Hillary won West Virginia yesterday. It doesn’t mean a thing for the nomination, the mathematical stakes were settled long ago, what even the narrative crafted by the press. It doesn’t mean a thing for the general election, Obama has plenty of suction in swing states all across the country. The win only has significance for a single constituency, and yesterday they lost a very important fight – the people of the Appalachians lost yet another chance to join contemporary American, to participate in the wave of modernity that passed over progressive states like Iowa a century ago. The only losers yesterday were the Appalachians, the Scots-Irish, the hillbillies, the forgotten rednecks of every remote draw, valley and hollow back in the Appalachians. Up along Hell-for-Certain branch and all the other tiny green places of the oldest mountains the descendants of King James’s army sent the twenty-first century a message:

Fuck you.

I am a Southerner by birth, and the older I get, and the longer I live in California I grow prouder and prouder of that fact. But (and listen for my Granny spinning in her grave) I am an Appalachian first. And stupidly proud of that fact. Like all of us mountain people are stupidly proud of our stubbornness. When you are stubborn, when stubbornness is all you have left, you are either proud of it or you lay down and die. And the people of Appalachia are not big in the lay-down-and-die department. They are more members of the “Live free or die” school. They are more of the “Why don’t you go fuck yourself?” school. The “You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold dead hands” school.

Why did they vote of Hillary? Undoubtedly because she is white. Hillary was able dig into her back of southern affects and find an appropriate twang. She talked a lot about giving people money. I can say with the contempt born of familiarity that the folks left in West Virginia are big on taking government money. Senator Byrd if very good at prying it loose from the feds – he gets back $2.45 for every dollar the state pays in. If you had any get-up-and-go in West Virginia then you’ve been leaving for the last 60 years, from the moment they put in enough roads that people could finally leave. People like my father and his PhD. Or my uncle and his medical technology start-up. They weren’t born into coal money – far from it. They are from a little down in central West Virginia, Weston. Once they got educated they did the only thing anyone with sense would do, they left for greener pastures.

So why did the people left in West Virginia vote so overwhelmingly for Hillary? Because they are among some of the proudest, most stubborn and willfully ignorant people on the planet. They could climb into their Chevy and drive to DC, Chicago, California. They could start a new life where there are jobs and education and opportunity, but they don’t want to. They don’t like the 21st century. Hell, they didn’t like the 20th very much. They don’t know why exactly, but you can’t make them. There isn’t enough dynamite in West Virginia to move these people.

In nothing else, Obama is a man of the 21st century. Racially mixed, progressively educated, he just looks *new*. He looks now. Obama believes in people organizing and helping themselves – something that you think would resonate in pro-labor West Virginia. But Obama is nothing but the shock of modernity in a good suit, the threat of how different the twenty-first century is going to be. Even if they can’t articulate it, break it down into an anatomy of change, they know in their heart of hearts that Obama represents the future, the need to adapt, to embrace the new. That he has the balls to show them this in the light of day, the audacity to suggest that the 21st century is coming, whether they like it or not.
They didn’t vote for Hillary. They voted for the past. Obama just kept saying, “Change is coming.” The people of the Appalachians have a one size fits all answer for outsiders who think they know what’s good for everyone:

Fuck you.

Fuck you, 21st century.

Fuck you for not getting us ready. All you did was keep cutting down our trees and mining our coal.

Fuck you for not bringing in new blood.

Fuck you for not educating us, or creating opportunity here in these hills.

Fuck you with your globalization and wage slave jobs.

Fuck you with your “difference” that doesn’t seem to have any room for us.

Fuck you for making us the last acceptable racist joke of the 21st century.

Fuck you for leaving us behind, like you’ve been doing for 200 years.

For leaving us with nothing but our pride.

Our pride. You can have that when you pry it from our cold, dead hands, you high-hat motherfuckers.

Because that we will not abide, 21st century.

Fuck you.

My brothers and I are very political - if sort of heterodox and roll-your-own in our political positions. But with my brother Dave's background as an activist, my brother John's work as a political analyist and campaign manager for the NRDC and my own background in strategic planning, it all makes for some pretty awesome (and awesomely informed) political conversations. Sometimes I wish the Grant brothers had a left wing talk radio show, if only because what passes for politically left radio in the US right now is just knee-jerk pablum.

Johnny fired off the following conversation starter in an email his morning regarding the Potomac wins for Obama yesterday. I was happy enough with what I wrote to slap it up here.

1) Was last night the tipping point for Obama? He's won 8 in a row!

JG

1) I think that last night will be remembered as the moment people began recognizing as the tipping point. The real corner was turned back on Super Tuesday. It was supposed to be the knockout blow, and HRC spent her war chest accordingly. When Obama fought her to a standstill on ST, his fund raising went into hyperspace. His ability to accelerate his operational tempo coming out of that race, surging onto prepared ground, marked the beginning of the end. However, John, you have good point in this - I think that if HRC could have taken VA, it would have let all the air out of the BHO "groundswell" narrative. Now she HAS to take Wisconsin, or at least blunt his margins. Anything that burns some of the luster off this grassroots-underdog-latter day JFK story is good for her. Which is of course a shit position to be in, pissing on "hope". Just ask the bush administration how fighting an idea works out.... And ask any media planner how fun it is to make last minute buys. Getting into the message-space in WI will be expensive, and with a $2+ to $1 fund raising advantage, it is an expense HRC can ill-afford, especially going into expensive markets like Dallas, Houston and Cleveland.

The marketer in me wanted to see the segmentation out of last night's contests. I figured that if he was able to eat into her core demos, then that was some very serious, transformative shit. And that corrosion/co-option was evidenced in spades - he grabbed white women in MD, he grabbed Latinos in VA, he grabbed blue collar voters in MD and VA. Meanwhile, his conversions on AA's and white dudes (???!!? wow! the Gibson/Glover effect rolls on!) continue to power into unprecedented internet-fueled hyperspace. As the idea of not having to listen to the Clintons for the next 4-8 years while simultaneously beating the tar out of the GOP begins to become a reality, look to white men to defect asymptotically. Even Texas is not impossible if this tectonic restructuring continues.

Her last minute re-entry into WI plus staff reshuffle seems to indicate that its FINALLY dawning on them - this is the end of the Clintons & the DLC's centrality inside the DNC power structure. To date, they have played the Terry McAuliffe game, speaking to base in tested, program-framed phraseology while simultaneously ignoring "unwinnable" territory. It's a strangely corporate, marketing fueled strategy and Obama's rise to prominence has been a stinging repudiation of it, if nothing else. If they lose to Obama, that's it, they are cast into the outer darkness.

If he blows her out in WI and fights her to a standstill in TX and OH, its all over but the crying.


