happened in Happy Valley, Pa. There have been a million words written about former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky's alleged sexual abuse of young boys. Because of his inaction, it cost the legendary Head Coach Joe Paterno his job, as well as the jobs of university President Graham Spanier, Senior Vice President Gary Schultz and Athletic Director Tim Curley. Schultz and Curley were charged with grand jury perjury and failure to report suspected child abuse by Sandusky. The indictment accused Curley and Schultz of not only failing to tell the police, but falsely telling the grand jury that Assistant Coach Mike McQueary (who allegedly witnessed Sandusky raping a 10-year-old boy in the Penn State locker room showers in 2002), never informed them of sexual activity. This is the worst thing to ever happen in college football, and as a fan I am sick to my stomach over it. Penn State badly handled the whole situation from start to finish. Hopefully, it will do everything it can, as quick as it can to regain its moral compass.

This post has been changed to reflect that Buffalo Beast's Ian Murphy conducted the phone call with Governor Walker.

Follow Rich Robinson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RobinsonFlash

Why Emma Sullivan Is Good for Democracy

2011-12-02T17:13:00.001-08:00

Since time began, sassy teenagers have been putting authority figures in their place. The way we respond to them says a lot about the society we hope to build.

blmurch/Flickr

One thing I've learned from the Emma Sullivan flap and the reactions to my recent post on it: a lot of people think it's scarier for a teenager to wise off to her friends about a powerful man than for a governor to try to bully a teenager. The comments on my piece included a number of people who really can't understand why anyone should object to the gentle guidance offered to Emma by the governor's office ("Shut that girl up or you'll be sorry") and her principal ("Apologize to the governor or you will be punished"). But it's taken for granted that tweeting "#heblowsalot" to her whopping 65 followers constituted the worst Kansas emergency since the sack of Lawrence in 1857.

"We don't allow no free speech over this way," isn't a good reason, any more than any other part of the Constitution can be voided by saying "this isn't a due process zone."

Ruth Marcus of The Washington Post concurs. "Emma Sullivan, you're lucky you're not my daughter," she clucks, the only part of the column with which I agree wholeheartedly. "[I]t was perfectly appropriate for the principal to explain how her attitude and language during an official trip reflected poorly on the school," she says primly. ("Explain" being the adult term for "threaten.") If she were Emma's mom, she would have taken away her smartphone and forced her to write the damned apology, and no backtalk, missy.

What in heaven's name did Emma tweet -- again, not to the governor's face, but to a few friends -- that threatens the Anglo-American edifice of ordered liberty? She said of him what teenagers since time began have said to their adult rulers -- indeed, what the good of society demands they say from time to time. In the words of Lewis Carroll, her tweet meant, "Who cares for you? You're nothing but a pack of cards!" I think any American governor ought to hear this sentiment at least twice a day.

I can't help wondering whether any of these benign spirits have ever found themselves looking at the barrel of school, or state, power for the offense of saying forbidden things. I have. It was a different time and a different place, but I will never forget being told by my headmaster in 1968 that I would be expelled from school, and have my college acceptance rescinded, for making a public show of regret that Martin Luther King was dead.

It only takes one incident like that to change your view of adult "guidance" and "explanation." Because of that experience, I think, I would have said to any child of mine caught in a similar vice, "What you think and say to about politicians is your business and not theirs." Because of that experience, 40 years later, I'm a First Amendment specialist instead of holding a real job.

But as a First Amendment specialist, I think the way we treat the Emma Sullivans of the world matters quite a lot to the kind of society we build. "Talking's something you can't do judiciously," says Casper ("The Fat Man") Gutman in The Maltese Falcon, "unless you keep in practice." And more and more I wonder where Americans are supposed to keep in practice. Free speech can't take place nowhere; it needs places to be uttered and places to be heard. Adults want high schools to be speech-free zones, and more and more the courts agree. Employers want the workplace speech-free zones as well. The law supports them. Recently, the Supreme Court held that the First Amendment doesn't protect even public employees who say things on the job that their employers don't approve. During this term of the Supreme Court, lawyers for a church school argued that religious bodies should have the power to fire employees who report child sexual abuse, as required by law.

So, no training in talking while you grow up. No talking on the job once you're grown up. Take down that cheeky tweet. Clean up that Facebook page. What about college, where students are supposed to speak their minds and follow truth wherever it may lead? Well, sure, as long as it's, well, decorous. "University officials have generally bureaucratized and limited assembly and speech on campus," notes Timothy Zick of the William & Mary Law School, author of Speech Out of Doors: Preserving First Amendment Liberties in Public Places. "Many campuses have adopted 'free speech zones' and other restrictions."

The "free speech zone" is a marvelous invention in which certain parts of the campus are designated for expression. Gradually the rest of the campus is then shut off from bothersome protest and agitation. It's an elegant way of making the First Amendment disappear: under that antiquated document, "the freedom of speech" is guaranteed everywhere in public -- unless there's a very strong reason why itcan't be allowed. "We don't allow no free speech over this way," isn't a good reason, any more than any other part of the Constitution can be voided by saying "this isn't a due process zone."

And once free speech is zoned, even the "zones" may not be quite so free as all that. At one campus I taught at, a graduate student went to the "free speech zone" and delivered a piece of performance art beginning "Fuck you, fuck your friends, fuck your parents . . . ." He didn't get much further before a campus cop told him, "You can't talk like that in the free speech zone," and led him away in handcuffs.

