Blogcomment record: "Julian Comstock" UPDATED

Paul Kinkaid reviewed Robert Charles Wilson's Julian Comstock.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden wondered if they read the same book. My comments:

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I seem to have read the book pretty much the way DaveL@70 did, and the idea that Julian's homosexuality was "unnecessary" is boggling to me.

However, speaking of marked and unmarked states:

I am surprised that no-one has mentioned the unmarked elephant in this state room.
Am I the only reader who noticed [SPOILER! PROCEED WITH CAUTION! YOU MAY WANT TO FIGURE THIS OUT FOR YOURSELF DURING YOUR FIRST READING!]













that the narrator, his wife, and Julian's lover are all what we would call "black", but that it's apparently without "ethnic" significance? It is, IMHO, a very marked unmarkness, a joke Wilson is pulling on the readers, to put a lot of black characters (not just one, as in Left Hand of Darkness, but a *lot*) into a story and see if anyone notices.

The fact that Paul Kinkaid was reminded of the US Civil War but didn't see the black people strikes me as hilariously revealing, but in fact when I skimmed through a bunch of reviews *no-one* seems to have noticed -- even though this is set in a North America in which *slavery* has come back.

But then, I haven't come across anyone who's noticed that the ruling Church in Julian Comstock already exists, which is why Wilson put its headquarters in Colorado Springs. Or that the back-to-the-1880s political philosophy they use is actually taken directly from a certain trend in modern libertarians.

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Chris Gerrib @ 77:

Actually, there are crumbs throughout the book indicating that the narrator and various other major characters are black. In particular, Wilson uses "tightly-curled" to describe what we'd call "black" hair. He's careful not to say "nappy", because he doesn't want the signal to be overt, he's *inclueing* the characters' race.

It's also not terribly relevant.

... um. You realize, don't you, that this parallels what Kincaid says about Julian's homosexuality. Indeed, I think one of the functions of homosexuality in the novel is to be the text while race is the subtext -- flipping the foreground/background in actual 19thC novels, where race could be text but sexuality had to be subtext.

No one else has spoken up, so I don't know if anyone here besides me perceived what Wilson does with race. I can't figure out which prospect boggles me more: that his clues were too subtle even for this group of very insightful readers, or that insightful readers noticed and thought it was trivial.

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PNH @ 108:

Actually, it's more explicit than that: as Jeff Sharlet pointed out years ago, many important fundamentalist (and Dominionist) organizations have concentrated in Colorado Springs *precisely* in the hope that they can infiltrate/evangelize the Air Force. Focus on the Family is there, as is the New Life megachurch. In many ways, Colorado Springs already *is* the headquarters of Dominionism.

And yes, that's New Life Church as in "Ted Haggard", and that's why Julian Comstock's homosexuality is *crucial* to the story IMHO. Besides the Classic allusion, it's part of how Wilson shows that the tragedy of his future world is built from currently available ingredients.

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OK, through the magic of Amazon.com, here are the descriptions:

Calyxa:

a pink and radiant face, and large eyes whose color I could not at this distance discern, although I imagined them (correctly, as it turned out) to be a handsome chestnut-brown; and a crown of hair that coiled list a vast collation of ebony springs, the light behind her making a spectacular Halo of it.

Now, I admit that "pink" is suggestive of what we'd call a white woman -- but it's not clear if he's talking about someone like Beyonce, either. The hair, IMHO, is the crucial element in Wilson's descriptions of "black" characters, and when I read this I thought, "she's got a 'fro!" Throughout the book, Calyxa's hair is described as "coiled" (if not "spring-loaded"), and in the Epilogue when their daughter Flaxie is described:

her hair is as glossy and dark and tightly coiled as her mother's was.

Now, for Magnus Stepney, Julian's lover, the description is unmistakable:

lustrously dark skin and wiry hair.

While searching for these citations, I also came across the first description of Lymon Pugh, who has an "unruly knot of black hair" under his cap, and I wonder whether he, too, is supposed to be black ... or not.

Like all good humorous novelists, I think the author spent some time laughing at *us*, the readers.

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Jo Walton@179:

I'm very glad to hear that you noticed, because I remember looking up your review after I'd finally gotten around to reading the book, and was both boggled and distressed that you seemed to have missed the way Wilson marks (or rather un-marks) race. I'm relieved to know that I can still trust your powers of observation, but distressed that you didn't feel you could talk about what you observed in a way that wouldn't be misconstrued.

The fact that issues of gender, race, inclusion, and all that are under *constant* discussion on livejournal/dreamwidth made it easy for me to notice what Wilson does, but it also made it easy for me to think and talk about it.