**********

And now I'd like to take the briefest of moments to explain the white dude love for Obama, a phenomenon that seems to be building across every socio-economic strata. At first, it was predominantly professional white men, but the results out of the Commonwealth of Virginia show that even blue-collar white Dem dudes were going for Mr. O in a big way. Why? Let me speak of the two creatures that nobody in the Democratic Partly likes to speak of, except in the glowing, sunshine-filled politically correct rhetoric of ten thousand singing tomorrows. Those creatures are gender and race. These factors aren't at work in an explicitly negative way, but they are at work. There are generational and cultural dynamics in play, but it all basically cooks down to two simple axioms, which I will unpack:

1) Gen X white guys are now grown men, and thoroughly sick of being preached to by their Boomer Moms.

2) Gen X white dudes feel that black dudes are fundamentally cooler than they are, and have secretly wanted a black friend since boyhood.

Point One – Shut up, Mom.
Am I projecting here? Sure I am. But I cannot be alone in this feeling – Gen X men, despite the legendary protraction of our adolescences, have come of age. We are all grown men now. We have moved out of our folks basements, finished up our degrees, gotten traction in our careers, even become fathers. In all of these things, across every income and education level, we are united in one simple fact: WE ARE TOTALLY FUCKING SICK OF LISTENING TO BOOMER BULLSHIT. The moralizing, the empty sanctimony, the hippy-haze that right or left they all seem lost in. Their idealism has brought the US to its current, tragically-fucked state.

So it is really galling to listen to Hillary’s moralizing – after her triangulating, boomerish support of the war in Iraq. After her husband’s proclivities destroyed Gore’s chances by galvanizing 3rd party wingnuts like Nader & harpooned us with 8 years of GWB. Yet I am still talking history & policy here.

The truth is that when Hillary starts talking, all I can hear is my mother, at her worst. Nagging, wagging her finger, getting up into my process. It’s not a rational thing. There is something about the pitch of her voice, her tired face and kicky haircut. I just can’t stand it. Some nasty well of deep adolescent resentment in me geysers to the surface, it alloys with the fact that in the full bloom of my manhood I don’t have to put up with this shit. Basically, hell would have to freeze over before I would vote for a Republican (unless I could travel back in time and vote for TR), so I find my eyes searching the horizon for someone, anyone else to vote for. And I know that I cannot be alone in this. This a generational style issue meeting up with a lifecycle dynamic – Gen X has arrived at adulthood. All of which sets up Point 2.

Point 2 – Hey Mom, this is Barack, my new friend.


There was a new cultural phenomenon in the 80’s, the buddy picture. Now, there have been buddy pictures for a long time, but they arrived at their full cultural weight in the 80s. These buddy pics were aimed at a young male audience, and they featured something new – a black man and a white man working together as equals. Usually the black guy was the comic relief, but he was almost always cooler than the white guy. And this was part of the appeal - despite some of the fucked up gender politics and their overall reactionary rhetoric, action movies of the 80’s almost universally offered this axiom: black dudes were equal to whites, and the racial frission made for a cool movie.

The value proposition was the same: the black dude was respected as an equal, the white dude earned the cultural capital of not being a total redneck fucknut. Was it jacked up that the white guy was the dispenser of respect in this scenario? Sure, but that was exactly the fucked situation the films & TV shows sought to explore and correct. 48 hours, Lethal weapon, Miami Vice, Magnum PI – Gen X guys, both black and white, secretly wanted this cross racial partnership in their own life.

Then along come Obama. At just the time that Hillary is antagonizing them, here comes BHO. He’s just plain cool. Witness the shit-eating grin on Tim Kaine’s face as Obama laid a very cool quasi-dap handshake on him at the Jefferson Jackson dinner in Virginia. Tim Kaine is a great governor, a great leader, but he isn’t cool. But Obama is, and Obama is his friend. There is a kind of reflected coolness that comes from the association.

The coolness gap is real, despite the fact that nobody knows how to talk about it. But Obama knows how to use it, and has used it to get to white men. It taps into a powerful cultural archetype that was laid down 2 decades ago. As insufferable as supporting Hillary is, it is equally gratifying to support Obama. It’s a difficult, potentially impossible generational dynamic for Hillary to overcome.

Obama / Nolte 2008!

I unsubscribed from MoveOn's email list today. For whatever reason, this last email was the one that broke the camel's back. I didn't even scan it for content. When I saw the message from "Nita Chaudhary" it offended me - as an interactive marketer.

MoveOn continuously generates these emails. My guess is that they think they are going to keep me "energized" as part of their "base." But what's happened is that they simply became background clutter in my inbox.

Then they took out the Petraeus ad in the NYT a couple of weeks ago, and I realized that my offense ran far deeper than professional disagreement.

When I clicked through to MO's subscription management page and started answering their "why are you leaving?" form, I realized how furious I was with these idiots. I have come to expect incompetence from the Bush administration. But the Left needs to remember that it was complacency, arrogance, and incompetence governance and campaigning that lost us the goverenment to begin with. The Republicans were once dedicated and competent campaigners, and those advisors and networks *haven't gone anywhere*.

When a marquee group like MoveOn pulls a bonehead move like this, they give the Right exactly what they need to terrify the moderates in this country: The Left is shrill, The Left are ideologues that will at without consideration for reality, The Left are anti-national security.

These statements are only true of the tiniest (but very vocal) minority of the Left in this country. But we have to take these traction points away from the Right, and rob the right of their perceived strengths on national security and counter-terror.

Was the Petraeus report a suspect act of political theater? Yes. No shit. You don't need a PhD in Political Science from John Hopkins to figure that out. Petreaus is Bush's last hope for something that doesn't look like abject failure in Iraq. What are Petreaus's motives? Anyone that looks over his CV will see an hyperambitious over-achiever that is playing to the audience of History. He sees himself as a U.S. Grant - a practical man who arrives at the Republic's darkest hour of hysteria to do the thing nobody thinks can be done.

I think Petraeus is a smart guy with a huge ego. The promise of the impossible is what drives him. Maybe his motives are less than pure. Ultimately, it doesn't matter what his motives are. Attacking his honesty and honor, while he's wearing that uniform, decked out in all his fruit salad - its just fucking stupid. Did the Left learn nothing from going after Ollie North?

When I buy stock in a company, I am expressing my trust and confidence that they are solvent and smart. I am placing a vote with my capital that they will make money in the market.

When I give a donation to a NGO or political action group, I am expressing my trust and confidence that they are ideologically grounded, and that they will provide with me actionable analysis and act as my proxy in the marketplace of ideas. I am making an investment in their message. I have to *trust* them.

They have lost my trust. Forever, I think.



Here's my letter to MoveOn

****
I don't know when MoveOn developed such a tin ear politically, but your ad in the NYT about the Petraeus testimony was a disaster. You immediately gave the Republicans the smoke screen they needed to dodge the vital issue at hand - the incompetent conduct of this unnecessary war.

Honestly, I was furious when I saw the ad, and with every passing day it remains a story in the news cycle, my anger only grows. I can't believe I ever gave you guys money. I think you provided the left great value when you were a lone voice in the wilderness against this administration. But you have become arrogant, self-righteous, and smug.

