The first is that, despite (or rather because of) your natural instincts, recessions are a good time to start a business. The risks associated with jumping into a tumultuous environment is a natural herd-thinner. Here, there be dragons. Those who are looking for security or opportunity find it somewhere else, leaving the field of start-ups reserved for the lean and hungry.

Imagine if innovators of the early naughts remained shell-shocked from the Dot Com bursting (a bubble worth $5 trillion!) and played it conservative, never giving their big idea a real shot. We’d live in a world without Wikipedia (’01), MySpace (’03), del.icio.us (’03), Flickr (’04), and lots of other examples.

Beyond the lack of competition, there are genuine economic reasons to start a business in a recession. As unemployment goes up, expectations for salaries and benefits fall—good news for an owner and bad news for an employee (or interviewee). This principle applies to other “resources” beyond labor. Office vacancies decrease rent, for instance, and overhead shrinks.

The second reason I’m not crazy is that this decision, while seemingly impulsive given the weather outside, has been a year in the making and has involved my reading half a dozen books and attending two conferences on the subject. When I stopped learning new things, I knew it was time. For my life goals, this is the right thing to do now.

Living in San Francisco and working at a non-profit is a recipe for permanent Bohemianism (or YAWNism, at least). While that’s a lifestyle that I find not only acceptable but even attractive, it’s not a one that can support the opportunities I want to provide for my children (none yet, just thinking ahead). If starting a business is the primary path to wealth, that’s a path I need to take today—not when I’d be subjecting a family to the risks I am willing to bare myself^*.

The third reason is, well… yes, I am crazy. But that’s okay.

At the recent Start Conference, Ev Williams (founder of Blogger and Twitter) gave “hallucinogenic optimism” as a prerequisite for entrepreneurship. A few panels later, Marc Hedlund (founder of Wesabe) painted a picture of obsession as a key personality trait, quoting fellow entrepreneur Paul Hawken, “Do the idea that won’t leave you alone.” A few panels later, venture capitalist David Hornik confirmed, “This is hard work. You have to be crazy.”

So, whatever you think about the bailout you won’t have to worry about me. I’ll just be over here in the corner watching Apple’s “Crazy Ones” video and pretending they’re talking about me.

Next episode: What I’ll actually be doing.

^* And Sarah’s being awesome about it all.

Quoth Howard Beale:

I don’t have to tell you things are bad… everybody knows things are bad… it’s a depression… everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job… the dollar buys a nickel’s worth… banks are going bust… shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter…

It’s hard to listen to the radio or watch television or whatever verb it is you do to blogs without noticing that several important systems are all falling apart. It’s equally hard to maintain a cheery attitude without being accused of either having buried your head in the sand or being callous to the woes so real for so many people. If you’d like to be happy, and who wouldn’t, I might suggest you embrace the concept of a market correction.

Financially speaking, a market correction is the sudden drop in a stock when a bunch of people simultaneously realize that it’s overpriced. All those tips that had seemed really good as your brother-in-law was pitching you over beers wither to dust in your hands as people come to their senses and realizes that everyone was excited only because everyone else was excited, when there was no reason to get excited in the first place.

Getting more metaphorical, it’s a way to maintain hope that an established system will ultimately regulate itself and that a short-term disaster doesn’t threaten the underlying paradigm. It’s a way to say, “Hey man, I know things seem pretty fucked up right now, but the fundamentals of our economy are strong.” Despite any sarcastic tone, I think they’re great.

Forests fires are market corrections, trading decaying oaks for nutrient-rich soil, thus ensuring the long-term life of the forest. Earthquakes are market corrections, drifting tectonic plates stuttering to catch up with one another to avoid gaping trenches of magma. When this planet finally kills off the humans to prevent more carbon from spilling into the atmosphere, it will be a market correction.

I can’t help but feel optimistic, even giddy.

Perhaps you’ve sensed that something like this was coming for a while. Admit it, things have felt a little “wrong” lately. Your intuitive self sensed a deep cancer within the body of buying houses on interest-only loans and flipping them onto the next guy who does the same like a game of musical chairs. Well, now the music has stopped and we have a quiet moment of lucidity, when the lights have come on and—although startled at first—we look around and find joy in the way things could be, should be, and will be again.