As we learned November 18, administrators at universities like the University California Davis are like administrators everywhere else. The campus cops pepper-sprayed those bothersomely peaceful students as if they were a nest of hornets. The resulting outrage took the administration by surprise; college administrators, in my experience, don't put up with a lot of back-talk from students or faculty, and usually can't believe it when they are finally forced to listen.

What about parks and streets, which, the Supreme Court once told us, "have immemorially been held in trust for the use of the public and, time out of mind, have been used for purposes of assembly, communicating thoughts between citizens, and discussing public questions"? Well, there's a battle on there, too. The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade is one thing; Occupy Wall Street is another. As Zick notes, "The occupiers have demonstrated the critical need for public gathering places and officials, with some notable exceptions, have tried to respect citizens' First Amendment rights to assemble and speak in public forums."

Those exceptions really are notable, though. When Mayor Michael Bloomberg's patience ran out, police moved in -- and reporters who tried to write down or photograph what the cops were doing risked pepper spray or the business end of a billyclub. It's not our business.

OWS's struggle for public space -- space to question the very economic foundations of our system -- illustrates the dwindling scope of free speech in our regimented, "watch-your-potty-mouth" society. Free speech is less and less a personal right of the Emma Sullivans laughing at governors, and more and more a property right of powerful institutions -- political parties, churches, media organizations, corporations -- deriding and silencing their critics.

Or to put it in terms the current age might understand, if Emma Sullivan wanted to use her First Amendment right to make fun of Sam Brownback, why didn't she just form a corporate SuperPAC and buy TV time, the way James Madison intended?

GARRETT EPPS - Garrett Epps, a former reporter for The Washington Post, is a novelist and legal scholar. He teaches courses in constitutional law and creative writing for law students at the University of Baltimore. He lives in Washington, D.C.
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Go Big, Mr. Obama

2011-11-23T12:20:00.001-08:00

President Obama has a clear choice on how to approach the 2012 election: He can spend all his energy defining Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich or whoever ends up as the Republican nominee in as ugly a way as possible, or he can spend all his energy defining the future in as credible a way as possible. If he spends his energy defining his Republican opponent, there is a chance the president will win with 50.00001 percent of the vote and no mandate to do what needs doing. If he spends his time defining the future in a credible way and offering a hard, tough, realistic pathway to get there, he will not only win, but he will have a mandate to take the country where we need to go.

Josh Haner/The New York Times

Thomas L. Friedman

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I voted for Barack Obama, and I don’t want my money back. He’s never gotten the credit he deserves for bringing the economy he inherited back from the brink of a depression. He’s fought the war on terrorism in a smart and effective way. He’s making health care possible for millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions, and he saved the auto industry. This is big stuff. But, as important as all of these achievements are, they pale in comparison to the defining challenge of Obama’s presidency: Can he put the country on a sustainable economic recovery path at a time when, if we fail, it could be the end of the American dream?

I believe the best way for Obama to do that is by declaring today that he made a mistake in spurning his own deficit reduction commission, chaired by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, and is now adopting Simpson-Bowles — which already has Republican and Democratic support — as his long-term fiscal plan to be phased in after a near-term stimulus. If he did that, he would win politically and create a national consensus that would trump his opponents, right and left.

“I think what happened with Simpson-Bowles was an absolute tragedy,” Warren Buffett said on CNBC last week. “They work like a devil for 10 months. ... They compromise. They bring in people as far apart as [Democratic Senator Dick] Durbin and [Republican Senator Tom] Coburn to get them to sign on and then they’re totally ignored. I think that’s a travesty.”

The president will never get the near-term stimulus through that he wants and that the economy needs without combining it with a credible bipartisan, multiyear deficit-reduction plan like Simpson-Bowles. Moreover, “a free-standing stimulus that is not combined with a credible multiyear plan that truly stabilizes our fiscal imbalances would not solve our problems,” argues Maya MacGuineas, the president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, “because if nobody knows what is waiting around the corner, after the stimulus runs out,” many people will just take that money and stuff it in a mattress “rather than in investments or spending.”

Obama aides argue that so many G.O.P. lawmakers are committed to making his presidency fail, or have signed pledges to an antitax cult, that they would never buy into any grand bargain. I think that is true for a lot of Republicans in Congress. But I have some questions: Why are the Republicans getting away with this? Why are so many independents and even Democrats who voted for Obama sitting on their hands? Obama owns the bully pulpit of the presidency and he’s losing to Grover Norquist? Also, assuming it is all true about the G.O.P., how can Obama trump them? I think he can, if he leads in a new way.

I think America’s broad center understands very clearly that the country is in trouble and that the Republican Party has gone nuts. But when they look at Obama on the deficit, they feel something is missing. People know leadership when they see it — when they see someone taking a political risk, not just talking about doing so, not just saying, “I’ll jump if the other guy jumps.” In times of crisis, leaders jump first, lay out what truly needs to be done to fix the problem, not just to win re-election, and by doing so earn the right to demand that others do the same.

What would it look like if the president was offering such leadership? First, he’d be proposing a deficit-cutting plan that matches the scale of our problem — one with substantial tax reform and revenue increases, a gasoline tax, deep defense cuts and cutbacks to both Social Security and Medicare. That is the Simpson-Bowles plan, and it should be Obama’s new starting point for negotiations. The deficit plan Obama put out last September is nowhere near as serious. “It is watered-down Simpson-Bowles,” said MacGuineas. “Most people don’t even know it exists.”

Second, he’d offer a plan in which the wealthy have to pay their fair share and more, because they’ve had a great two decades. But everyone, including the middle class, has to contribute something. This has to be a national effort. Third, he would offer a plan that is aspirational. It would not just be a roadmap to balancing the budget but to making America great again through reignited economic growth.