I was hoping that someone in this discussion would know if Wilson has talked/written about the way he handles race in "Julian Comstock". I basically agree with Terry @242: I think the idea that slavery could come back to North America and *not* have anything to do with race is preposterous. But writers are allowed one preposterous assumption per book, and I'm willing to go along with this one.

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Marilee @255:

I completely disagree. I think Wilson is describing this kind of hairstyle, not sausage curls.

Remember, Calyxa's hair is like a *halo* -- that certainly sounds like a 'fro. And black african hair definitely coils naturally -- each hair is like a little slinky.

In general, too, sausage curls are a highly artificial, high-maintenance hairstyle, and it seems clear to me that, throughout, the narrator is talking about Calyxa's natural hair, which her daughter inherits.

But I'm not sure if I would have come to the same conclusion about Calyxa's appearence based on this passage, except that I was looking for other unmarked black people once I noticed what Wilson did with the narrator.

Violence, Libertarianism, Social Connection

Jim MacDonald has a deeply moving and often enraging series of posts up about Carl Drega, who went on a rampage and killed four people in their town, 11 years ago.

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The Red Army Faction and the Baader-Meinhof gang were *certainly* leftists. I think it's significant, though, that I can't think of an example of a violent leftist movement in Europe or North America since the 70s.

Something *changed*, starting no later than the early 70s, to make violence feel intrinsically "conservative", and peace/non-violence seem "liberal". I don't think this alignment is dictated by logic: to be conservative is to want to conserve something, to support some kind of status quo, and violence *should* be a particularly poor match for stability. There *should* be a conservative peace movement -- but we observe that there isn't one.

I have my suspicions about what's driving this dynamic, but I'm going to wait to see what other people think, first.

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David Manheim @30:

Either I don't understand you or I don't agree with you, or both.

Modern political & economic conservatism are indeed conservative, because they want to keep the distribution of money & power the way it already is: with large corporations and wealthy individuals. Keeping the rich rich is *the* bedrock value of economic conservatives; keeping power in the hands of the powerful is *the* goal of political conservatives.

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Michael Turyn @19: Yes, exactly. So very well put.

IMHO libertarians are people who don't believe humans are social animals. In the cases of Drega and VS, this goes along with full-blown sociopathology: an inability to act or *feel* like a social animal.

Jorg @17: Your insight is extremely useful.

My theory, which is mine: Historically, it has been exceptionally easy for people in the US to detach themselves from networks where others know them personally, yet to be able to depend on impersonal, industrial/capitalist networks for survival. This doesn't *feel* like depending on other people, so it's easy to think you're self-reliant and independent, beholden to no man.

Speaking as an biologist, human sociality is not all that deep, evolutionarily speaking. Some sociopathology is surely a matter of a basic neuro-biological lack, a problem in the brain. But it can also be matter of upbringing or habit, so that neurologically normal people lose or never develop the mental skill of seeing things from another's POV.

It's not coicidence, IMHO, that Drega was a "summer person", whose only connection to the community was property. The connections Jim and Debra have to the town and the area are far deeper, more complex, more personal and (I do not use this word casually) natural. If things like this happen more often than they used to, more often in the US than in Europe, or more often in some parts of the US than the rest, it's IMHO these are places because sociopathic behavior is more normal, where it's within the range of what is acceptable.

I don't think this is unconnected to the well-known fact that if corporations were humans (not just legal persons), they would be sociopaths.

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Nancy @44:

You seem to be taking the point of view that libertarians are the problem and corporations are the problem.

No. I'm saying that humans become well-socialized in societies where you interact with a few hundred or thousand other people over the course of a life, so each relationship has personal context and depth. In a small-scale, "natural" society like that, sociopathic behavior will be rare, because people who can't be trusted will starve.

In a modern society, we have connections to many many more people -- not just because we see more people, but through the exchange of goods and money. Something as basic to my life as electricity requires the coordinated efforts of many thousands of people -- but my relationship to each of those people is extremely weak.

It's like -- imagine my hunter-gatherer ancestor, anchored to other people by a web of 100 ropes, each one strong and obvious. I, on the other hand, am in a web of 10 million strands, most of which are so fine as to be invisible. Collectively, my web is thicker and more gripping than hers -- she could usually make her own clothes and gather enough food for survival -- but it's harder to see. And libertarians IMHO are people who have a hard time seeing it.

Free speech and the Jerkosphere

There's been a wank at BoingBoing, and TNH posts about one of the more accurate takes. My comments don't refer to the wank directly (it's *wank*), but are about free speech and online communities in general:

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Phil@25: Neither option is necessarily "better" than the other.

hmm. I disagree, and I think that in this case quality is actually measurable -- at least in theory.

