August 29, 2006 (1): The Next Economic Bubble?

Rafe Needleman came up with a great title for his Web 2.0 blog yesterday: "Are there any Web 2.0 businesses in the real world?" After reading his argument, which involved a critical reading of the values of the Cluetrain Manifesto, I decided to follow up with my own TalkBack entry. I called it "Bubble 2.0," because I am always on the lookout for the inflation of the next economic bubble. As I put it, I wanted to argue that "the primary source of gas" for the current inflation is Web 2.0. Here is an edited version of my reasoning:

We should have learned from the last bubble that sobering concepts such as "the real world" just do not signify during bubble inflation, probably because the very act of inflation in grounded in an arrogant utopianism. ("Don't worry about the real world--or the 'old economy' or whatever--because after the changes you won't recognize it any more!") Consider Needleman's account of the Cluetrain Manifesto and its "shiny new values competing with reasonable but conservative older values:"

• Simplicity over Completeness
• Long tail over Mass Audience
• Share over Protect
• Advertise over Subscribe
• Syndication over Stickiness
• Early Availability over Correctness
• Select by Crowd over Editor
• Honest voice over Corporate Speak
• Participation over Publishing
• Community over Product

There is (at least) one entry missing from this list. It's absence discloses the dirty secret of the whole story. The entry I have in mind is:

• Confidence over credibility

Bubbles are inflated by claims that, when viewed in retrospect have little, if any, credibility; but enthusiasm over the inflation dismisses any reasoned attempts to warrant those claims. Rather than reading The Cluetrain Manifesto, folks should be reading Mark Taylor's Confidence Games and its attempt to argue that our daily life, particularly as shaped by advanced technology, now plays out as one confidence game after another.

This not to say that we should hurl our wooden shoes into the works of the new engines of these confidence games. However, the Internet can help us to be more critical readers, rather than just more "clued-in" ones. If we read those ten enumerated value shifts more critically, we shall probably be less enthusiastic about embracing them. Some of us might even think our way through to dialectical syntheses that might play out in the real world!

June 22, 2006: Faith and Interpretation

It occurred to me this morning that one of the reasons I have been investing so much energy in this blog is that I feel a very strong personal commitment to the practice of interpretation, and I can probably trace that commitment back to the first time I encountered a copy of the Bible that included commentary on the text. In retrospect (although I did not know it at the time) this was most likely my first exposure to hermeneutics, since, while I made no mention of this in my "Hermeneutics 101" entry, the practice of hermeneutics originated in problems concerned with the interpretation of Biblical texts. This raises an interesting irony, which I would like to explore briefly.

It goes back to a throw-away line delivered during last summer's San Francisco Mime Troupe production, Doing Good. One of the characters is a retired CIA agent who had considered going back to his old job but decided that "faith-based intelligence is not for me." As you might imagine, this got a good laugh from the audience; but, as I think back on it, it feels as if there is now a sense of opposition between interpretation (which is the primary work of intelligence analysts and hopefully is also a required skill for field agents) and faith. The age in which an appreciation of a religious text comes from the scrupulous examination of all the different things it might mean seems to have given way, in many circles, to the conviction that interpretation is irrelevant because the text has only a single, absolute meaning; and that meaning is given to you by some authority or, in a clutch, by your own devout sense of right and wrong.

Thus, I am confronted with evidence of a vociferous (if not strong) body of opinion that has written off one of the intellectual skills I most value as irrelevant! How seriously should I take this judgment? I would still prefer to subscribe to the more liberal attitude that reasonable people may differ and continue to explore the nooks and crannies of this deep-felt passion; but, as this note has probably demonstrated, I now seem to be exercising that skill in the interpretation of the actions and events I observe in the world at large, rather than confining myself to texts!