My gut says that if the president lays out such a plan — one that begins with him taking all the political risks on himself and then demanding the G.O.P. and his own party follow — he will be both defining himself and the future in a way that would earn him so much centrist support and respect that it would leave every possible Republican opponent in the dust, no matter how obstructionist they are or want to be.

Go big, Mr. President. You will win, and so will America.

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

The GOP Divide Over Illegal Immigrants: Are They People or Abstractions? - The Atlantic

2011-11-23T12:19:00.000-08:00

The GOP Divide Over Illegal Immigrants: Are They People or Abstractions? - The Atlantic

Fox News viewers less informed about current events, poll shows

2011-11-22T10:19:00.000-08:00

Fox News viewers less informed about current events, poll shows

Listen...

2011-11-12T23:40:00.001-08:00

<a href="http://hudsonmusic.com.au/track/against-the-grain">Against The Grain by Hudson</a>

How Great Companies Think Differently

2011-11-02T10:42:00.000-07:00

Idea in Brief

Traditional theories of the firm are dominated by the notion of opposition between capital and labor, disconnecting business from society and posing conflicts between them. According to this view, companies are nothing more than money-generating machines.

By contrast, great companies use a different operating logic. They believe that business is an intrinsic part of society, and like the family, government, and religion, has been one of its pillars for centuries.

Great companies work to make money, but in their choices of how to do so, they consider whether they are building enduring institutions. As a result, they invest in the future while being aware of the needs of people and society.

There are six facets of institutional logic, which radically alters leadership and corporate behavior: a common purpose; a long-term view; emotional engagement; community building; innovation; and self-organization.

Artwork: Sarah Morris, Midtown—HBO/Grace, 1999, Gloss household paint on canvas, 213.4 × 213.4 cm

It’s time that beliefs and theories about business catch up with the way great companies operate and how they see their role in the world today. Traditionally, economists and financiers have argued that the sole purpose of business is to make money—the more the better. That conveniently narrow image, deeply embedded in the American capitalist system, molds the actions of most corporations, constraining them to focus on maximizing short-term profits and delivering returns to shareholders. Their decisions are expressed in financial terms.

I say convenient because this lopsided logic forces companies to blank out the fact that they command enormous resources that influence the world for better or worse and that their strategies shape the lives of the employees, partners, and consumers on whom they depend. Above all, the traditional view of business doesn’t capture the way great companies think their way to success. Those firms believe that business is an intrinsic part of society, and they acknowledge that, like family, government, and religion, it has been one of society’s pillars since the dawn of the industrial era. Great companies work to make money, of course, but in their choices of how to do so, they think about building enduring institutions. They invest in the future while being aware of the need to build people and society.

In this article, I turn the spotlight on this very different logic—a social or institutional logic—which lies behind the practices of many widely admired, high-performing, and enduring companies. In those firms, society and people are not afterthoughts or inputs to be used and discarded but are core to their purpose. My continuing field research on admired and financially successful companies in more than 20 countries on four continents is the basis for my thinking about the role of institutional logic in business.

Institutional logic holds that companies are more than instruments for generating money; they are also vehicles for accomplishing societal purposes and for providing meaningful livelihoods for those who work in them. According to this school of thought, the value that a company creates should be measured not just in terms of short-term profits or paychecks but also in terms of how it sustains the conditions that allow it to flourish over time. These corporate leaders deliver more than just financial returns; they also build enduring institutions.

Rather than viewing organizational processes as ways of extracting more economic value, great companies create frameworks that use societal value and human values as decision-making criteria. They believe that corporations have a purpose and meet stakeholders’ needs in many ways: by producing goods and services that improve the lives of users; by providing jobs and enhancing workers’ quality of life; by developing a strong network of suppliers and business partners; and by ensuring financial viability, which provides resources for improvements, innovations, and returns to investors.

In developing an institutional perspective, corporate leaders internalize what economists have usually regarded as externalities and define a firm around its purpose and values. They undertake actions that produce societal value—whether or not those actions are tied to the core functions of making and selling goods and services. Whereas the aim of financial logic is to maximize the returns on capital, be it shareholder or owner value, the thrust of institutional logic is to balance public interest with financial returns.

Institutional logic should be aligned with economic logic but need not be subordinate to it. For example, all companies require capital to carry out business activities and sustain themselves. However, at great companies profit is not the sole end; rather, it is a way of ensuring that returns will continue. The institutional view of the firm is thus no more idealized than is the profit-maximizing view. Well-established practices, such as R&D and marketing, cannot be tied to profits in the short or long runs, yet analysts applaud them. If companies are to serve a purpose beyond their business portfolios, CEOs must expand their investments to include employee empowerment, emotional engagement, values-based leadership, and related societal contributions.

Business history provides numerous examples of industrialists who developed enduring corporations that also created social institutions. The Houghton family established Corning Glass and the town of Corning, New York, for instance. The Tata family established one of India’s leading conglomerates and the steel city of Jamshedpur, Jharkhand. That style of corporate responsibility for society fell out of fashion as economic logic and shareholder capitalism came to dominate assumptions about business and corporations became detached from particular places. In today’s global world, however, companies must think differently.

