taste

authority’s last trick

the point

truth

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

1/12/07: Heather conversates with creator of Yahoo Hack Day Bradley Horowitz, undercover satirist Harmon Leon, theatrical midwife Rhodesa Jones, Founder of The Medea Project: Theatre for Incarcerated Women and the people formerly known as the audience.

What allows people access to each other and places that they’d never otherwise go? What is gained by the outside/in perspective?

Listen to the mp3 of the entire show (90 min)

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