Late last week, I watched Kapitaal by Studio Smack (link via TypeForYou) and was enrapt by the degree to which we are subjected to the power of design every day. Yesterday, walking through San Francisco’s Mission District, I had a flashback to Kapitaal and suddenly the answer to the questions I brought up in my last post emerged fully-formed, like Athena, from my head.

The Achilles Heel (lots of Greek metaphors today) of running corporate campaigns like RAN does is that corporations can outspend you. Markets campaigning goes for the jugular, in terms of reputation or branding, but a giant like Exxon or Ford can drop millions into a PR campaign to combat your educational outreach. Anyone who reads Stanifesto regularly has witnessed my ire for PR campaigns that do exactly that.

But these companies don’t do this all by themselves. They hire people to do it. They hire smart, creative people. They hire people who (and I’ve met a lot of them) are either completely full of self-loathing at being shills for gas-guzzlers, cigarettes, and war or are extremely thankful that they get to do something creative with their lives and merely rise to the abstract challenge of selling “n” units of product “x” with a budget of “$”. Design, at its core, is problem-solving. Lately, the problem has been stated in terms of units, products, and dollars… but it doesn’t need to be. We must change the challenge.

Joe Pytka has won countless Emmys for his creative and technically flawless commercials. A few years ago, he directed three spots for Chevron’s “Will You Join Us?” campaign. The campaign itself is merely to spread FUD about energy issues. A design community that recognizes any contribution to that campaign with an award, whether beautiful or not, is a community that is delirious. A magazine printed on 100% virgin paper cannot be great. A website inaccessible to non-sighted visitors cannot be great. The criteria for great design must be adjusted to reflect our modern values.

I’m not saying anything new. If you’ve ever read a copy of Adbusters you know that design is sick and needs medicine. If you’ve read Emigre’s “First Things First 2000” essay, or even the original from 1964, you know that these things have been discussed. Fists have been raised. So what’s any different now?

Now we can imagine a corporate campaign against design firms. We should name names instead of drop names. Which firms are perpetuating oppression and poverty, promoting greed and consumption, and rewarding want? Which designers are providing the skilled labor for the white-washing, green-washing, or any other CMYK combination of washing for Corporate America? Which designs, full of the spiritual investments by creative people, end up as just tools in the toolchest of maintaining corporate power? Find them. Expose them.

Markets campaigns work. Designers are sympathetic but need some tough love. With great creativity comes great responsibility.

Envision a world where the creative class realizes their power in shifting culture and stands accountable for doing it in healthy ways. Imagine advertising firms refusing to represent products untruthfully. Picture marketing becoming a new ally, not an enemy, to a sustainable world. Watch it spread across other creative lines: musicians refusing to license their songs to unethical commercials, writers forsaking puff pieces for real investigative journalism.

You and me free of the constant fear that people are trying to trick us into buying shit we don’t need, free to live our life in personally meaningful ways… that’s the world I want to live in. That’s the world I want to help design. Who’s with me?

It’s my third day at SXSWi and there’s now a clear winner in the Best Panel category (congratulations to the other winners, as well). He receiving standing ovations on both his entry and exit—neither of which superfluous.

Considering that I was literally surrounded by bloggers transcribing his every word, I’m not sure I need to play reporter here (sidenote: he finds the phrase “Investigative Reporter” redundant). Instead, let me try to explain my, admittedly unexpected, awe. I don’t get celebrity jitters normally, but halfway through his speech I couldn’t help but feel like I was sharing the room with a real hero.

For several of the questions he was asked, he asked questions of his own. “Do we still believe that it’s important that our news be independent? That we ask the follow-up question? Do we believe that our government belongs to us? Do we believe that democracy is about informing people and letting them decide?” One could have confused it for a presentation on crowd sourcing, but it was actually a challenge to the audience: take journalism seriously or lose it forever.

The man has credentials to talk. When he was the age of many of the bloggers in the room (early 30s) he was in Vietnam covering the war, headed to the middle of hurricanes to cover relief efforts, and part of the White House Press Corps by 33. He had the pair to go toe-to-toe with Nixon; most of us back off when someone leaves a rude comment.

We are, indeed, well on the path to losing journalism forever. The Couric Era of CBS Evening News, the program Rather just vacated, has for its current top stories: “Famous Alaskan Bears”, “The Death of Captain America”, “Blind Auto Mechanics”, and “Sniffing Your Way to a Better Memory”. Hardly Watergate.