Globalization increases the speed of change; more competitors from more places produce surprises and shocks. An intensely competitive global economy places a high premium on innovation, which depends on human imagination, motivation, and collaboration. Global mergers and acquisitions add further complexity, with their success resting on how effectively the organizations are integrated. Moreover, seeking legitimacy or public approval by aligning corporate objectives with social values has become a business imperative. Corporations that cross borders face questions of cultural fit and local appropriateness; they must gain approval from governmental authorities, opinion leaders, and members of the public wherever they operate. Their employees are both internal actors and the company’s representatives in the external community.

Only if leaders think of themselves as builders of social institutions can they master today’s changes and challenges. I believe that institutional logic should take its place alongside economic or financial logic as a guiding principle in research, analysis, education, policy, and managerial decision making. In the following pages, I will describe six ways in which great companies use institutional logic, how it gives them an advantage, and how the perspective can radically change leadership and corporate behavior.

A Common Purpose

Conceiving of the firm as a social institution serves as a buffer against uncertainty and change by providing corporations with a coherent identity.

As companies grow, acquire, and divest, the business mix changes frequently and job roles often vary across countries. So what exactly gives a company a coherent identity? Where are the sources of certainty that permit people to take action in an uncertain world? Purpose and values—not the widgets made—are at the core of an organization’s identity, and they can guide people in their efforts to find new widgets that serve society.

Consider the Mahindra Group, an $11 billion multibusiness company based in Mumbai that employs 117,000 people in 100 countries. Like many emerging-market enterprises, the Mahindra Group operates in many industries, including automobiles, finance, IT, and several dozen others. And like the great companies, it invests in creating a culture based on a common purpose to provide coherence amidst diversity, proclaiming that it is “many companies united by a common purpose—to enable people to rise.”

Globalization detaches organizations from one specific society but at the same time requires that companies internalize the needs of many societies. Establishing clear institutional values can help resolve this complex issue. For example, PepsiCo has made health a big part of its aspiration to achieve Performance with Purpose. Nutrition, environmental responsibility, and talent retention are pillars supporting the slogan. Performance with Purpose provides strategic direction and motivation for diverse lines of business in many countries. It requires a gradual shift of resources from “fun for you” to “better for you” to “good for you,” in PepsiCo parlance. It provides a rationale for acquisitions and investments. It is the logic behind the creation of a new organizational unit, the Global Nutrition Group, and new corporate roles, such as chief global health officer. It guides a quest to reduce or eliminate sugar and sodium in foods and beverages. Above all, it provides an identity for the people who work for PepsiCo all over the world.

Leaders can compensate for business uncertainty through institutional grounding. Great companies identify something larger than transactions or business portfolios to provide purpose and meaning. Meaning making is a central function of leaders, and purpose gives coherence to the organization. Institutional grounding involves efforts to build and reinforce organizational culture, but it is more than that. Culture is often a by-product of past actions, a passively generated outgrowth of history. Institutional grounding is an investment in activities and relationships that may not immediately create a direct road to business results but that reflect the values the institution stands for and how it will endure.

Institutional grounding can separate the survivors from those subsumed by global change. A sense of purpose infuses meaning into an organization, “institutionalizing” the company as a fixture in society and providing continuity between the past and the future. The name can change, but the identity and purpose will live on. In 2007, Spain’s Grupo Santander acquired Brazil’s Banco Real and folded it into its Brazilian assets. But Banco Real’s spirit involved much more than its financial assets. Its then-CEO Fabio Barbosa was put in charge of creating the combined entity, Santander Brazil. Although the new organization faced pressure to increase branch profitability, under Barbosa’s leadership Banco Real’s focus on social and environmental responsibility, along with its private banking model, were infused throughout Santander Brazil and the parent.

Successful mergers are noteworthy for their emphasis on values and culture. When the merger of two Swiss pharmaceutical companies formed Novartis in 1996, CEO Daniel Vasella wanted the new company’s mission to be globally meaningful and central to the integration and growth strategy. The question was how to provide employees with a tangible experience that reflected those values. When I floated the idea of a global day of community service—unheard of in Europe at that time—Novartis agreed. The company allowed each country organization to determine how it wanted to serve local communities, based on its interpretation of what the two histories and one future would suggest. The day of service has become an annual Novartis event, held on the merger’s anniversary.

Affirming purpose and values through service is a regular part of how great companies express their identities. In June 2011, IBM celebrated its 100th anniversary by offering service to the world. Over 300,000 IBMers signed up to perform 2.6 million hours of service on a global service day. They contributed training and access to software tools, many of them developed specially for the occasion, to schools, governmental agencies, and NGOs. Projects included training on privacy and antibullying in 100 schools in Germany; a new website developed in India for the visually impaired, with a launch at 50 locations; and access to small-business resources for women entrepreneurs in the United States. The company gave the tools away, even in cases where the software could form the basis for commercial products, to demonstrate IBM’s commitment to being a contributor to society.

A Long-Term Focus

Thinking of the firm as a social institution generates a long-term perspective that can justify any short-term financial sacrifices required to achieve the corporate purpose and to endure over time.

Keeping a company alive requires resources, so financial logic demands attention to the numbers. However, great companies are willing to sacrifice short-term financial opportunities if they are incompatible with institutional values. Those values guide matters central to the company’s identity and reputation such as product quality, the nature of the customers served, and by-products of the manufacturing process. Banco Real, for instance, created a screening process to assess potential customers’ societal standards as well as their financial standing. The bank was willing to walk away from those that did not meet its tests of environmental and social responsibility. This short-term sacrifice was prudent risk management for the longer term.