I am not telling you to compromise your principles, I am asking you to examine your methods. Who are you trying to connect with? Yes, the base needs energizing, always, but it is the center that decides elections in this country. Big, stupid, inflammatory ads are counterproductive. They give aid and comfort to the ideologues of the Right. The brazen incompetence of the bush administration gives you all the ammunition you need. NEVER attack the military and give the Right that stick to beat you with. Get on message and stay there: the brave men and women of our military are being held hostage by an incompetent and ideologically fanatical administration. The only thing that will end the war is a new president. Focus on that.

I also want to give you some advice on your direct campaigns. I do think you send too many emails. I work in the interactive industry, and there is such a thing as attention inflation. Your organization has diluted its impact by continually sending out these emails. You become part of the noise, not an answer to it. A political organization needs to provide actionable analysis to its members. Continually messaging them in one-way communications does not do that.

Sincerely,

Steve Grant

I know I'm late to this party, but the ability of Facebook, library thing, twitter, and other social media mashup services is just... amazingly cool.

Suddenly, random books on my blog. And library thing sucked them all in from Amazon's API. That's me, my semantic radiation, gathered up radio telescope style & piped to my blog.

There are big impacts for manufacturers - along the spime axis. We just need to be smart about it.

Well, some biggish news, at least in Warcraft terms. I switched realms from the venerable Greymane to the new frontier of Baelgun - another Pacific time server. I was originally playing on Greymane because my friend Mike from work has a 60 Undead warlock on there names Smelvin. Mike has been an amazingly cool mentor for me with the whole thing - staking me 65 silver out of the gate and just generally giving me advice. The WoW universe is amazingly complicated... with its own language, styles, factions, an economies. This kind of steep learning curve creates a barrier to entry, and Mike has helped me get over this barrier. It strikes me that this barrier is added value for the players, as hard as Blizzard works to increase their subscription base, the players don't want just anyone on WoW. It's not a console game. Most players only want people that get it on the service - as "bad" players, the obnoxious and the incompetent are actually dangerous to the welfare of their characters.

And in a world where network effects and urbanization continually crowd the popular, the feeling of having a wall between you and everyone else, them, the other, it is both comforting and creates a sense of belonging. As any coolhunter will tell you, popularity is lethal to the cultural currency of any trend, and Wow's complexity and continual upgrade path creates a sort of moving cultural storm front, a sweet spot where there are enough players to have strong social effects and still have a feeling of closeness and belonging. There are also real technical issues.

At the end of the day, logging onto Greymane during prime time (after dinner... when people used to watch TV) was sometimes taking thirty minutes. Some people were reporting waits as long as 45 minutes to an hour. There were a couple of things shocking to me about this. Apparently I was willing to wait even 10 minutes to get on -I'd just read a book. I cannot think of any other online activity where I would wait one minute, much less 10. Google measures their response time in tenths of a second, because users can perceive those microdelays. The user might not say, "this was 2 tenths of a second faster." They'll just say "this was better." I think its a testimony to the power of the WoW experience that people will actually sit there and wait in an age of always on instant access.

They aren't going to wait forever, though. Blizzard knows this. So they offered 4 very crowded servers free character transfers to brand-new, empty worlds. It was like some strange colonization project. Despite the friends I had on Greymane, and the real friend I had there with Mike, 30 minutes just wasn't cutting it for me. I have been working till 6pm at the office, and then logging on for an hour or so while traffic dies down. I can get in an hour of WoW and spend a whole 30-45 minutes LESS in the car on my way home. 20 minutes is a measureable fraction of my play time, as I'm not a teenage thats going to spend the next 5 hours on there.

So I said goodbye to everyone and took the transfer. I chunked through the process on the blizzard website, then received a TERRIFYING message that it might be five days before I was able to access Suriqa. Yikes. But in actuality, everything was moved in about 10 minutes.

I logged into Baelgun, and was immeditate bombarded by messages to come to Ogrimmar, the capital city of both the Orcs and the Horde. I hopped a bat from The Crossroads and headed town to the post office... sort of the main hangout in the city. The place was almost empty, there were only 5 people in the whole city. It had a strange neutron bomb feeling of abandonment.

The last couple of days have been great, however. TONS of monsters, since I'm not competing with so many other players for kills. I got into a great new guild right off the bat, and two of my very good friends from Greymane transferred - Resident and her brother Omegastar. Awesome stuff.

I'm up to level 25. Great new battle bow and an upgrade to razor arrows. Once i crack 26 I can use my new sword and cloak for huge DPS.

I am such a fucking dork

Zoram'gar Outpost, Ashenvale, Western Continent of Kalimdor, Greymane

I completed the long "Warsong Reports" run yesterday - a kind of "jog and sneak" west from Splintertree Post to the western shore of Ashenvale, and area rich with Naga, Hydra, and other nautically themed monstrosities. It has made me wonder what it would taste like to roast and eat a crab the size of a prize Rottweiler. On the long road westward I avoided getting killed by the elvish patrols at Astranaar and picked up a friend - a level 20 Tauren Druid whose name eludes me at the moment.
Which brings me to the idea of style - this guy, much like Omega and Resident, was fun. He was in it to explore, have a good time, and meet people that liked to play in a fun way. There is a definate strain of compulsion on WoW, people that take the game *way* too seriously. After all, short of deletion by yourself or Blizzard, there is no such thing as a total-loss consequence in WoW. Things are going to go wrong. You might misjudge the people you are playing with. But ultimately, much as in life, you keep your friendships with the "good guys" and minimize your involvement with the douchebags, peckerwoods, and assorted asshats that the world seems to produce is such splendid profusion and variety - the whole burgeoning assholery of Life.

Which finally loops me back to my Ragefire Canyon run. RFC, which sounds like Kentucky Fried Chicken, is an instance - a special location within the WoW geography. Unlike the commons, which is randomly repopulated with wandering monsters and open to the entire human-backed population of the real, instances are uniquely instantiated for individuals or specially constituted raiding parties. So, if I entered ragefire canyon alone, and then Ed and Wade formed a party and entered after me, we wouldn't run into each other inside the dungeon. I would be in there alone, and Ed and Wade would be inside their own copy, or instance, of the dungeon. Back outside, we would return to the commonality of Azeroth.

Once your raiding party is formed, you have to stick together - or they whole thing starts over. If you are running the instance at the appropriate level, you'll need to work together, each player's skills covering for the weaknesses of the the others. Over time, a sophisticated group of best practices has evolved, and you will hear the calls for these different roles go out over the common chat channels - "LF2M for RFC, need tank and healer." Or, translated into natural language, "Looking for two more players for our party to run Ragefire Canyon, we need a tank and a healer." A healer is obviously the team medic - priests are best, something akin to a cleric from the old AD&D days. But priests suck at combat. Shamans can also heal, and all classes have a limited ability to heal after combat with food and first aid. Having a potent and gameplay competent healer is one of the surest predictors of success for a raid. Much like the tank (which I'll elaborate on in the next paragraph), they need to cultivate good, real-time situational awareness, and there are aftermarket tools that can help them do just that.

