Boosting Everyware

As a first-time author, I’ve by and large been pleasantly surprised by how well Everyware tends to do. I had absolutely no expectations going in, so it’s been really gratifying to see it find a solid (and crucially, an influential) audience. Sales have been modest, at best, in absolute terms, but I often feel like I’m living out the old Brian Eno saw about the Velvets, i.e. that only a hundred people ever bought their records, but every last one of them went out and started a band. Those of you who have bought it are an accomplished bunch, I can tell you that much.

Having said that, of course, it would really be nice to, y’know, shift some actual units. So if it wouldn’t put you out overmuch, I’m wondering if I couldn’t ask you to do me a favor. Here’s what I had in mind: I thought, since the book has in the past appeared on Amazon’s Bestsellers in Technology & Society list, it might be nice to see it place there again. In fact, if for no other reason than that it would help sell my next book proposal to publishers, I’d really like to be able to say that Everyware was at one point Amazon’s top seller in Technology & Society.

This isn’t Oprah’s Book Club territory, mind you. Given the relatively low volumes involved, if ten or fifteen of you order it in the next twenty-four hours or so, I think this goal is entirely achievable. (I believe that ordering used copies counts as well.) So if you’ve got the budget and the inclination, I’d surely appreciate it if you could take this opportunity to pick up a copy of Everyware, either for yourself or for someone else you think might benefit from giving it a read.

You know you’ll have my gratitude, and if you’re the kind of people I think you are, you’ll also have a book you’ll really enjoy - if for no other reason than to sink your teeth into arguing with. It’s what the marketing folks call (cough) a “win-win.” See you on the bestseller lists! ; . )

Mutual-appreciation society

Tickled pink to see this AM that Vitsœ has included my March encomium to their Web site in their rollup of 2007 press coverage.

All these years later, I’m still occasionally caught off-guard by how profoundly two-way the medium of the Web can be. I still find it delightful when someone on the corporate side totally gets the “markets as conversations” idea.

In my experience, the gold standard here has to be a thread on Joi Ito’s site in 2002, when a representative of Shure popped unsolicited into an ongoing discussion on their - excellent - e2c earphones to talk audio. His frank responses sold me on the merits of picking up a piece of gear I would otherwise have regarded as entirely too minty for me.

I was so satisfied with the e2c’s that I wound up not merely buying a pair for myself but recommending them to everyone who asked me about them for a good year or two; Shure’s ROI on that one conversation had to be off-the-charts ridiculous. (It’s also true that being carried over that particular price threshold also paved the way for my eventual surrender to the Ultimate Ears ue10 Pros, but that’s another story.)

Point is, when organizations as diverse as Vitsœ, Shure and Mojo Cosmetics pay such close attention to what’s being said on the enthusiast blogs, they reap a double benefit. On the one hand, I’d imagine they get a far better understanding of actual customer wants and needs than any suggested by the intellectually shoddy and ludicrously overpriced “research” most marketing insight firms are only too happy to sell them. And the loyalty thus inspired can be impressive, verging on pathological: so pathetically reduced to a state of learned helplessness are we by contemporary customer-service practices that it makes you want to cry tears of gratitude when you realize that someone’s actually listening on the other end.

If only, say, United Airlines was as responsive. Ahem.

If it’s Monday mourning

Dang. R.I.P., Lee.

If it looks like a duck, and it walks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck…

“It was the intentional and systematic infliction of great suffering masquerading as a legal process.” From Jane Mayer’s essential New Yorker piece on the CIA’s “black sites.”

I don’t know about you, but the distinction between the “intentional and systematic infliction of great suffering” and “torture” eludes me. It makes me want to weep and tear my hair out that we’ve come to this.

Infracity NY

The problem with ideas you get in the shower is that real-world impracticalities and such scupper any chance of acting on so many of them before you’re even quite fully towelled off. Given the magnitude of the commitment involved in realizing this particular brainstorm, I’d sure like to get a sense of what people think before proceeding any further with it:

How interested would you be in a one-day event focused on the infrastructure of New York City, in every sense of that word?

We’d be exploring the hidden, the latent and undernoticed systems that undergird our experience of New York, from the geological and biological to the technical to the human. I’d want to get people from Con Ed, the MTA, and 311, of course, but also representatives from the New-York Historical Society, the American Museum of Natural History, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Maybe get graffiti artists, the Infiltration folks or Miru Kim to talk about their experiences down in the subway tunnels and switchyards.

I’m willing to bet this would be hella fun, not just because I know there are infra geeks galore in my extended friendship network - the Flickr group on Urban Markup Language is only one salient example - and not merely because it’d help me with important aspects of research for The City Is Here For You To Use. It’d also address, in part, some of the concerns Mike Migurski’s recently been raising about design conference burnout, and also some of my own boredom with same - I mean, this event would be about something, not more conference-circuit logrolling 2.0 wankery.

Actually, my interest is doing this is so completely overdetermined that it’s hard to suss out just what led to what. It’s also motivated by some of our Urban Computing students’ projects; by Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ work, specifically Touch Sanitation; by Cassidy Curtis’s Graffiti Archaeology. More recently, my reading of Richard Louv’s curious book Last Child in the Woods, and his diagnosis of contemporary society as suffering from “nature-deficit disorder,” have been especially influential: I’m determined to learn more about the ecological underpinnings of this place I call home, learn the names of the trees lining the streets and the species thriving in the river, the park and the sewer.

Perhaps less abstractly, my interest is also driven by infrastructure default events like last month’s steam-pipe explosion and last night’s bridge collapse in Minneapolis: as citizens and voters, we could all stand to learn more about the systems whose smooth functioning daily life of the city is utterly predicated on, and about the patterns of disinvestment that are manifestly putting us at risk.

Anyway, what do you think? Would you attend such a thing? What would you want to see discussed? And how much do you think it’d be reasonable to pay for such an event, assuming it had fairly tasty production values?