Companies using institutional logic are often willing to invest in the human side of the organization—investments that cannot be justified by immediate financial returns but that help create sustainable institutions. In South Korea, after the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, Shinhan Bank set out to acquire Chohung Bank, a larger and older bank that the government had bailed out. The moment the acquisition was announced, 3,500 male employees of a Chohung Bank union, whose ranks extended to management levels, shaved their heads in protest and piled the hair in front of Shinhan’s headquarters in downtown Seoul. The acquirer then had to decide whether to go ahead with the acquisition and, if it did so, what it ought to do about Chohung’s employees.

Shinhan’s leaders applied institutional logic. They negotiated an agreement with the Chohung union, deferring formal integration for three years, giving equal representation to both Shinhan and Chohung managers on a new management committee, and increasing the salary of Chohung employees to match the higher wages of Shinhan employees. The acquirer also handed out 3,500 caps to cover the heads of the protestors. Shinhan invested heavily in what it called “emotional integration,” holding a series of retreats and conferences intended not only to spread strategic and operational information but also to foster social bonding and a feeling of being “one bank.” According to financial logic, the acquirer was wasting money. In terms of Shinhan’s institutional logic, the investments were an essential part of securing the future.

The result: Within 18 months, Shinhan had grown both banks’ customer bases, and the Chohung union was having a hard time fomenting discontent against the benign acquirer. Although a formal merger wouldn’t occur for another year and a half, Shinhan and Chohung employees were working together on task forces and discussing best practices, and ideas were spreading that began to make the branches look more similar. Employees were, in essence, self-organizing. By the third year, when formal integration took place, Shinhan was outperforming not only the banking industry but also the South Korean stock market.

Emotional Engagement

The transmission of institutional values can evoke positive emotions, stimulate motivation, and propel self-regulation or peer regulation.

Utilitarian rationality is not the only force governing corporate performance and behavior inside organizations; emotions play a major role, too. Moods are contagious, and they can affect such issues as absenteeism, health, and levels of effort and energy. People influence one another, and in doing so they either increase or decrease others’ performance levels, as my study of teams and organizations on winning and losing streaks reveals (see my book Confidence, Crown, 2004). Well-understood values and principles can be a source of emotional appeal, which can increase employee engagement. Having a statement of values has become common, so the issue is not whether a set of words called “values” exists somewhere in the company. Adhering to institutional logic makes the regular articulation of values core to the company’s work. The CEOs of companies I studied, whether headquartered in the U.S., Mexico, the UK, India, or Japan, allocated considerable resources and their own time to breathing new life into long-standing values statements, engaging managers at many levels in the institutional task of communicating values. The point was not the words themselves but the process of nurturing a dialogue that would keep social purpose at the forefront of everyone’s mind and ensure that employees use the organizational values as a guide for business decisions.

As a Procter & Gamble executive, Robert McDonald had long believed that the company’s Purpose, Values, and Principles was a cornerstone of its culture, evoking strong emotions in employees and giving meaning to the company’s brands. Within a month of becoming CEO in 2010, he elevated the purpose—improving the lives of the world’s consumers—into a business strategy: improving more lives in more places more completely.

In P&G West Africa, for instance, every employee has a quantitatively measurable purpose-driven goal: How have I touched this year? So P&G West Africa’s Baby Care Group set up Pampers mobile clinics to reduce high rates of infant mortality and help babies thrive. A physician and two nurses travel the region in a van, teaching postnatal care, examining babies, and referring mothers to hospitals for follow-ups or immunization shots. They also register mothers for mVillage, a text-message service (many of the poor in West Africa have cell phones) that offers health tips and the chance to ask questions of health care professionals. At the end of each mobile clinic visit, everyone gets two Pampers diapers. The emotional tugs for P&G employees are strong; they feel inspired by the fact that their product is at the center of a mission to save lives. They also feel proud that Pampers’ sales have soared and that West Africa is among P&G’s fastest-growing markets.

In companies that think of themselves as social institutions, work is emotionally compelling and meaning resides in the organization as a whole rather than in a less sustainable cult of personality. Top leaders exemplify and communicate the company’s purpose and values, but everyone owns them, and the values become embedded in tasks, goals, and performance standards. Rather than depending on charismatic figures, great companies “routinize” charisma so that it spreads throughout the organization.

Partnering with the Public

The need to cross borders and sectors to tap new business opportunities must be accompanied by concern for public issues beyond the boundaries of the firm, requiring the formation of public-private partnerships in which executives consider societal interests along with their business interests.

One paradox of globalization is that it can increase the need for local connections. To thrive in diverse geographies and political jurisdictions, companies must build a base of relationships in each country with government officials and public intermediaries as well as suppliers and customers. Only by doing so can companies ensure that agendas are aligned even as circumstances—and public officials—keep changing. Those external stakeholders are interested as much in the corporations’ contributions to the local community as they are in their transactional capabilities. At the same time, great companies want both an extended family of enduring relationships and a seat at the table on policy matters affecting their business.

Public-private partnerships to address societal needs are growing in number and importance, and are especially prevalent among enterprises that think institutionally. Partnerships can take many forms: International activities, conducted in collaboration with the United Nations and other global organizations (such as Procter & Gamble’s Children’s Safe Drinking Water program with UNICEF and several NGOs); large domestic projects, undertaken in collaboration with government ministries and development agencies (PepsiCo’s agricultural projects in Mexico with the Inter-American Development Bank, for example); product or service development to address unmet societal needs (for instance, P&G’s linkages with public hospitals in West Africa); or short-term volunteer efforts (IBM’s work following the Asian tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and earthquakes in China and Japan to provide software to track relief supplies and reunite families).

Companies that operate using institutional logic reap substantive benefits.