Tanks are well armored fighters with the ability to absorb high levels of damage. One of the biggest jobs of a team healer is to keep healing and buffing the tank (buffing is casting beneficial magic on a player - increasing their armor, increasing their attack power, etc.). The most important thing that the tank does, however, is "drawing aggro." The concept of aggro is an important one in the game, and understanding and managing aggro is maybe one of the most prized qualities of a Warcraft colleague. Tanks use taunts (a kind of spell) and flashy high damage, high-threat attacks to keep themselves as the focus of monster aggression. Since they are highly armored and can take the heat, this is a comfortable place for them in the gameplay economy. But, has ranged deathdealers like Hunters and Mages pour on the firepower, monsters will want to rush out to attack their greatest threat, namely lightly armored Hunters and fun-sized mages with their chewy caramel centers. Thus, Tanks must ALSO maintain a very high degree of situational awarness, continually throwing fouls and drawing in monsterly ire.

This to me is one of the great lessons of Warcraft, this idea that the whole world behaves according to the logic of Sesame Street "Cooperation!" That the universe is a perfectly interlocking web of complimentary talents. And this is of course the great myth of a differentiated service economy, a perfect little place for everyone - some of us warm and nuturing clerics, some of us hearty, selfless warriors, some of us cool-headed archers, winging in long distance aid just in the nick of time, and all of us showered with gold and goodies. In warcraft, nobody has to work as a stockboy at WalMart.


This has wound up being more low-level than I wanted, but the point I am trying to move here is that the people you play with are very very important.

Crud, running out of time. I'll finish this tomorrow.

Labels: warcraft

Splintertree Post, Ashenvale, Western Continent of Kalimdor, Realm of Greymane

Yes, my life has come to this.

In an effort to discover what it is like to blog on a regular basis, just chunk messy, uncrafted prose right into an entry field on a web page, I have started a warcraft blog.

It started as many things have started in my life, as kind of participatory social experiment, anthropologist permanently in the field. The arrogance of this is, of course, that I am somehow detached from the idea of a massively parallel online role playing game. And that is just bullshit. I am a 36 year old man, but I some part of me is also permanently stuck in 18 year old Dungeons and Dragons mode.

What started as a sneek-and-peek is compulsion for me now - both as a twitchy teenager with an active social life and as a 36 year old who makes his living understanding the forces and movements of interactive consumer trends.

So, this is bullshit. Like most things where I am trying to cover for shame or nervousness I am intellectualizing this thing. And its crap because Warcraft is somehow an enactment of all those endless monster and orc killing sessions that unfolded in my mind during Ms. Slepski's Spanish class. The game is just fucking awesome.

The art direction is amazing. Everything is so beautifully rendered, from the paperdoll goodies to the ecosystems of the forests, beaches, and high plains. The game play is masterwork. And the social aspect - this is where my social scientist & critic antennae get vibrating. There are people in there, whole economies of friendship and war. There is real money and real man-hours loose inside that pocket world. That's what I want to understand.

My character is Suriqa, currently a level 22 female troll hunter. Hunters are awesome - sort of a Ranger of the North kind of character. Amazing damage per second with their bows, and the ability to tame beasts for use as a pet and companion -good for older losers like me who don't start the game with a built-in peer group of bloodthirsty teenage boys.

I was finishing up silverwing raid quest (with a real moron shaman that didn't seem to understand the idea of buffing and healing the DPS dude). I was headed back to splintertree to cash in the quest. For the neophyte at home, in Wow questgivers give various errands for the player to run, incentivized by a rewards of cash, experience points, and quest gear, like armor or weapons. Wow has a very deep quasi-free market structure, actions are always given a market incentive to entice players into taking part in the group narrative of the game - it is a fantasy world run by the Republicans. Which is great when your healthcare is provided by wandering bipedal buffalo who can heal you by driving enchanted tiki torches into the ground and lighting setting their enchanted, healing citronella candles alight.

I was back inside the gates of Splintertree, a military outpost that protects Orcish (Horde really) logging operations inside the contested forests of Ashenvale. These sort of realpolitik overnarratives are pretty common inside the geopolitics of the world. As I loped my tollish way towards the Inn, I was bushwhacked by a level 60 Night Elf druid in stealth stalking cat form. I was dead instantly.

I had to wander back from the graveyard as a ghost - reuniting with the shattered mortal coil of my character would bring me back to life. It usually take anywhere from 2-10 minutes of dumb ghostrunning to do this, a real pain in the ass.

Then I was killed again, by the same Night elf alliance bushwhacking son of a bitch.

This is not the interesting part of the story. The interesting part of the story is when I get on the general Splintertree chat channel (good old channel /1) and say "High level night elf druid in stealthed cat form, inside Splintertree wall."

A player, lets call them Moonlynx, whispered me to say, "Don't worry, we are on our way." What was on the way was a 5 man posse of level 60 Alliance hunters. They had been hunting this guy for hours, killing him repeatedly until he so bored that he eventually logged off. Apparently he had been harassing Splinter for 2 days, and this self organized irregular militia had had enough.

Moonlynx healed me up, and also became a friend, someone I can turn to for in-game advice.

I'll backtrack a little tomorrow, and talk about my first two instances (dungeons), and how different they were socially. Short version - Ragefire Canyon sucked, Wailing Caverns was awesome.

/SG

Labels: warcraft

Reviewed in this entry:

"Count Zero" (William Gibson)

They set a slamhound on Turner's trail in New Dehli, slotted to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street named Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystalized hexogene and flaked TNT.
He didn't see it coming. The last he saw of India was the pink stucco facade of a place called the Khush-Oil Hotel.
Because he had a good agent, he had a good contract. Because he had a good contract, he was in Singapore an hour after the explosion. Most of him, anyway. The Dutch surgeon liked to joke about that, how an unspecified percentage of Turner hadn't made it out of Palam International on that first flight and had to spend the night there in a shed, in a support vat.
It took the Dutchman and his team three months to put Turner together again. They cloned a square meter of skin for him, grew it on slabs of collagen and shark-cartilage polysaccharides. They bought eyes and genitals on the open market. The eyes were green.

"The eyes were green." The next time I teach a section of creative writing, I'm going to hand out (or blog for review) a collection of openings for a novels and short stories. If you don't have a strong opener, it doesn't matter how good the rest of the story is. There were a lot of people at Iowa that never seemed to get this. Near the top of my list will be the opening page of Count Zero. Along with Libra and Gravity's Rainbow, the 350-some word opener of Zero is just about one of the flat-fuck best opening moves you will ever come across, dear reader. Turner's whole world, the world that the reader is invited to join, it's all there on that single page. Like all good openings it's both a beautiful hologram of the work as a whole and the bright promise of things to come. Gibson uses a poetic economy of language, conflating neologisms and a precise, lapidary selection of high-context technical jargon with the perfectly mundane. The result is both vivid and opaque at the same time. Slamhound. Recrystalized hexogene. Brown legs. A stucco fronted pink hotel. Turner's world it real from page one. Lead with a good punch.