It's my observation -- and not just mine -- that what you call "the cut & thrust" is especially off-putting to woman, not least because of the way guys will casually insult each other with gendered language. I think this is co-extensive with the real problems with misogyny in tech workplaces.

Now, IIRC if you have a group of people with men and women talking, when women make more than 30% of the comments people (M & F) say that the women are talking "all the time". In other words, unless you have the gut (though mistaken) feeling that the women in your group are talking "all the time", you're not hearing women's voices. And any space that's supposed to be for "free speech" but where only some people's speech is free ... isn't.

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I am pleasantly surprised to hear that MeFi has been discussing the "boyspace" issue. I tend to think of it as the "Jerkosphere" problem, because it's not really about anything particularly XY-like IMHO, it's a part of the general culture that is coded masculine and tends to be amplified online. But holy cats, there are certainly some mostly-female online spaces that are full-fledged parts of the Jerkosphere.

I guess I want to break the association between "acting like a boy" and "acting like a jerk". You can have boyspaces that are not part of the Jerkosphere -- and women shouldn't get complacent, because as the Law of Proctouniversality says, "There's a little asshole in all of us."

For me, though, MeFi will have to change a lot before I stop thinking of it as on the edge of the Jerkosphere.

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alsafi @101: I don't think being deliberately insulting is acceptable discourse or behavior, here or elsewhere.

Whether you consider it acceptable or not, it is empirically true that "being deliberately insulting" *is* considered acceptable in many parts of the Internet and in parts of society as a whole, and if you're witty or transgressive enough it's even considered admirable, a valuable social coin. Saying "this is not acceptable" doesn't work, when the behavior clearly *is* acceptable some of the time.

Leah's story @104 is exactly why I talk about the Jerkosphere, not "boyspace". The problem isn't boys, it's *humans* -- and, as Leah's story illustrates, women have often been trained to be extremely high-level social manipulators. If the MeFi-ers (??) think of their Jerkosphere problem as a "boy" problem, that's a misdiagnosis IMHO.

language hat @111 : I frankly have no idea why you say to Leah, "as for free speech, we'll have to agree to disagree". Leah presented evidence about how "free speech" can lead to unfreedom; what evidence are you presenting to the contrary? Just FYI, in my experience "we'll have to agree to disagree" is a line used by people who are feeling overwhelmed and put upon by the weight of evidence on the other side of an argument.

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albatross @143:
In particular, the only way to stop adolescent males of any age from having the "look at the hooters on that one" or "damn, what a fat cow" sorts of discussions is to ban that sort of discussions from the internet.

Because boys will be boys? Nope, sorry, this argument is made, as they say, of FAIL -- not to mention privilege, double standards, and misogyny.

The way to stop that sort of discussion is to *not accept it* -- for other men, in particular, to say, "no, this is not funny; no, I do not think that way; no, being a jerk does not make you one of the boys, it makes you a jerk."

My best solution is to patronize nice coffee shops, and avoid biker bars.

In Real Life, this is the kind of widely-accepted attitude that leads to women being raped in biker bars -- and then blamed, because what did she expect, asking for a drink in a place like that?

The problem is not that some people say things online that make me uncomfortable or unhappy, the problem is that they make me *unsafe*.

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*staggers in, panting* I made it to the end of the comments posted since the last time I commented! So now I get to do it again! But it'll be the Reader's Digest Condensed Comments.

My opinion, which is mine:

Whoever said above that "free speech" is a poor term to use is IMHO right. My experience is that lightly-moderated, adult fora like ML or Obsidian Wings or Slacktivist or parts of livejournal (esp. many of those likely to be linked from the metafandom community) have the truly freest speech on the Tubes, much free-er than Central Jerkotopia, even though "free speech! free speech!" is much more of a rallying cry in the latter fora.

Part of what I am doing in using the term Jerkosphere is to emphasize that flagrant assholery is part of a whole flowing culture or pattern of behavior, found on many sites and cropping up sporadically all over.

Do the rest of you-all feel that you instinctively recognize what I mean by The Jerkosphere? Does it convey a meaning?

When I eat made chocolates, I get them freshly-made from Munson's if possible. If I'm buy choc for cooking or life-sustaining munching, it's Ghirardelli. hmm. The Guy is heading thataway for the Fencing Nationals -- what should he bring back as loot? Any suggestions?

Standards of Beauty

Posted at Making Light, in Indistinguishable from Parody, which is mostly about troll identification.