It’s the death of Captain America that might sum it up the best. Cap’s creator, 93-year old Joe Simon, lamented the decision saying, “We really need him now“. Joe Quesada, President of Marvel Comics disagrees. “That to me is why this story is worth telling… How do we get along without Captain America? Do we stand up? Do we step down?”

Ditto for Dan Rather.

Courage.

They tell you when your plane is leaving, but if you get there less than 30 minutes in advance you’ve “missed it.”

The rules for bringing on shampoo are fairly complex (more than 3 ounces requires checking your bag, less than 3 ounces is allowed as long as it’s sealed inside a 1-quart ziploc bag, available for purchase right next to the security checkpoint), but clearly no security guard truly believes that preventing contraband shampoo will affect the security of your journey.

For that matter, I have to empty my pockets and take off my belt every time I go through security… each time I consider just taking off my pants to save time—I have to choke back, “so… how many terrorists you guys catch today?”

The safety instructions that we’re asked to listen to pay extensive attention to water landings, even though none have ever occured in the history of air travel. Also, since they know this, flight attendants don’t seem to care if you don’t listen.

Okay, I just fact-checked that last paragraph and it seems that there have been a few instances of planes under- or over-shooting runways near water that have resulted in people needing their flotation devices. Imagine the announcement, “in the event of our pilot barely missing the runway, a flotation device is located…”

The whole cell-phone-will-bring-down-the-plane assertion is ludicrous and even the FCC has proposed opening up planes to cellular use.

As I write this, my travel companion Japhet has discovered a “notice of baggage inspection” in his luggage. My favorite part is:

If the TSA security officer was unable to open your bag for inspection because it was locked, the officer may have been forced to break the locks on your bag. TSA sincerely regrets having to do this, however TSA is not liable for damage to your locks resulting from this necessary security precaution.

Yes, sincerely.

I’m not entirely sure if you can disclaim liability after you’ve done something. That sounds like an Unreasonable Agreement to me.

My biggest concern in all of this is the lack of recourse. I’m already riding trains whenever I can. What else can I do to tell these bastards that I don’t appreciate being treated like a criminal for desiring silky, smooth hair.

Sure, there are claims that his self-aggrandizement (the hubris of suggesting that climate change is caused by humans!) has all been to bolster his name recognition for a presidential bid. However, couldn’t he have made an equally interesting movie about the dangers of proprietary data formats? The answer: yes.

For some reason he chose climate change, despite being almost 60 years old—clearly beyond the reach of the majority of its devastation. He has kids, but their affluence will likely guard them as well. Why care about climate change? What’s the dark secret? What’s the nefarious, shadowy, wicked, dark, dark secret that has him so concerned about the future of our planet and its people?

Tuvalu.

That’s right. I know I probably just blew your mind. You may not even know what Tuvalu is. Follow the money and it becomes much more clear.

Fact: At some point during his Congressional service, Al Gore invents the internet.

Fact: After a failed bid for the presidency, Al Gore becomes Chairman of Current.tv, a progressive television channel/community.

Fact: The top-level domain extension .tv is the country code for the island nation of Tuvalu. Something that only the inventor of the internet (or residents of the Federation of Micronesia) could possibly know!

Fact: Due to climate change leading to rising sea level, Tuvalu is sinking. The entire country will likely disappear entirely if trends are not reversed.

Put the pieces together. Who has the most to gain from Tuvalu not sinking? Al Gore. Who has the most to gain from stopping climate change, thereby saving Tuvalu? Al Gore. Who has put up a $25 million bounty to the creator of a machine that sucks Greenhouse Gases out of the atmosphere, thereby slowing climate change without addressing root causes, thereby not necessarily saving Tuvalu? Al Gore.

I rest my case. The Norwegians must be told.

The story begins with an anonymous article posted to IndyBay, an independent online news source. Here’s the long and short of it:

Our job at Tomkins and Scott, my job specifically, was to monitor Craigslist and summarily flag all postings which reflected negatively upon the city in any way. I am going public with this because, after 3 years of being a censor for Craigslist, I believe what we are doing is totally wrong.