I just re-read the book this week, and experienced the rare pleasure of reading something I really loved in high-school, really loved in college and discovering that not only did I still love the book but that it had improved with age. It had "gotten better." Since then, I have become a much more sophisticated reader and writer (one would hope), my own faculties to appreciate Zero have deepened significantly in the twenty years since I first read it in high school. But there has be something there to appreciate, and Gibson delivers it page after page. I was struck with how many things he seemed to get right (sprawl, corporate power) and how many things he got wrong (nobody has a cellphone). Yet even in 1986, Gibson and the rest of the mirrorshades crowd would have told you they weren't in the prediction game. They were in the science-fiction-as-microwave-ethnography game, using an imaginary future to explore the forces shaping the present.

The overwhelming impression I am left with, however, is just how damn well it is written. Nobody can touch Gibson at the sentence level. He is as good as any writer working today. He has a writer's command of character and plot. He's a master. Sure, Sterling's steam grommet factory tour of plastic-spewing tailored bacteria, pogo stick drug smuggling robots, and lethal slingshot fights deep within the guts of an asteroid are the planetary gold standard for inventiveness. Rucker's chops as as an actual, working mathematician and scientist are unimpeachable. But Gibson writes.

A lot of hype and derision have been heaped on the cyberpunks. Some of it is deserved - they were arrogant in their self-stated mission to destroy science fiction's softy social-speculation ghetto. Gibson's stylistic accomplishments are one of the most potent satchel charges ever superglued to the gates of the Science Fiction Internment Camp. Of course, it's not arrogance if you manage to pull it off, and to some extent the cyberpunks did just that. Despite their punk anarchist tendencies, their efforts actually made SF acceptable as a "literary" genre. Along with the efforts of writers like James Ellroy, the "literary" label these days is more a question of chops than genre. Much of SF's ghettoization these days is its own fault. Gibson's prose style and total command of the novel form blew open the internment camp gates long ago.

Count Zero is important to me. It was always my favorite of the Sprawl series. Turner, the arguable protagonist of the book, grew up in what sounds like rural Georgia, and yet as an adult he was able to navigate the complicated, urban world of the future. I knew Gibson had grown up in Wytheville, Virginia, just down I-81 from Blacksburg. I felt there was something of Gibson in Turner, and maybe something of Turner in me. Turner was capable and cool in every situtation. He could deal with corporate types, but never gave up the country boy survival skills so many urbanites never seem to develop. To this day, when I pack my bag for a business trip, when I head out to do fieldwork or research, Turner's corporate mercenary is the mental model I turn to. Turner is a suit I can put on when things need to get done, another country boy that learned how to hack the city. In those pre-Web days, I clung to that one scrap of biography: a guy from a little town like Wytheville had grown up, moved to The City, and written one of my favorite books. Maybe I could do it too.

One morning during my senior year in high school, a classmate walked over to my desk and picked up the science fiction book I was reading. "You know what, Grant? You're a smart guy, but you fill your brain up with shit. This is shit. Try reading some Camus." This dude had been kicked out of Choate and a number of other fancy east coast boarding schools. He had travelled all over Europe and Asia. I'll admit it, I was intellectually intimidated by him, and harbored a sneaking suspicion that what he read was better than what I read.

He was wrong. Yes, a lot of what I read was crap. But I also read Gibson. Gibson is one of the people that taught me good writing.

Hail to the Count.

In the "Technology" section of this Saturday's NYT, there's an article on the rise of "true" web applications, or perhaps more appropriately, web-active desktop application replacements (wadars?). What's a wadar? It's not a web application like Orbitz or EBay. Plunk someone from 1991 down in front of Orbitz and the response would be "What the fuck is this?" But a wadar... plunk that same chrononaut down in front of Writely and they would say, "This? This is a really nice version of Word." Only after you had explained the networked collaboration, the fact that your files were being stored on some server out there in the white hot data cores of the matrix would an expression of gnostic horror would take control of their face.

Google has had the pieces for a totally networked "Office," for a while - Gmail, Google Spreadsheets, Google Calendar, Google Maps, and Writely. Writely hasn't been rolled out yet (the beta site has it rated at "62% beta," for what that's worth), but when it goes live there will be a suite of office software that is operating system independent and totally free - because the operating system is the web and revenue stream comes from context cued search. While this is tectonically, seismically, geologically important, it is not news. This was Larry Ellison of Oracle's pitch way back in the heady 90's. Thin clients. Massive networked data centers. Multiple modes of access and delivery. To which I say, "So what?" This kind of thing has been possible since the days of Nth tiered software architecture. Browser technology has finally caught up with the idea of ubiquitous data through ubiquitous computing. The important thing is that something much more significant has caught up - user expectations of experience.

"Web as Platform" has gone mainstream. When you ask a friend if you can check your email and they hand you their phone, WasP is mainstream. When turning in your essay to your composition professor means uploading it to Writely (apparently a killer app for the service), WasP is mainstream. All of this is significant because it means the needle has moved on user expectation of experience.

If the game experience is now the default frame of reference for an immersive, high-interactivity user experience, then the wadar experience is holding down the other end of the bench. Users are arriving at websites today expecting the sites to do something. Ask them questions to help configure a car. Search for product more powerfully. Aggregate and process content based on their preferences. They are expecting the site to work in certain ways: moving data and input asynchronously. Remembering what users want and do and reacting. Life is an active, metabolic state. Web sites do not "deliver" anything. Websites need to help users work, help them live. It is a concept which goes as far beyond providing static product information as a word processor supersedes a typewriter. Both work in words, but beyond the layout of the keyboard there is simply no comparison.

Sites that simply provide a "virtual brochure" experience are essentially Colonial Willamsburg for the late 1990's. Sites that provide rich media interfaces for galleries of photos and product information are more of the same, circa 2004. The future of user experience online looks like a chimeric hybrid between an Excel spreadsheet loaded with all the data you've ever touched and a robot knife fighting game, all delivered via Firefox... except that Firefox is now your operating system, except it isn't, because you're on your phone. Wait, you're on a Lenovo-clone made in Thailand with a Tupperware exterior, the whole thing ginned-out in a inkjet fabrication plant for $40, running on open source software that you are continually tuning to your personal tastes. It's all just a door to your data.

Where am I going with this? This is the state of the experience gap. Users expect a game with a cinematic-like high definition world, or they expect tools - newly powerful tools that are increasingly replacing the role of desktop applications. Both experiences carry with them an expectation of doing something. In World of Warcraft they are forming social networks and building personalities. They are creating a sense of community and accomplishment that may not exist in their analog lives. On Google Spreadsheets they are conducting business, crunching number in a free groupware environment. They are getting things done. That is their mindset when they open up their computer, users are not "online" so much as just living. They are not creative professionals and developers caught up in technologies and branding. They are doing.

With our brands and our microsites, what are we doing for them?

or how everything (and I do mean everything) is falling further and further

behind the accelerating hyperreality of video games.

