Essays
The following are essays I have written on the topic of Duck! & Gather:
- The Fourth Turning Predicts People vs. Corporations
- Long Tail Rising
- Mr. Donaghy was Doing a Good Job
The Fourth Turning Predicts People vs. Corporations (December 2003, 22 pages, Comments)
This essay deconstructs and reconstructs the theory of a popular book written in 1997. That book is An American Prophecy: The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny, by authors William Strauss and Neil Howe. Fourth Turning predicts that, starting around 2005, give or take a couple of years, America will enter a crisis period every bit as terrifying and dangerous to the nation's survival as was Word War II, the Great Depression, the Civil War, and the American Revolution before it. However, the authors hedge their bets, and make no specific prediction as to the nature of this impending crisis. This essay of mine looks closely at the Fourth Turning theory, and argues that the theory leads to an inescapable conclusion: the coming crisis can be described as People vs. Corporations.
Long Tail Rising: The Coming Race Among the Internet's Big Players to Capture the Long Tail (April 2006, 71 pages, Comments)
"Long Tail" and "Head" are Tech business synonyms (or euphemisms?) for "People" and "Corporations". This essay looks at the rising trend of successful Long Tail Internet startups like Flickr and MySpace. It argues that this rise is due to the forces discussed in Duck! & Gather. It concludes that one of the two Internet powers Yahoo! or Google will play the definitive role in completing the rise of the Long Tail (ie. rise of People). The conclusion is that Yahoo! is certainly able to play this role, but it's will to do so is presently an open question. Conversely, Google appears more than willing to do so, however its ability is constrained by the clock of destiny winding down. Time will soon enough tell which behemoth will play this historical role.
(Long Tail Rising PDF | Long Tail Rising SXW) (Long Tail Podcasts, ie."The Director's Cut": Sections 1 & 2 (54:28), Section 3 (54:29), Section 4 (33:49))
Notes: I haven't yet converted the SXW file into an HTML file. Sorry, but the job looks a little tricky right now. In the meantime, you can download the PDF, which is nice and clean and pretty. But of course, you can't access the links. The SXW file allows you to access the links, but odds are you probably don't run Open Office. Oh well, there you have it. As for the podcasts, sorry about the scratchiness. I did the bulk of them walking around a parking lot on a windy day.
Mr. Donaghy was Doing a Good Job (July 2007, 7 pages, Comments)
On Friday, July 20, 2007, a story broke that shook the NBA to its foundations. An NBA referee is about to arrested for point shaving and disclosing secret information, by way of helping the mob in its gambling activities. Early indications are that this ref engaged in this illegal activity during the past two seasons. Ironically, or as this essay argues, consistently, the same ref was promoted by the NBA for performing his job so well during the past two seasons. How can it be that a ref's performance of his job can simultaneously please both the NBA and the mob? This essay argues that the answer to this question calls for the dismantling of the NBA corporation as we know it.