Institutional logic is built on a foundation of purpose and values, which serve as a buffer against uncertainty and change.

Conceiving of the firm as a social institution generates a long-term perspective. Short-term financial sacrifice becomes permissible in the interest of positioning the firm for sustainable success.

Strong institutional values can evoke positive emotions, stimulate intrinsic motivation, and propel self- or peer regulation.

Great companies see business as a primary pillar of society. This focus facilitates the kind of cross-border and cross-sector engagement needed to tap global opportunities. Through the formation of public-private partnerships, firms consider the public interest along with business priorities.

The attention placed on social conditions often generates experiences and ideas that lead to learning for innovation in products, services, and business models.

In a firm steered by institutional logic, employees can be treated as self-determining professionals, coordinating and integrating activities and producing innovation through self-organization in addition to formal assignments.

In companies that adhere to an institutional logic, executives cultivate relationships with public officials neither as a quid pro quo nor to push through particular deals. Rather, they seek to understand and contribute to the public agenda even as they influence it. For example, PepsiCo’s chief global health officer, who came from the World Health Organization, is planning a cross-sector project to reduce childhood obesity. IBM’s CEO, Samuel Palmisano, circumnavigates the globe six or seven times a year to meet with national and regional officials, discussing how IBM can help their countries achieve their goals. This is not sales or marketing; it’s a high-level conversation to demonstrate the company’s commitment to furthering the development of the countries it operates in. Such engagement at the top helps other IBM leaders get a seat at the table when discussions about the country’s future take place.

Institution building requires the efforts of many people. The more interested that top leaders are in external relations, the more likely they are to involve others and to reward them for building relationships with the nation and community. Although relatively few people might hold formal responsibility for these external interfaces, a great many might perform institutional work by volunteering, attending public meetings, and participating in community service. Such activity projects a sense of authentic motivation. Community building is not a hard sell for people native to an area or for long-term residents; there is an emotional pull of place that makes such work desirable. For others whose careers take them across geographies, this work is a way to connect their organizational roles with the places they now live, making them feel more rooted.

When leaders come to see themselves as having societal purpose, they can choose to get involved at local, national, and even global levels. A few years ago, the head of IBM Greater China organized a personal diplomatic mission to Washington, meeting with White House officials and U.S. politicians to discuss the impact of China’s emergence as an economic superpower. He had a desire to see both nations thrive and believed that his role in a global company afforded him a unique perspective. After retiring in 2009, he remained an IBM “super alum,” in company parlance, and was supported by IBM in attending a major U.S. university for a year, with the company’s support, to learn about health care. At the end of 2010, he returned to China and launched an initiative with a Chinese government institute to develop an IT-enabled evidence base for traditional Chinese medicine that will build on IBM ties.

Innovation

Articulating a purpose broader than making money can guide strategies and actions, open new sources for innovation, and help people express corporate and personal values in their everyday work.

Companies’ claims that they serve society become credible when leaders allocate time, talent, and resources to national or community projects without seeking immediate returns and when they encourage people from one country to serve another. IBM’s Corporate Service Corp, for instance, develops future leaders by sending diverse teams of the company’s best talent on monthlong projects around the world. The attention placed on social needs often generates ideas that lead to innovations. For Cemex, operating by institutional logic and considering unmet societal needs produced innovations such as antibacterial concrete, which is particularly important for hospitals and farms; water-resistant concrete, useful in flood-prone areas; and road surface material derived from old tires, desirable in countries that are building roads rapidly. An idea from Egypt for saltwater-resistant concrete, helpful for harbor and marine applications, became a product launched in the Philippines.

Institution building helps connect partners across an ecosystem, producing business model innovation. Cemex started Construrama, a distribution program for small hardware stores, in 2001 as a response to competition from Home Depot and Lowe’s, which were then entering Latin America. Construrama offers the small stores training, support, a strong brand, and easy access to products. In accordance with its values, Cemex sought dealers who were trusted in their communities, rejecting candidates whose business tactics didn’t meet the company’s ethics standards. Cemex owns the Construrama brand and handles promotions but doesn’t charge distributors, operate stores, or have decision-making authority. It requires, however, that stores meet its service standards. Among those is participation in community-building philanthropic endeavors—expanding an orphanage or improving a school, for instance. By the mid-2000s, Construrama had opened enough stores to qualify as a large retail chain in Latin America and was expanding into other developing countries.

Creating opportunities for individuals to use company resources to serve society furthers institution-building goals. Novartis employees serve in hospitals, where they see firsthand the challenges of disease and how their drugs are used. In 2011, P&G employees set out in Tide Loads of Hope vans to visit communities in the southern U.S. ravaged by floods. In the mobile Laundromats, managers and other professionals washed and folded clothes for local people, getting to know them and their circumstances. These kinds of interactions express corporate values and produce valuable learning, too.

Self-Organization

Great companies assume they can trust people and can rely on relationships, not just rules and structures. They are more likely to treat employees as self-determining professionals who coordinate and integrate activities by self-organizing and generating new ideas.

Institutional logic holds that people are not paycheck-hungry shirkers who want to do the bare minimum, nor are they robots that can be ordered to produce high performance. Instead, employees make their own choices about which ideas to surface, how much effort to put into them, and where they might contribute beyond their day jobs. Resource allocation is thus determined not only by formal strategies and budgetary processes but also by the informal relationships, spontaneous actions, and preferences of people at all levels.