I went to E3 last week and felt old. E3 is the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the biggest video game trade show in the industry. For the last several years its been held at the Los Angeles Convention Center. I'm going to get back to E3 in the specific and video games in general, but before we move on, I want to unpack "feeling old" a little, because it's important to the larger point I'd like this essay to make.

I've felt uncool before. Old is a similar feeling to uncool, because both involve feeling out-of-the-loop. There is a party going on that you weren't invited to, because.... why? Because you don't get it, your clothes are no longer of the mode, you don't understand what people mean when they say "I totally crushed it." You're just a little too slow.

This is ultimately an essay about speed - movement over time. Speed is always a function of time, and speed is of massive importance in a capitalist economy, especially a post-industrial information economy. We talk about computers in terms of processor speed. We talk about the collapsing speed of the news cycle. Much of the information we deal in our day-to-day lives is with is issued with an expiration date, its ability to confer value or competitive advantage is a function of its time criticality - its relationship to time is a goad to speed.

This was the first year at E3 where the product I saw exhibited was a radical departure from my mental model for "video game." What I saw was so cinematic, so photorealistic, so massively multiplayer that it bore as much relation to my old Atari 2600 as a cheetah bears to a trilobite. Sure, there's a line of relatedness, but the distance is so great that comparison is largely an academic exercise.

This has been a long time coming. Anyone that understands Moore's law could have guessed that these consumer-grade consoles were eventually going to get to this level of capability. But we need to put this capability into context. This was the year that I felt like we arrived at the watershed. Sure, video games are in the ascendant. That's not news. What is news is that video games still looked like video games last year. This year they looked like... nothing I'd ever seen before. If the past is another country, the future is a land filled with objects, means, systems and ways that nobody has ever seen before. It is the landscape of the unprecidented. Yes, video games are in the ascendent, but it is a question of scale. It is a question of speed. This is a media on an ascending trendline like an F-18 going into a balls-to-the-wall climb - two pounds of thrust for every pound of airplane, the sky turning outer-space black outside the canopy.

Context. It is not just that video games are amazing. It is that this was the first time that I saw them replacing... everything. Television is still our dominant media form, but in the developed world we already exist in a hybridized space where television is the one-way mass-market high-def delivery pipe that plugs people into the conversation-driven high-findability medium of the Internet. We are a post-literate society, that's not news. But I could feel the money at E3 this year. Bigger than publishing. Bigger than film. The thin edge of the wedge, to be sure, but it was there. The gap is getting bigger. And the rate of growth is accellerating at computer speeds. Think about that, cultural change at computer growth speeds. When Toffler spoke of "Future Shock", he predicted that our post-industrial society would eventually hit a change curve where we would inadvertently alter our own culture so quickly that we would wind up giving ourselves collective culture shock - just by walking out the door for a quart of milk. What he didn't guess was the mechanism, or that the biggest change would be at home, on our living room screens. What he didn't guess was the rate of change, the speed.

Context - video games are the new context of comparison. In my day job we build websites for the automotive industry. The experience gap that we have had to deal with to date is the space between television and a networked personal computer. That gap is effectively gone - we are pumping video to people, creating product-focused reality tv shows, offering things that could never be possible on conventional tv. Our star was on the rise.

But our best offering looks like shit compared to the games I saw. Yes, the game industry has billions of dollars more than we do. But guess what? Nobody cares. The consumers we are targeting will increasingly hold these massively immersive and interactive game environments as their gold standard, their default frame-of-reference. So what that our website has a $300k budget and your game has a $100m budget? Do you think that Joe and Judy America at home give a shit what my budget is? I still have to compete with your game if I want to sell a car. How am I going to do that? I'm not sure, but the result sure isn't going to look like the way we do it now, I can tell you that much. The answer may be not competing at all. Or that the game producers are the new television networks. Or that advertising and the whole of the culture industry as we know it is over.

In his book "The Curve of Binding Energy" John McPhee describes how the calculation of the CBE made nuclear weapons a theoretical possibility. By plotting the curve, physicists could know how much energy would be liberated in the detonation of a nuclear weapon. Once the trend of that curve was known, the arrival of a weapon orders-of-magnitude more powerful than anything in human history was only a matter of time.

The new curve is there for everyone to see. And as the aperture of the gap between video games and everything else widens, the light it will liberate will be blinding. Everything else will seem shabby and dull by comparison. The culture industry is in for a turbulent ride.

This isn't the end of the world. As Bruce Sterling likes to point out, the past is always with us, and the present is composted to make the future. When the bomb was born in July 1945, we had to learn to live with it.

Adjustments will need to be made. Fast, as in "with speed."

A tag search for "Precision Guided Munitions" on Flickr goes horribly wrong

---

Things find us. Mosquitoes, gossip, bombs. There is the information and the vessel that moves the information.

My buddy Wade sent me this email:

subj: Benjamin Rush, "Plans for a Peace-Office"

SF author Will Shetterly linked to this on his blog, saying, "The plan itself is a charming mix of the practical and 17th century enlightened Christian gonzo."

http://www.lewrockwell.com/vance/vance76.html

Gonzo, indeed! For example, his plans for redecorating the War Office - what would now of course be the DoD - are striking:

In the lobby of this office let there be painted representations of all the common military instruments of death, also human skulls, broken bones, unburied and putrefying dead bodies, hospitals crowded with sick and wounded soldiers, villages on fire, mothers in besieged towns eating the flesh of their children, ships sinking in the ocean, rivers dyed with blood, and extensive plains without a tree or fence, or any object, but the ruins of deserted farm houses.
Above this group of woeful figures, – let the following words be inserted, in red characters to represent human blood,

"NATIONAL GLORY."

Folks, this is strange stuff. The kind of semantic air pocket that knocks the coffee out of your styrofoam cup and burns your leg. I mean, one moment you are thinking about your morning team meeting, then next... this.

Let's retrace our steps through this garden of forking paths: Crazy Age of Enlightenment Framer, the suspended animation of print, then blogged by Messrs Rockwell and Shetterly, the link cut-and-pasted into a email to me from Wade.

Awoken from the death-sleep of a forgotten book, the molecule-slowing cold of deep space, roused by the heat and warmth of the Internets into some kind of hyperactive quickening of forwards, the strangeness of this Peace Office idea is like The Blob crawling out of a freshly crashed meteor in a cornfield. One brain out of six billion pulls a gene of information loose from the big goopy genome of a book, enzyme splices it into a rhinovirus, and then wipes it on the handrail to the subway. And the next thing you know you are imagining Donald Rumsfeld as the Secretary of Peace, blissed out from the electrode implanted in his substantia nigra, transformed into the lever-whacking lab monkey of American foreign policy.

Shocked awake by our collective You Tubed Flickrated Dr. Frankenstein consciousness, these informational chimeras shamble to their feet and hammer at the glass double doors of our mental shopping centers. They find us. And after that finding, the world is different.