If you’ve been frustrated about the “childbirth bubble” where expectant mothers are first given pain medication and then labor inducers, and then pain medication, and then labor inducers, until finally their’s no choice but to perform a Caeserian, you’ll be happy to know that there’s a market correction going on.

If you’ve been irked by the “global food market bubble” making your food tasting bland, unsatisfying, and full of ingredients you can’t pronounce, you’ll be happy to know that eating local and urban farms are forcing a market correction.

If you think that the “partisan politics bubble” has made the national discourse too divisive, despite your sharing more and more values with your neighbors and that, “the reality of gun ownership may be different for hunters in rural Ohio than they are for those plagued by gang violence in Cleveland, but don’t tell me we can’t uphold the Second Amendment while keeping AK-47s out of the hands of criminals.” You probably already know that there’s some markets getting corrected lately.

And if you think the “lists of links to lists of links bubble” has left the blogosphere a wasteland of search-engine optimized lists, Digg-bait headlines, and lifehacks distracting you from the life you’re supposed to be hacking, you’ll be pleased to find out that the Internet is receiving a long awaited market correction.

Yes, there are growing pains. Yes, the coming world will destroy the current one in its wake. But I have confidence that the turmoil we’re seeing on the world stage is merely a generation of chickens coming home to roost, breaking some eggs, and tomorrow we’ll all be eating some mighty tasty omelettes.

My step-father is a business professor at Krannert School of Management and recommended I check out David Aaker, whom I guess is considered a bit of an authority on the subject. Aaker stresses relevance as an element of branding that a lot of people forget.

Relevance occupies the space between someone knowing who you are and someone liking what you do. Say I’m hungry for a salad. There are thousands of places I could go to get one (including produce stores to make my own). Even though I’m familiar with McDonald’s, it’s not going to pop into my brain as a destination. I don’t connect “salad” and “McDonald’s”, even though I might connect “food” with “McDonald’s”. It’s not relevant to the current question. Similarly, while I might consider Black & Decker relevant if I were looking for a hedge trimmer or cordless drill, I wouldn’t if it were a rice cooker I was after.

In this way, branding closely mimics findability on the web. Findability is the conceptual sequel to information architecture that stresses the process of users finding your information over the internal structure of the information itself. Do I care if your product is considered top of the line if I never click to the page that describes it?

The folks over at Xerox PARC (who have previously brought you the mouse, desktop icon, etc.) have put together a model of human behavior while looking for data that they call “Scent Navigation Information Foraging”, abbreviated both appropriately and hilariously as SNIF. SNIF suggests that people roam the web like hungry beasts in search of information. When we catch a scent, we bound off in that direction (by clicking a link) and smell the air again (by scanning the page). For instance, if I were looking for a job from Lockheed Martin, I wouldn’t expect to find a job description on their (awful) homepage, but I would scan for any trigger words that might help me get closer like “careers”, “jobs”, “opportunities” or failing those “about us” or “corporate”. Finding one, I’d pounce and then see if I could get closer from the next page, until I had the poor data-gazelle in my gnashing teeth.

With farms and factories producing far more than we could ever want, the problem of scarcity has been for the most part solved on a physical plane (though problems of sustainable production and equitable distribution of resources remain). Still, demand for branding remains high due to the “supply” of relevance being finite. We simply cannot hold information about the offerings of every single company in our heads. Our collective psyches are slashed and burned for profit, with very little regard for what we ourselves may or may not want to store in there. Cynicism, sarcasm, and an increased resistance to advertising is the end result.

A healthier and more sustainable strategy for branding may be to further pursue the foraging model in greater depth. Advertising would be limited to those seeking advertising, and specifically seeking the products being advertised. This simple evolution—contextual branding—is not only respectful, but how Google makes billions of dollars a year. Like other landscapes allowed to recover after intense resource extraction, perhaps our minds will eventually return to a more peaceful state.

For most, “Web 2.0″ is either a meaningless phrase or one way past its expiration date. Yet there is undeniably a meme-complex that the phrase captures.

Now I must digress to explain meme-complexes. What defines a bird? All birds fly, but not penguins or ostriches. All birds lay eggs, but so do reptiles and the duck-billed platypus. Still, one can look at a bird and see the loose connection of almost-but-not-quite signifiers and get a good idea for what a “bird” is. We call that little cloud of memes a meme-complex or, just to be clever, memeplex.