I definitely have an axe to grind with the PR industry in general, so this article sucked me right in. Could our vision of online democratic utopia truly be so easily torn asunder by this “Black PR” strategy? Is the emerging global community just the latest playground for powermongers to co-opt and exploit?

But I was quickly reminded that the internet is a fundamentally more diverse and thus more healthy media environment than newspaper or television. The very first comment to the article was:

I’m checking to see if this is for real.

Craig

By the time the article from IndyBay got to Digg, it was already being sorted out. Writes one commenter:

I just googled Tomkins and Scott and found nothing (except this post). One might attribute this to the fact that the company is “underground” because it does “black PR,” but the wording of this post is very strange. It really sounds like a 12 year old trying to sound like a 30 year old.

Which was followed shortly afterward by:

I don’t know about the rest of Diggers, but I don’t like to go off half-cocked. Dugg nonetheless for a cool conspiracy theory. Also marked as possibly inaccurate. Let’s see some proof.

And finally:

I sure wish someone would have asked me, I asked the guy, and he admitted it’s a hoax.

There are people doing really nasty PR stuff, and netvocates and also fls-dci have been accused of very ugly stuff. Check out the investigative journalists at patriotproject.com, look up their work on swiftboaters.

Craig

One way to look at the whole situation is that an untrue story like the original post would never have been published in traditional media. Another is that the article itself was describing how easy it is to fool the new media. But at the end of the day, community feedback took a dishonest article about a dishonest practice and managed to uncover the truth of the situation (i.e. while this particular instance was a hoax, it is describing a real threat). That feedback simply doesn’t exist in traditional media. Which is why we get things like half of America believing that Iraq had WMDs and bad math on the cover of Business Week.

In essence what we’ve seen are sources of increasingly less authority all safeguarding the validity of whatever they exist in contrast to. Craigslist keeps watch on mainstream media, IndyBay keeps watch on Craigslist, Digg keeps watch on IndyBay, and the commenters keep watch on Digg. The truth seems to be a recursive function.

Philosophers have wrestled with logic for thousands of years, coming up with some amazing advancements:

• Ternary Logic (1400s) recognized that it’s possible that there are other answers than true and false, but only goes as far as adding “unknown”. There is an understanding that, if known, that answer would probably be true or false.
• Bayesian Logic (1700s) challenged the Law of Excluded Middle by navigating the wasteland between true and false with probability. A threshold for truth is set where if something has, say, a 98% chance of being true, we feel comfortable calling it true.
• Fuzzy Logic (1960s) can be understood as a set of states (e.g. early, on time, late ) that are assigned ranges of truth (e.g. earlier than 9:00, 8:45 to 9:15, later than 9:00). In this way, you might ask “Was Stan ‘late’ for work today?” and receive “yes” as your answer, as I arrived at 9:13. If you had asked “Was Stan ‘on time’ for work today?”, you’d receive the same answer.

Still, almost three millenia after Aristotle, most common usage relies on Boolean Logic. A set of mathematical operations named for George Boole, who must have been a very hot and cold sort of fellow, everything is true or false, on or off, 1 or 0. Boole is so immensely popular with computer programmers, they’ve named a whole datatype after him. It contains a single value, either true or false.

I’m no fucking Buddhist, but it seems a priori to me that this strict bivalence is missing some answers. Nagarjuna, a Buddhist philosopher back in 150CE, claimed a dialectic of four states: true, false, both true and false, neither true nor false. Though this certainly feels like a more natural way to describe the world (“Are you still in love with her?” really needs those third and fourth states, no?), it’s never been embraced by mathematics or computer science because it’s near impossible to program a dialetheia.

Or is it? Say we have a datatype, like a Boolean, but containing one of four values (true, false, both, neither). I guess we’ll call it a Nagarjunean. Imagine how this might be used:

if (Nagarjunean is true) then action

Let’s consider what happens for each value. “True” would trigger the action, as would “both”. “False” and “neither” would not. This works with other expressions:

if (Nagarjunean is not false) then action

Again, “True” would trigger the action, but so would “neither”. “Neither” is not false. “Both” would not trigger it, as it is false (both true and false, actually). Is this making sense?

I realize that Nagarjuna himself would take great issue with all of this. His dialectic of the four states was intended as an admonishment of people running around trying to measure everything and claim knowledge of the world. Still, I wonder what power may lie in applying his logic to modern mathematics and computing. Is there application for Buddhist wisdom in today’s world?