---

This isn't Aeon Flux. It's just tagged that way. The meaning isn't destroyed, just stranged.

---

I typed Aeon Flux into flickr’s tag field – and somehow wound up with what seems to be a Nike ad.

Nike has its headquarters in Portland, which is a very strange town. So what exactly is going on here? The quantum noise of people thinking and sticking words on things. Nothing new there - poets call it "motion of mind." They call it that in MFA programs, in any case.

What is new is that when I stick a word on something, and I make a misstep, or a misstick, the missticking still stays stuck. And that slippage, that seismo-semiotic skip remains visable from the air. It is findable. And that mashup of findability and strangeness is new.

Neomorphisms get neologisms. I would like to propose a new word. Proposals are usually the start of something strange anyway, somebody asking you to do something you didn’t think of on your own. The word is RESE, which is a strange kind of word, an acronym:

Reverse Entropic Strangeness Effect

Strangeness is created, but it is never destroyed. And once it is created, it gets found. Once it's found, it grows ever more findable, as the neural network of our brains is wired (and continually rewiring itself) for strangeness.

Chris Anderson has written extensively about The Long Tail, the way the Internet has changed the traditional behavior of markets. To quote him directly:

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail.

In other words, niche markets thrive because demand can ALWAYS find supply. This is how the Long Tail disintermediates, disambiguates and other discombobulates traditional markets through the subversive power of findability. But I want to push that concept one step further. The Long Tail not only allows people to find strangeness, but in the finding it creates more strangeness.

Dadaism works by through combinatorial effect - by combining disparate elements in an unexpected way it subverts the significance of both. It is the power of Eisensteinian montage to create meaning turned on its ear. Or as Johnson characterized the metaphysical poets, "The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together."

The proliferation of life forms that evolutionary paleontologists call "The Cambrian Explosion" likely occurred because of the development of sexual reproduction - the deliberate combination of previously uncombined genes into totally new genomes. Information could suddenly shuffle its own deck, over and over again.

That's what we are in the middle of, right now, a long orgy of recombination, our information reproducing itself not in monastic cells of orthodox transcription, but in a writhing mess of brains, trained and untrained. A mess of information in transit and transition, with the only constants being change and strange.

The Long Tail isn't quite enough of a label for this phenomenon. Maybe we could call it the Long Flail, or the Strange Grail, which isn’t even an anagram, but does rhyme, and sounds very Golden Bough.

---

This is Aeon Flux. And a physical tag of Aeon. And the tag has been tagged ...

"That which does not kill us makes us… stranger."

As much as I love that line, I didn’t write it. Trevor Goodchild says it in the animated series Aeon Flux.

Have the Internets ushered in a brave new tomorrow of transparency, a real-world correlate to what economists and game theorists have called perfect information, the informational equivalent to the frictionless void of high school physics homework? I don't know. It's probably something like that.

Have the Internets unleashed a horrific avalanche of human depravity and avarice upon a previously insulated world? I know that I managed to make to thirty years of age before I knew what a furry was - and then the internet brought not only the idea into my head, but an actual furry into my living room. Guess what? I never wanted to know about the furry lifestyle ("lifestyle" - a favorite strangeness mixer), but once that box is opened and the cat is out of the bag and the metaphor is mixed, there not a damn thing you can do about it. It's a kind of entropy, an arrow for time based on the inalienable ratchet that while strangeness is created, it is never destroyed. Because strangeness is bulletproof. And look, I don't have a problem with furries. Ok, actually I do. I don't think I would have so much trouble with the concept if these people were better looking. Maybe if I looked like that, I would want to pretend I was a priapic dolphin covered with synthetic fur. It may be one of the last acceptable prejudices in the developed world. Enjoy it while it lasts.

I don't know if the Internet, if this ever-improving exchange of information has made the world a better place. I don't know if it has made it a worse place, or only helped us be awful faster and harder than we ever have before. But there is one thing I know for certain...

The Internet has made the world stranger.

Out here on the perimeter, there are no stars. And the Internet is only perimeter. Everything is an edge. The long edge.

The edge is where things get strange.

Stranger.

When I started blogging, I told myself that I was not going to blog from anger. I told myself that I was going to mostly write analysis about marketing, the internet, the automotive industry. The subjects would be edifying and the tone would be a kind of readable, Harpers-esque midbrow academic. A think tank of one.

But this is the dumbest fucking thing I have read in a long, long time:

"Senators to push for $100 gas rebate checks"

One hundred dollars. To every taxpayer in the US.

On the IRS website I learned that there were 130,423,626 individual filings in the US in 2003.

130,423,626 x 100 usd = 13,042,362,600. Go ahead and slide that decimal point over a couple of orders of magnitude.

That's THIRTEEN BILLION DOLLARS.

Not to mention the overhead to distribute the thirteen billion.

This bill is being sponsored by legislative superstars like Senators Rick Santorum (R- PA) and Ted Stevens (R-AK). I am further saddened to say that the whole enchilada is being quarterbacked by Chuck Grassley (R) of Iowa. Iowa. A state that is leading the nation in the production of biofuels. A state with a real stake in researching alternative energy.

What would 13 billion dollars worth of biofuel investment look like? What would that kind of investment in research and development or biofuel infrastructure look like for our nation? What would it look like for the good people of Iowa, who are supposedly Grassley's constituency?

What would 13 billion dollars worth of state of the art refining capacity look like in America? Recent studies suggest that fuel prices in California would be $.25 to $.50 cheaper if there was new refining capacity. But NIMBYism and a total lack of ANY MARKET INCENTIVE for the petrofuel industry to increase refining capacity have paralyzed the development of new refining infrastructure in this nation for the last twenty years.

What would 13 billion dollars worth of tax incentives for high-fuel economy passenger cars look like? What if the bonus was higher for hybrids and clean-diesel super-sippers build here in AMERICA, using american technology, burning american biofuel produced in american midwest, by american farmers? WITH NOT ONE SLIM DIME GOING IN TO THE POCKETS OF CORRUPT, DESPOTIC MIDDLE EASTERN OIL INTERESTS?

And why in the wide, wide world of sports - why for the love of all that is holy are we, the american taxpayer, paying for this Republican election-season faux-populist snowjob? Why are these supposed titans of the free market so happy to give our money away? Can't we let a little good old Adam Smith Invisible Hand pressure work on those prices some?

In marketing we have a little thumbnail rule called the $100 test:

If you would make more impact giving out the project budget as $100 cash incentives, the idea is no good. But good is such a dangerous term, because "good" is usually a value judgement grounded in relativities. Who is this $100 good for? It sure isn't good for us, the american taxpayer.

We elected these people. So let's keep our Bomb & Spend domestic and foreign policy. Let's have the foxes rob the henhouse one more time to stay in power, mortgage our collective future and security for their short term gain.

Energy Security is National Security.

The Midwest should always come before the Mideast.