To return to the issue at hand, with “Web 2.0″ one can see the rounded corners, the subtle gradients, the extra-legible typography and get a good idea for what it looks like (and all of these design elements are present with the friendly-looking Wii). But, of course, there’s more to “Web 2.0″ than just how it looks.

According to O’Reilly, it’s about rich experiences, user-added value, and the Long Tail (and a few more things). Of course, others have other criteria. In general, most would agree that it’s about treasuring the needs and power of the user over superfluous features.

Me and my Mii

James Surowiecki (of Wisdom of Crowds fame), acknowledges that Nintendo is thriving in 3rd place and cites reasons like recognizing limitations and focusing on making fun games instead of the bigger!faster!more! that has seduced Sony and Microsoft (both their consoles and other offerings). My first reaction was, “oh, it looks like Nintendo has read Getting Real“. While Sony loses money on every PS3, in an effort to capture market share (how Web 1.0!), Nintendo’s making money making games people want to play.

Nintendo is far from a cute, little startup. Certainly. I remember the gyroscope-spinning robot from the 80s. Still, the spirit of forsaking bloat and simply delivering the goods is delightfully illustrated in both their own commercials and parody ads. Contrast this with the sterile padded cell and black monolith in the Sony ads and it’s suddenly easy to imagine Nintendo as a ragtag bunch of passionate coders that slapped this thing together in their spare time and next thing you know it’s selling like hotcakes.

There’s a lot more that Nintendo could do if they wanted to truly embrace their 2.0 nature. I’d start with making the Virtual Console handle both downloads and uploads, so amateur gamers could share their own creations (which would require Nintendo releasing at least a junior version of its SDK). Next, take all of the “Abandonware” that is now legal to pirate and Open Source it. Let the community add new levels to Bubble Bobble or new units to Herzog Zwei. Finally, why not embrace the social networking aspects of 2.0 and facilitate players meeting other players: “Stan, we’d like you to Becky. She lives near you, is single, and always plays as Princess Peach in Mario Kart. Just like you!”

The features begins with a seemingly inspiring question…

Can we turn capitalism into an open source design project and make it more sustainable and responsible to our and future generation’s needs?

… And then becomes a version history of sorts, beginning with 1.0 (Shortage Capitalism) and ending with 4.0 (Sustainable Capitalism). I would link to the article itself but Adbusters is a bit exclusive with their content, so I’ll just recap it here.

Shortage Capitalism (1.0) is the capitalism we all learned about in high school. People have needs, businesses make products to fill them. If demand exceeds supply, prices go up. If supply exceeds demand, prices go down. Everyone acts in their own best interest and “the market” does the rest. It’s easy enough to understand, but capitalism hasn’t really functioned like this for a long time.

Next came Surplus Capitalism (2.0). Resource extraction and manufacturing are exported to the Third World, lowering costs but sending externalities skyrocketing. With a wealth of goods, supply far exceeds demand—but corporations have learned how to prevent that from translating into lower prices. Advertising becomes the new business of business. To pay for all the things they don’t need, consumers turn to credit and go into debt. This is the most current version… and it has a lot of bugs.

Commons Capitalism (3.0) is Barnes’ proposed next update. Inspired by Garret Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons, he envisions a capitalism that includes a commons transformed from a victim to a market force of its own. Nature (including air, water, or even DNA), along with communities and culture, would have representation via a trust tasked with defending and preserving the commons and paying dividends to the collective shareholders.

The essence is to fix capitalism’s operating system by adding virtuous feedback loops and proxies for unrepresented stakeholders.

Since there are efforts out there that are trying to do something like this, I’m comfortable saying that while 3.0 may be in Beta, we might see a Release Candidate soon.

Finally, Adbusters imagines Sustainable Capitalism (4.0). This conglomeration of existing ideologies like True Cost Markets, Ecological Economics, the Tobin Tax, and Corporate Social Responsibility come together to create a model of capitalism that could evolve beyond the EOLed version we have now.

I have two major responses to the article. The first is that, while the metaphor of capitalism as open source software is a great one, power over corporations and their “operating system” is already in the hands of civil society; we just keep forgetting. It is dangerous to objectize “Capitalism” as something not fundamentally controlled by humans. At the end of the day, we are the programmers and the responsibility for providing tech support (in the form of patches, updates, and new features) falls squarely at our feet.

