This is what we all need. How to choose your work/ partner/new venture/PhD thesis/husband/wife/bandmate/major?

What do you want to tend to in an ongoing way?

We don’t need constant initiation. What will thrive out there and in you is what you feed and care for.

This is what I tell myself. And I am someone who writes jokes and epigrams so that I don’t have to finish and nurture each idea (to avoid overwhelm).

Business has turned the corner form “masculine” to “feminine.”

The intention we bring to our acts, affects the outcome of the acts.
The Net and the apps and creative acts that make it grow have been built, for the most part, out of a desire to connect and a desire for open-ness, which speeds genuine connection.

Any geek knows how to feel validated by others and even themselves by fixing problems. It’s a way to make ones head useful and feel present and appreciated by those for whom you solve problems. But any validation and sense of self worth/valuation or (company valuation) built on that alone will lead to an empty looping (something familiar to any geek who has felt befriended only for their laptop tech support skils).

This empty looping possibility is just as true for any organization or system. What makes the connection really genuine and ore self-sustaining is when it is the intentions that connect, not merely the acts.

The best thing about the geeks, the artists, the children or anyone who has maintained their genuine sincerity (with which we are all born) is that they live truly. And the connections made with an honest and vulnerably sincere person and their sincere acts don’t have to be fed by constant problem solving.

I see this on a huge level embodied on the Net. Only geeks would have built it. Not because the have the mad coding skills, but because they wanted to connect as they are with others and the temerity to *assume* other want to as well. This motivatation drives how the Net is being built and which structures, including those operating as businesses work on those structures.

So we have the Net, the digital era, a physical manifestation of the growing web of connection that is wrapping closer inside of us and or thoughts and our questions and our minds and hearts. It is helping shrink the earth like any empire before it.

It is the sincerity that truly links us. All 6.6 billion of us. We all came into this world with it.

To link to the show, you can use this scooby dooby thing:

<a href=”http://heathergold.com/”><img src=’http://subvert.com/media/images/hgshowsxsw.jpg’ with=’136′ height=’48’ alt=’Heather Gold Show’></a>

Here is the RSVP page. What a 1999 web page sentence.

I’ll be vlogging + podcasting the thing as soon as editing can happen. Oh magical Internet, why can’t you make editing happen so much more easily?

SXSWi has so many people this year, there are lineups at things. Lineups I tell you.

We’ll be at The Ritz on the 6th Street strip on Monday March the 12th. 7-8:30 with lots of great drinks and fun.

Make a digital note of it!

Democrat Gavin Newsom has just admitted an affair with the wife of one of his aides (his re-election campaign . He’s Mayor of San Francisco. I figure he’s bummed that his ex-wife, former lingerie mode, turned DA has now turned Fox News personality.

It took Bill Clinton to run for the White House before he admitted an affair.

Soon the affairs will be listed in that little book we get when you go to the polls, and we can vote for the person with the best affairs.

The Heather Gold Show: Outside In

Friday January 12th, 2007

Bradley Horowitz‘s name kept popping up. Some programmers at Songbird raved about him, “He bought all the cool shit at Yahoo.” By that they meant: flickr, upcoming and other sundry “Web 2.0” companies that make great stuff.

As we discussed in the show, he’s like an A+R guy that the indie musicians trust. He has real spirit, which is why I thought he’d make a great guest. The passion he wanted to discuss was hacking and the sublime that comes from subverting systems for their own good. Bradley create Yahoo Hack Day. He’s an insider that got other insider’s to listen to outsiders: bringing hackers to camp on Yahoo’s lawn and bring Beck to play for them all. Super cool outside coming in. I thought so, until Anil let me know the other day about Beck’s Scientology, a “religion” that’s so insider, you have to pay to belong.

Harmon Leon is an outsider who stays an outsider by geing a fake insider. He read a piece about infiltrating a Benny Hinn faith healing hoping for release from his “bird flu” and being hurled to the ground by staffers as Benny rebuked the demons in him.

<a href=”http://www.culturalodyssey.org”>Rhodessa Jones</a> helps women who are outsiders (on the “inside,” aka prison) transform themselves through theatre. She defied cliche liberal ideas by asserting the need for prison, “some people belong in prison, okay?”

Bradley and Rhodessa were clear on one central truth. The way to connect and cross boundaries from outside in, is to really listen to people with regard. Harmon’s technique for gaining the trust of groups from the Christian right to the young Republicans? “I just parrot back to them their own beliefs.” People are happy to look f=no further.

Highlights and Links

• Harmon Leon – first infiltrated on a dare to himself that he had to get and lose a job within 3 hours, all the while working in a bad fake foreign accent. It took many efforts to get the fast food place to fire him. The clincher was shoving a vanilla shake and fries in his mouth, and spewing it on the floor by customers. “Ich been sick.”
• Rhodessa’s story about working in a peep show in early 1970’s San Francisco and recognizing ptron’s Richard Pryor and jazz great Mose Allison. She was playing Mose’s music and when he approached her she recognized him, and he took off.
• Rhodessa Jones’ Medea Project

daily epigram

This occurred to me while I was attending Meshforum 2006. There were lots of different presentations full of excited hope about viewing the World and Everything In It (including business) As Networks.

Here’s what I got from feminism (and the Sisterhood from the shul in my small town on Niagara Falls) long before Web 2.0 starting pushing these truths into a business reality that seems connected enough to butch stuff like routers and executive summaries to feel real and important to a whole new group of people.

• deep connection comes through small networks of people

• discussion is action

• gossip builds social bonds and keeps local news alive

• publicallly acknowleding private truth is transformative

>this is proceeded by witnessing your own truth which has been previously disbelieved in public

• an integration of both “male and female” roles is better for the individual and general good. It is evolution and eventually removes the ghettoization of functionality (so 19th century). Feeling (“feminine”, expressing (with feeling = “feminine”, with Powerpointing = “masculine”) and distributing (“via hierarchy = “masculine, via distributed network = “feminine”)
• If you come to an agenda with an issue, say so.

> Ok, so this used to look like “speaking as a differently-abled, lactose-intolerant, Latina …” But it’s exactly the principle that Scoble and others use to keep credibility in their business blogging

“People look to adult movies for personal contact, and yet they’re still not getting it. HD lets them see a little bit more of the girl.”

– porn director Robby D. in today’s NYTimes

I don’t think that HD is going to give porn viewers personal contact. Nor are girls going to give them adult entertainment. Why go to a hardware store to buy bread?

(Thanks to Liz B for the lovely phrase)