Technorati Tags: automotive, government, oil war, peak oil, Bomb & Spend

A report from the frontlines of lifestyle event marketing

It is a beautiful, warm day in California's Great Central Valley. Fresno to be exact. I just ate a delicious lunch, which Toyota paid for with a $15 dollar gift certificate. I am about to take a Scion tC coupe for a test drive, something that I am mildly excited about. Paid agents, young good-looking people who are enthused about the Scion product have been paying me all kinds of loving high-touch attention for several minutes.

I am filled with a sense of well being for the Toyota Motor Corporation, USA.

----


It is a well known fact that the weak link in the automotive industry's purchase funnel is the dealership.
On the one hand this makes a huge amount of sense - advertising agencies and other creative enterprises hire great talent to create brand and look for the product.
The dealership hires a clown to hand out balloons and hot dogs. Their staff works on commission - every human that walks in the front door is nothing but a man-shaped silhouette, a target that needs to be knocked down to make the sale.

But this disconnect is the great paradox of the industry! Ultimately the automotive industry is about... cars.

And cars are design objects. The number one piece of terrain between an intender and their purchase is the *physicality* of the car, this artifact *designed* from sheet metal, foam, plastic, and software. If the intender has their deepest hopes and dreams affirmed during this critical first close encounter, then the hardest sales job, the emotional sales job is over. The car "feels" right. And takes the quotes off feels - because the feelings of the intender are real.

So why is the dealership the weakest link when it should be the strongest?

How do we get the wonderful physicality of cars into the decision space of automotive consumers, literally put the product back into the hands of our customers? Especially when the retail experience of a car dealership is something that seems totally out of synch with the rest of 21st century retail universe?

You bring the mountain to Mohammed. You make meeting the product a natural part of their life.

---




The Scion Drive Tour: Event Scene Analysis

Short version - this thing is a home run for Scion. It was a fun, hip, low key even that participants and passerby seemed to love.

Space: The Tower Distict
I'll be honest, I never expected to find this in Fresno. Microbreweries, cafes, bookstores... boho city. Interruptive advertising sucks when it's jamming up your episode of Desperate Housewives, but somehow it's delighful serendipity when spatially dropped into your lunch break. The location, right off the main drag, pulled in a lot of foot traffic.

Time: Lunch and Dinner
Set up next to a popular (and good) cafe, the Scion team was set up to grab both the lunch and the dinner rush.

The People: Good looking & Smart
I mean, this seems pretty obvious, but someone put a lot of effort into staffing this event. Smartly dressed in Diesel jeans and fitted Scion tshirts, the crew looked the part and knew their product inside out. They came off as smart, not pushy. And they were quietly efficient - this thing ran like a swiss watch.

The Approach: Gentle, Let the product do the talking
Nobody was out doing pushy "sign my petition" marketing. If you asked a question about what was happening, they were waiting to answer. If you asked what was going on, they explained how the test drives worked and asked if you wanted to try out a Scion (very nicely and sincerely, I might add).

How it worked:
Top to bottom, the whole thing took about 25 minutes, and that was with me asking a number of pain-in-the-ass undercover corporate operative questions. I timed other people and saw folks do it in as little as 10, with most people coming in around 15 or so minutes. This is a crucial metric - if you took 45 minutes or so to eat lunch on your lunch break, you could easily do the drive on a whim and still get back to the office without your absence becoming a major production. This is opportunity-based product-focused marketing at its smartest. The whole thing was a Scion-branded experience.

All I handed over was my drivers license. I signed a single form - and that was just a release. 30 seconds tops. I asked for the tC and the booth operator radioed back to the lot. When I got there Mike was waiting for me.





The Drive:
Mike asked if I wanted to drive, or be driven. I said I wanted to drive. The traffic control staffer even took our picture. And that was it - we were off.

Mike was my product specialist, and he was no temp agency flunky. He knew the product backwards and forwards - displacements, horsepower, gearbox, options, you name it. There was no a single question I asked that Mike didn't know the answer to. Seriously, this was the man that Toyota wanted working this show. He came off as very confident and friendly. All told we drove about 10 minutes, on a mix of urban arteries and residential roads.

Scion is a great product. Fit and finish was surprisingly good, especially considering that the Yaris comes off as such a piece of commodity-grade junk. This little coupe was a pistol to drive, and the Pioneer sound system was great. And for a vehicle that folks were climbing in and out of all day, it was immaculately clean. Prep was super.

I asked Mike about how they transported the cars from city to city - car carrier or motorcade.

"Oh, we convoy - get them out on the road."
"Do you do opportunity marketing, I mean, talk to people at rest stations and restaurants?" I asked.
"Oh yeah, we always answers people's questions, and in a group the cars make a real impression."

This event squeezes out branding and product experience value at every possible turn.

Impressions:
EVERYONE was having a great time at this event. It was very low key, but people left smiling. The mix of staff, location, a free lunch, and direct product interaction is an alchemical brew. I walked away with a great impression of this product, to the extent that I would consider the tC as a purchase if it only had a little more headroom (I'm tall).

Does a lifestyle event like this generate the numbers that a national media campaign does? No. but does it have the pricetag of national media? Also no. And this has to be, dollar for dollar, a phenomenal promotional value. BIG brand and undoubtable translation to sales. The people that were hit were *hit*. They walked away *knowing* Scion. They would talk about it when the got back to campus or the office.

The whole thing had a lightweight, almost guerilla feeling to it. These guys traveled light, but my guess is they create smart-bomb results - this is putting the marketing right on the target, but then letting the target opt-in.

Folks, this is the future. Spatially interruptive marketing that comes off as a surprise picnic, not something to be TiVoed past. How do you create awareness about the event? How scalable is this kind of marketing? Big questions, but ones that need to be answered in our Post-television, time-shifted world.


Additional commentary and complete photoset at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnny_n/sets/72057594107162390/

Technorati Tags: automotive, branding, event, fresno, scion, advertising

Headed north on CA99 on my way to Fresno I passed this and had to pull over to take a picture. It seemed a fitting inaugural.



I couldn't get off the freeway until the next exit, then made my way back along the frontage road. Working my way back, I passed this:



While I was taking pictures of the gas station sign and the old datsun, the old man that owned the car noticed me outside.

"I saw you taking pictures of the car," he said.
"Yessir, I did take a picture of it. Is that OK?" I said.
"Who do you work for?"
"I work for Nissan. We built that car of yours, I guess."
"Well, it's a good car," he said.
"Yeah, a buddy of mine had one just like it in high school. It was a great little car. I liked the color of yours so much I thought I'd get a picture of it," I said.
"I didn't know if maybe you wanted to buy it."
"Does it run?"
"Not right now, I got to rebuild the carb, you know?" he said.
"When's the last it run?" The conversation had rapidly shifted to two rural men talking cars.
"Well, maybe about three years ago? "
"Has it been in your front yard all that time?" I asked.
"Where else am I going to keep her? Hell, I'll give you the goddamned thing, sonny." Yes, he actually called me "sonny."
I thought about it.
"Naw, I can't bring home another problem like that," I said.
"Think about it. It's a good car when it runs."

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