Fully understanding a company requires knowledge of its social structure and informal networks, and optimizing performance requires social investments. At Shinhan Bank, the two banks self-integrated through social bonds and relationships well in advance of the three-year mark when official integration was to take place. The new connections manifested in such actions as each bank’s voluntarily hanging the other’s banner in its headquarters. At Procter & Gamble, managers in Brazil turned strategic and organizational traditions on their head to develop low-cost, high-quality alternatives to premium products. They undertook this risky initiative on their own and self-organized to ensure closer cross-functional teamwork and partnerships with customers. They felt that they had an obligation to improve the lives of consumers who could not afford premium products. Similar institutional logic led the P&G Himalaya team, a global cross-functional group, to find ways to make Gillette razors affordable and desirable to men often bloodied by barbers using rusty or worn-out blades.

Managers in great companies understand that formal structures can be too general or too rigid to accommodate multidirectional pathways for resource and idea flows. Rigidity stifles innovation. Informal, self-organizing, shape-changing, and temporary networks are more flexible and can make connections between people or connect bundles of resources more quickly. Employees’ formal roles come to resemble the home base from which they are continuously mobile as they carry out daily tasks and projects, develop work relationships, and participate in team or group activities. Matrix organizations—in which individuals report to two or more bosses depending on the different dimensions of their tasks—become what I dub a matrix on steroids. People are accountable along many dimensions simultaneously, attending to multiple projects and using their networks to assemble resources for all those projects, often without going through a decision-making hierarchy.

Although there is a drudgery and confinement component to many jobs—plenty of Cemex employees work in factories, Shinhan’s banks have tellers stuck behind counters, and every company has stay-at-desk support staff—trusting people to make choices about where, when, and with whom they should work makes jobs more engaging. For example, on any given day about 40% of IBMers in the U.S. do not go to an IBM office. They work at home or at customer sites, moving between locations and taking vacations at times of their choosing. IBM’s work-at-home programs, such as the one started in Japan in 2001, have caught the attention of governments interested in keeping women with technical degrees in the workforce. In some cases, IBM offers allowances to support infrastructure in the home, which has enabled a Harvard graduate working in India to combine project work with child-rearing, for instance, and a software manager from Egypt to move with her husband to Dubai.

Institutional logic assumes that people can be trusted to care about the fate of the whole enterprise—not just about their own jobs or promotions—and to catalyze improvements and innovations without waiting for instructions or sticking to the letter of a job description. Job descriptions nowadays document only part of what people do; performance reviews and salary bands capture only some of the activities through which people might add the most value for the company.

When people self-organize to create networks to share information, new initiatives or innovations are often the result. Organizations must encourage the creation of such networks, of course, and facilitate them through communication platforms or meeting spaces, but the networks usually flourish best if they spring from volunteers who do things that bosses might not have anticipated. What’s more, these self-organized networks often keep good ideas alive long after an organization would have abandoned them.

For example, three PepsiCo managers in Latin America had shared a dream for around a decade of developing new kinds of potatoes that were suitable for southern climates, less starchy, and environmentally sustainable. They felt that the initiative should be based in Peru, the potato’s birthplace. The troika remained in contact despite their moving to different locations, and even after years of ho-hum response, they presented their ideas wherever they could. They eventually received a boost when a new Peruvian potato chip whose creation they championed became a sensation. The chips, which used multicolored potatoes from small farmers in remote villages in the Andes, combined nutrition, tastiness, and social contribution. Proof of concept turned the dream into reality: In August 2010, CEO Indra Nooyi announced the establishment of a global potato development center in Peru, headed by one of the three champions.

Self-organizing communities can be a potent force for change, propelling companies in directions they might not have taken otherwise. People with no formal orders serve as explorers and entrepreneurs. For example, had it not been for self-forming networks, IBM might have lagged behind or even missed out on two big business ideas: virtualization and green computing. These emerged as among IBM’s top strategic priorities after an Innovation Jam in July 2006, a web chat spanning several days to which over 140,000 employees contributed ideas.

The virtualization initiative came together outside of formal structures and, initially, as a voluntary activity. Some 200 early adopters of virtual platforms—such as Linden Labs’ Second Life and similar platforms—found each other through the company’s chat rooms and created an ad hoc group of people who shared ideas in their free time through avatars and weekly phone calls, with conference lines sometimes open in the virtual world, too. After a year of informal self-organization, the network found an IBM executive sponsor. IBM then designated virtualization an emerging business opportunity and provided funding for it.

My argument has come full circle. A logic that justifies treating employees as self-determining volunteers—in essence, as true professionals who care about high performance because they believe in the company as institution—makes it important to have a motivating purpose and values to provide coherence and common identity. The first enables the last. The six principles I describe in this article are interrelated and share many characteristics. Especially for great global companies, institution building is not the result of carrying out specific activities but a coherent, holistic pursuit in which elements reinforce one another, are inextricably intertwined, and reflect a logic and leadership style that permeate the corporation.

Skeptics abound, of course. Firms that present themselves as institutions concerned with serving society often come under more scrutiny than others do, and they must withstand criticism about the gap between stated aspirations and performance, financially and socially. If they make money while doing good, they will be criticized for manipulation; if they do some good but not enough to solve complex problems, they will be criticized for lack of courage or commitment. Despite a growing number of advocates for a new kind of capitalism that finds win-win opportunities by creating value for both business and society, there is still controversy over the obligations of business.

The great global enterprises are not waiting for grand new theories or perfect answers. Their leaders already use an institutional or social logic to supplement economic or financial logic in guiding and growing their enterprises. Institutional logic cannot be captured by cost-benefit equations or reduced to the language of economics, and yet it turns out to be a powerful driver of financial performance.