Second, and this comes back to my friend trying to decide if she is an anti-capitalist or post-capitalist, I want to caution anyone thinking that merely having a roadmap to 4.0 secures its inevitability. Every oil worker kidnapped or brick through a Starbucks window is a bug report reminding us that the current product is not working. Put more fancily, the Hegelian synthesis requires conflict between actual and potential ideologies in order to manifest progress.

Finally, can we all take a moment to appreciate how incredibly clever I am to have put the Web 2.0 reflection under the Monopoly Guy?

From the very beginning, the movie has stood on title alone. Screenwriter Josh Friendman, who reviewed early drafts of the script describes it:

I will not give away any of the plot details of SNAKES ON A PLANE. But know this. As the great Sam Jackson would say: There are motherfucking snakes on the motherfucking plane. What else do you need to know?

Indeed. Mr. Jackson famously took the part based on the title and just as famously fought to keep it when movie executives sought to change it. A lot of times movies will have “working titles” that are later changed to something perceived as more box office friendly by the marketing plan. For instance, “Kicking & Screaming” was originally titled “Will Ferrell Soccer Movie”. Currently tops at the box office is “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby“. I’m absolutely positive that if you ask 10 people “Hey, what’s that about?”, 9 of them will respond: “Will Ferrell Nascar Movie”. Why not just call it that? Why not call it what it is instead of running it through the PR machine on spin cycle until it comes out shiny? When “Snakes on a Plane” was about to become Pacific Air 121, people spoke up.

The fact that the democratic blogosphere (and, let’s be honest, all of us) so values authenticity provoked it to rally behind this uncharacteristic showing of sincerity from those typically slimy Hollywood types. Fans began making their own posters, t-shirts, and complete trailers for the movie. The demanders started to assume the role of suppliers, to make the products that they wanted themselves (in fact no “official” posters, t-shirts, or trailers were released until fairly recently). It was somewhere around this point when the executives “got it” and not only kept the title, but went back to film a scene containing the line “motherfucking snakes on the motherfucking plane”. If ever there were a movie that embraced the basic tenet of the Cluetrain Manifesto, it’s this one. I am given hope by the idea that there is fast becoming an economic model that rewards candor over craftiness.

Early in the 1976 film Network, anchorman Howard Beale explains his inability to continue newscasting with, “I really don’t know any other way to say it other than I just ran out of bullshit.” He must have been speaking only for himself because, 30 years later, there’s still plenty of bullshit to go around. I don’t think that anyone is saying that “Snakes on a Plane” will be a good movie. It might be shit, but it won’t be bullshit. The core of all the enthusiasm is that it is what it is, unapologetically. Mr. Jackson has said of the brilliant title, “You either want to see that, or you don’t.”

And I do, so I’m going tonight.

The classic illustration of Hotelling’s Law is two hot dog vendors on a beach. One would think that optimal position for their hot dog stands would look something like this:

With this positioning, customers have to walk the shortest distances. Stretching the metaphor to politics, the distance between one’s own politics and the party for which they vote is relatively low. However, Hotelling’s Law points out a different scenario:

The Left has moved to the center and is the closest hot dog stand to far more people. Let’s call this the Hotelling Maneuver, though it could just as appropriately be called Clinton’s Choice or even the Super Mario Strategem (“Run to the Right as fast as you can!”). As far as picking up elections, it seemed to be a good move for quite some time.

Kottke won’t feed the troll, but I think she’s something more functional than merely a rouser of rabble. Seeing an opportunity in the Hotelling Maneuver, the Right has done an amazing job of losing the battle in order to win the war. With the Left overextended (leaving room for Nader or even Dean, representing “The Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party”, to spring up) they have shifted the entire culture by re-centering the national debate around the new party positions.

Bombasts like Coulter play a vital role in making less radical bombasts (like O’Reilly) seem completely rational. Her rhetoric opens up spots on the beach for people to fill, leaving the Left in the undesirable position of defending beliefs that they don’t even hold, in order to stay in the middle.

Hotelling’s beach metaphor may work for hot dog vendors, but the Right realizes that they don’t necessarily need to sell every hot dog in order to further their agenda. In fact, with the Democrats having adopted a number of Republican frames, the Right can just hang out and collect dividends on their hot dog franchises.

It seems to me that the only way out of this mess is for the Left to consider what they really stand for and start campaigning on that instead. They’re going to lose a few elections, but it’s what the country ultimately needs.