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Free Advertising [Retired]
This blog is going through some changes, and I’m retiring one of my features which I implemented last year. I may come back to it at some point, but I no longer feel this accurately reflects what I am after and how I want to present myself. I do still like the idea of offering authentic unpaid endorsements for products and services which I like, along with culturally aligning myself with the social meanings behind brand names, but more on that some other time.
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This site is published by and reflects the personal views of Tim Boucher, in his individual capacity. It does not necessarily represent the views of his employer (since he is unemployed), and he and this site are not sponsored or endorsed by or otherwise legally affiliated with any of the following corporate and other entities…
In fact, he isn’t getting paid by them at all, but here they are anyway!
WTF is going on here?
I’m giving away free ad space as a promotion for my new business:
- I give away free business ideas.
That’s my business. I sow possibilities. I celebrate mutually inspired abundance, shared value communities, and the easily provable fact that when you create value, money becomes irrelevant.
How did I choose which companies to include? Simple. I use their products. Some of them I even like!
Unlike a lot of counter-culture-ish people who complain about mainstream blah-blah-blah and then run out to the shopping mall right after, I’m ready to admit I’m just a regular person and buy stupid shit like everybody else. It’s not ideal, but ideals can only be expressed in particular forms. And I believe we have the responsibility to choose those forms creatively and positively instead of letting them just get forced on us.
Life isn’t perfect, but at least you can master your self.™
PS. Here’s why this is so totally hypocritical, and here’s why I’m really doing it.
And while you’re here, economize!
- Store of Value
- Medium of Exchange
- Complementary Currency
- Local Currency
- Ithaca Hours
- Social capital (what I am using as currency here)
- BBC documentary: Century of the Self, Part 3 of 4 (totally awesome and relevant)
GIVE UP WORRY
FORM SHARED VALUE COMMUNITIES
September 24th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
Slightly tangential, but isn’t everything?
You wrote elsewhere, about becoming a corporation yourself:
“the true check against the excesses of that essentially publicly controlled corporation [the US government] is that private citizens can and do form other corporations other bodies other systems to continually modulate and correct the underlying mechanism of our society.”
Cynicism:
People already tried this. They were called Trade Unions and the powers what are decided to change the rules as soon as they were successful to limit their power. Similarly, the history of local currencies, as you know, is often the history of power banning their use.
So when you use the chess analogy - why should I get in trouble if they’re still getting their cut, if I am playing chess according to the rules - I think the correct question is: what do you do if you are playing chess against your older brother and HE keeps changing the rules on you every time you start winning, and threatens to hit you in the face when you complain?
Nomadism:
This is where that hoary old chestnut, the chess/go comparison comes in. In Go, there are ‘no’ rules (beyond the most basic allowing there to be a competition at all), just ever-shifting concatenations of power interacting with each other in unexpected ways. Hence Deleuze and Guattari’s whole schtick about go as the nomadic, un-statist option. If you rely on differentiated rules for differently identified pieces, you are at the mercy of the rule makers.
I think the missing element, which you are probably already manifesting but I don’t think have really made explicit yet, is that of Stealth. By all means make yourself a corporation, give away abundance for free, be totally open source in everything you do, but let the tentacly Overlords believe that you are just a shyster, putting one over on the marks for a quick buck. Which takes us all the way back to that dangerous shadowy side of the carnival/ bard/ travelling trickster angle.
Ironically, in being totally open, you may even end up making some money - people say, ‘but Tim, surely if it works bigger companies will just copy the formula and come in and take over your pitch’ - but if you have no formula, if they [if you allow them to] judge your actions by their own value system, they will fail to reproduce the fundamental creativity and flow at the heart of the enterprise (Burroughs: our one advantage over tham is that they do not understand magick). They will be Stuck, where you are smooth they must remain striated or else how can they maintain (hierarchical) form? ‘A cistern contains, a fountain overflows’, as Old Will Blake mumbled into his porridge one morning…
Am I on message or is this all just alphabetti spaghetti?
I was at a talk by Grant Morrison oooh, years ago, and he was talking about how he had just set up a corporation, GM Word, as a Magickal experiment, so it could then interact with other corporations and exploit their special privileges. No point doing that if the rules will change so that such entities no longer have special privileges, but then you can just move on to something else, right? A charity, a political party, a land trust. I don’t know wy the Trade unions didn’t just rebrand themselves as religions and get round anti-strike laws by having their oracles occasionally declare open-ended ‘religious holiday periods’, but there you go.
Of course, arguably I am violating my own principle of stealth by typing this all here. I wonder what my real agenda is? Everytime I get close to remembering my brain switches off, presumably to protect me from potential interrogators. At some point I might have to disable that firewall and find out…
September 24th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
Yeah, I feel you on all this. I don’t pretend to know where it’s all going either. It’s just a matter of staying afloat, adapting to currents in the wind and sea as they develop and touching down at safe harbors when and where they come my way.