the fake that launched a thousand blogs
who among us has not suffered the multiple personality disorder that is the blogosphere? how many screen handles have you accumulated over the years? [if your lifespan as a user dates back to the Well, don't answer that question.]
next question: how many outrageous/audacious/unlikely
business plans have you blogged about and never seen past the R & D phase? how many boxes of business cards for ficitious companies/brands are sitting on your shelf? did you actually get to the point of having a prospectus printed?
were you one of the chosen few who actually went IPO with nothing actually for sale but vapor? [if so, dear reader, please know: i do not scorn you. after all, even the mighty engine of the winds that drives the sails of every merchant ship upon the seas of commerce, is itself fueled by vapor. not to mention hyperextended metaphors.]
wouldn't it be nice if our lives weren't so fear-based and addictive to dishonesty that we could actually roll up our sleeves and make something? a chair, a birdhouse, lawn art, a coffee mug?
instead, what do we do? we have spent our lives designing brilliant PowerPoint treasure maps to nonexistent pirate treasure buried in the backyards of our minds.
i propose something different. i propose that we go back into our cobwebbed warehouses, turn on the lights, look at what's rusting there, and ask ourselves: would
i buy this? and if not: bring on the gasoline.
this internet thing is useless only insofar as talk is cheap. in other words: if all you've ever done is spew meaningless drivel and bogus rah-rah business philosophy, you're not going to make a dime more in this place than you already have.
however, if your conversation is
scintillating - if you can tell a story that makes a room crackle with excitement, or even with bitter irony - then behold: your audience just got a whole hell of a lot bigger.
the tricky part is, which of us will be smart enough, or perhaps brilliantly dumb enough to actually exploit that fact?
this is probably the most frightening statement ever made
and by corrollary, the most truthful statement ever made:
[click on picture to witness
the genius that is hugh mcleod]
this is the truthful statement that makes me wake up screaming.
except it's even worse than that. because i can't seem to wake up.
postscript
the rest of you bush-leaguers [and i use that term advisedly] wouldn't have the stones to admit something like that on their blog.
that's what sets SFM apart from the rest of the fleabitten hyenas in this wasteland.
go back and read what i wrote about going down in flames a few posts below.
marshmallows anyone?
first quarter returns
let's hear it for 8 straight months in the red!
that's right; SFM is hemorrhaging to death.
perhaps we should kill the monkey and eat its brain.
but then we'd be guilty of killing the proverbial monkey that throws the golden turds...
things i learned in 2005
1. how can you possibly make anyone care if you don't?
2. even if you do, you'll probably only succeed in making someone else care one time out of hundred.
3. the good news is, this is a pretty decent way to weed out the idiots.
4. annoying people can still be useful. this includes customers as well as partners.
5. if you're going to go down in flames, make sure you do it as publicly as possible. and don't forget the marshmallows and hot dogs.
6. everybody's got a sob story. not all of them are well written.
7. sometimes it's the editing that kills a movie.
8. it's not the spinach in your teeth that sinks a pitch. it's the fact that the recipient might think you didn't put it there on purpose. a successful pitch leaves the recipient wanting their own piece of spinach.
9. if you watch the behavior of animals at the zoo, you'll learn a lot about why even the best job is still pretty much a stinking prison for the wild one inside you.
10. sometimes you have to do stuff, then talk about it, then write about it, and not the other way around.
job hunting sucks
because i don't live alone in this bomb shelter, i have been forced to go outside in my yellow radiation suit and forage for scraps of garbage that might be useful. that is one of the many reasons that this blog has lain fallow for lo these six months. [another is that we've got better things to do than sitting around doing this, but that's another story.]
my colleague and i have been conducting an ongoing experiment, namely: on the road to making a living for oneself and one's family that involves doing whatever the hell one feels like at any particular moment, which is worse - employment or unemployment?
perhaps it's due to our white male privilege, but my associate [well, he's not really "white" and i'm not really "male", but that's another story] and i have found that somehow we have failed to die, or to cause or allow our families to die, during our period of unemployment. [this may be due to the fact that our spouses are more industrious than we are, but that's another story.] however, the constant stress of our situation might be construed as a fate worse than death.