Leaders in the great companies can tell a different story about the basis for their decisions. In so doing, they are able to produce new models for action that can restore confidence in business and will change the world in which we live.

by Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Rosabeth Moss Kanter is the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and the chair and director of Harvard University’s Advanced Leadership Initiative. Her most recent book is SuperCorp: How Vanguard Companies Create Innovation, Profits, Growth, and Social Good (Crown, 2009).

Five Things to Never Say to Your Direct Reports

2011-11-02T10:30:00.000-07:00

Recently I was hanging out with a group of entrepreneurs, and as often happens, the discussion turned to complaints about managing employees. This is a common topic among those in management positions — find me a manager, and I’ll show you someone who wants to vent.

Don't say it! (Image by Stuart Miles)

As a person being managed, this can be disquieting to hear. After all, I’m sure you believe you’re doing a great job and should be considered with accolades! However, the reason this is a passionate, evergreen topic is because managers realize that positive, productive employees are critical to success — both their own and the organization’s. We get wrapped around the axle about the things we care about most. And of course perspective plays a leading role. We can only see what we can see.

As a coach, I have an interesting vantage point where I am in constant conversation with all sides. (I see the situation far differently than when I was a business owner responsible for a hefty salary line.) I know the manager’s frustration that comes with simply wanting your employees to do a good job with minimal intervention. And I hear the concerns of employees trying to understand and meet a manager’s expectations while attempting to do their best job.

In the middle of these competing perspectives, frustration thrives and judgment errs. I wrote earlier this year about statements you should never make to your boss, and so this one is for you, managers.

There are a lot of internal conversations getting verbalized that should stay right there in the comfortable recesses of a manager’s brain. I know it feels good to get some of these all-too-common sentiments out, but the result is never positive.

1. “That’s what you get paid to do.”

Managers (and to an even greater extent, business owners) feel constantly pinged with requests for monetary and non-monetary rewards, and it can feel tempting to rejoin with, “Why should I reward you extra for doing the job you’re paid to do!” This front line job of balancing needs versus wants is exhausting and no one blames you for feeling that way. Often your own needs come last.

However, employees generally don’t see it quite so cut and dried. Sure they get a paycheck, but they still expect to be recognized for good work within their job description. Some version of recognition consistently falls in the top five reasons employees stay in their positions. You’re better off getting creative and committing to rewards than fighting them. Especially when the job market recovers, you’ll lose.

2. “I never did that when I was in your position.”

This is a spin on the age-old sentiment “these kids today…,” As a leader, it’s tempting to look back on what you did when you were in a junior position and congratulate yourself on your own stellar work ethic and ambition. This is especially true when generational differences crop up — for example how the much-covered Millennials seem to want it all from Day One.

This is never a fair comparison. First, you don’t know what it was like to manage you because you weren’t your own manager. Hindsight is notoriously unreliable as we remember our achievements better than our struggles. Even if you do recall yourself accurately, everyone’s actions are bounded by their unique circumstances, whether situational or generational. There’s no way to know what you would do in someone else’s situation, or they in yours. And finally, there’s a reason that you’re the boss — you’re motivated by certain goals that others may not share. Stop worrying about what motivates you — and consider what motivates them.

3. “I want you to be more proactive.”

My clients will sometimes throw up their hands in a struggle to pin down exactly what they want from their employees with the catchall admonition to “be more proactive.” As the manager, you may know exactly what that means because you’re a seasoned problem solver with an ability to anticipate issues ahead of time. That’s why you get paid the big bucks.

Now realize that others likely don’t share your idea what being proactive means because they don’t have your same vantage point. You see more, have a greater context, and the authority to step into any situation. If you want more get-up-and-go behavior from team members, you’re more likely to get it if you use specific requests.

4. “You need to spend more time in the office.”

Time in the office is usually a red herring for a performance problem of another kind. We all know folks who log in plenty of face time but are ineffective. We’re in a time when work teams are more distributed and remote than ever — and all indications are that this will increase. Managing someone’s office hours feels old-fashioned and frankly, a bit controlling. A recent article in Harvard Business Review, How Great Companies Think Differently, states that great companies allow people to self-organize. Forty percent of IBMers in the U.S. don’t go to an office on any given day, but work in locations of their choosing.

If the issue is that a client’s needs aren’t met or team communication is lacking, call that out. It’s the employee’s job to fix it, and if she can’t or won’t, you have a different problem to solve.

5. “It will be faster if I do it myself.”

Delegation is a perennial coaching issue because most people struggle with it. (For my best delegation tips, refer back to my earlier post.) However, no matter how tempted you may be, resist the urge to take on work to be expeditious.

Doing versus delegating hurts you long term because you’re missing a development opportunity for your staff, and you have limited bandwidth. But also, for employees this is the same as saying they’re incompetent and untrustworthy. It feels rotten and demotivating, and sets up a dynamic where people won’t even try because you’re going to do it your way anyway. A major part of being a manager is developing others behind you, and you do this through managing their work product. Even when it’s harder than doing it yourself.

Managers have had a tough few years with recessionary restructurings and reduced staffs. It’s understandable to be frustrated, but resist the urge to show it. While the job market is tight now, a recent survey showed that there is serious pent-up attrition, with 40% turnover not unlikely in the next two years.

If you want your good people to stay, you’re the ticket. An employee’s relationship to their manager is a primary factor in retention. But you already knew that, right? That’s why you’re reading this.

NOVEMBER 2, 2011 BY KRISTIHEDGES

This post also appears on Forbes.com.

p.m.warner, inc.

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