for instance, i have a funny feeling right now that i've acquired walking pneumonia. and all because i've been job hunting for six months. i am beginning to believe that job hunting is bad for your health.
here is something of interest for you to consider. recently i sat through an 80 minute job interview, as well as performing a number of onerous research, writing and design tests for which i easily could have charged a client a month's salary for, all for a job that
salary.com describes as
starting at 40k a year [peanuts to some of you, i know, but to struggling family men, nothing to shake a stick at] at the bargain-basement-entry level.
i was then offered the job. at an hourly rate.
of $12.
half-time.
to quote a sign that was recently put up at the counter of seattle's famous allegro cafe:
"what in the world is wrong with you all?"
reprint of an earlier broadside
Posted here apropos of the delivery of Part II in very soonage.
***************************************************************
MANIFESTO: THE HEAT DEATH OF THE ADVERTISING INDUSTRY, PART I
A Superflatmonkey Communique
Here at the mid-point of the first decade of the new Millennium, it is no coincidence that at a time of information technology convergence equally as revolutionary as Gutenberg's printing press, when we are staring in the face not only of instantaneous real-time wireless video teleconferencing on a global scale, but the even greater watersheds of smart paper and thumbprint banking, the mightiest nation on Earth is controlled by factually challenged religious fanatics.
We are living on the knife edge of risk and opportunity, when possibly nothing might stand in the way of total human communication across all boundaries and distances; and yet, what good is that if what we are communicating is not even fertile enough to be called bullshit?
In the downloadable, peer-to-peer, open source culture, commodities as we used to know them have grown obsolete. We have seen short-sighted people try to create bottlenecks and charge a toll; this is the real piracy, not the digital black market, which is still the strongest market on Earth as it always has been. We've tried prohibition before and it just doesn't work as a business model. It's not that "information wants to be free", because information is a thing - it doesn't want anything. We are the ones who want to be free, and the truth of the matter from a Bakuninist [as much as a Buddhist] perspective is that we already are - we are merely struggling against the imposed illusion that we are not.
If we want to profit, we have to examine the rules of profit, not as we hope or imagine them to be, but as they really are. And the first rule of profit is not "Buy cheap and sell dear", nor is it "Never give a sucker an even break"; both maxims, in the end, contain their own hidden costs that only the suicidally stupid can afford to ignore, and only the retarded can pretend never to have learned from the most painful experience.
No, the first rule of profit is, simply, "It is always cheaper - and infinitely more profitable - to sell the customer something she or he already owns."
the laziest bloggers in the world
we at
superflatmonkey have
lots of
more important
things to
do with our
time than
blogging. we're not sure what. but it might have something to do with old
vampirella comics and
salad oil.
we're also trying to quit our jobs and make money the old fashioned way - by stealing it. don't worry about our moral compass, however - we are firmly committed to stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. the poor just happen to be us, but if we're flush and your cardboard sign doesn't contain any egregious misspellings, we might buy you a sandwich.
if you are a rich person or financially solvent corporation, greetings! have we got a marketing plan for you. all that "new media", "viral marketing", "cluetrain/hughtrain" stuff you've been hearing about? yeah, that's us all over, jack. write us a check. for as much as possible. better yet, give us the cash in one of those shiny steel briefcases. what will we do for you in return?
we will notify you as to whether or not you're already dead, and in need of the george romero treatment.
we are willing to tell any and all lies necessary in order to acquire free iPods and titanium powerbooks with wifi broadband access.
we also plan to expense entire wardrobes from
this guy. [and not just because
hugh told us to. okay, well, maybe yes, because hugh told us to, but hugh is very smart.] a different one for every day of the week, for every season. that's...let's see...five times three...at least fifteen outfits.
campester prefers black of course; eject! prefers ivory, wasabi, orange cream and baby blue.
we also need ski equipment and a vacation home in tahoe.
i'll let you know if we're expensing anything else.