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Slight tangent: am I right in surmising that the singles scene is one of the reasons why the standard of beauty in the US is becoming the porn star?

I believe you are incorrect. I have seen what you're talking about, and I think it's due to the incredible ease of access to porn itself. I can't remember who pointed out (in a livejournal discussion, but that's all I recall) that these days the average 20-year-old man has seen far, *far* more women in porn than he has seen naked women in real life. His eyes are used to them, in a way that he won't be used to actual naked women.

What I noticed starting a few years ago is that young men stress thinness in young women much more than they used to. I've had a young man argue with me that male preference for slender women is "hard-wired", and that there must have been evolutionary change since the days of Renoir (!), because back then guys seemed to like fatties. *head desk*

When I was a young 'un in the 70s, the young men generally assured us young women that models & movie stars were *not* all that attractive to them, because they were much too thin -- and flat-chested, which made their assurances quite believable.

In recent years, though, the style in porn and in the rest of the entertainment industry has been for young women to be skinny but have breast implants, and this has gone along with the dissemination of free porn online. I think both men & women have gotten used to seeing skinny+implants women as the standard of sexy.

Heads They Win; Farming

I left a comment at echidne of the snakes:

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from What’s $34 Billion on Wall Street? [NYT, Jan 27 '08]

In any other industry, Mr. Kim and Mr. Maheras would be pariahs. But in the looking-glass world of Wall Street, they — and others like them — are hot properties. The two executives are well on their way to reviving their careers, even as global markets shudder at the prospect that Merrill and Citigroup may report further subprime losses in the coming months.

... The quick comebacks of these executives stand in stark contrast to the plight of the hundreds of investment bankers who have received pink slips in the last two weeks. They also illuminate a peculiar aspect of Wall Street’s own version of a class divide.

... To some extent, it is personal: Mr. Kim and Mr. Maheras have a web of relationships with Wall Street’s top executives.

I don't see anything "peculiar" about this class divide at all. This is what a ruling class looks like: if you're on the inside, your friends help each other loot & pillage when times are good -- and cut back to just looting when times are bad.

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also posted at Making Light, Heads they win, tails we lose. With much other discussion:

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It looks like one of the oldest games of all: It's Not What You Know, It's Who You Know. The complete decoupling of risk and reward is not a bug in this game, it's a *feature*. For the winners, at least.

I'm not sure what kind of -cracy this is. Plutocracy? Aristocracy? BigGuycracy? In any event, it's not "a peculiar version of a class divide", it's the same old class divide made especially stark.

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albatross @ 215:
I think you'd find it hard to make an argument for subsidizing small farmers (being pushed out of the market by economic forces) that didn't also apply to all kinds of other businesses

The traditional argument is that food is special because everyone needs food to *live*, so (a) monopolies are especially dangerous, and (b) letting the supply be controlled by other countries is especially dangerous.

In the case of France, at least, one can see an additional consequence of small-farm supports: French food. Most food ingredients just aren't as tasty when they've been mass-produced and travelled hundreds or thousands of miles. To get French food, you need local ingredients, and that's part of what French agricultural policy has gotten them.

Of course, this is doubly untrue in the US, where (a) people historically don't care how the food tastes, and (b) ag policy supports the food that travels best (grains, sugar, butter). But the local harvest idea really does mean something.

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PJ Evans @219:

One of the great benefits of Community Supported Agriculture is that the farmer gets the money in the spring, when ze needs it, and then the risk that a particular crop will fail gets spread across all the members, not just dumped on the farmer. I've been a CSA member for about 15 years, and you really get an old-fashioned attitude toward the weather -- it's *personal* when an early frost means no more basil, or too much rain at the wrong time means no carrots this year.

I strongly recommend this directory to find a CSA near you -- though shares are mostly gone for the 2008 season as the popularity of "eating locally" increases.

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Greg @ 234:

It really, really depends on what they're farming and where. I'm not far from Princeton, NJ, and I know a number of people who have successfully gone into "boutique" farming from a non-farm background. The CSA has interns and apprentices every year. A bunch of my middle-schoolers friends are in 4H, just like the farm kids were when I was growing up -- but these aren't farm kids, they're not born into farming -- they're learning it just as the kids on the robotics team are learning engineering, or the kids in woodworking classes are learning that trade.

It's definitely the organic farmers who are the real cutting edge, here: they're developing a model of farming as a *career*, not a birth right (or curse).

As PJ says, it works for unprocessed fruits & veg, and for high-value items like organic dairy products and wine. And it also works here because the land is so valuable that farming *has* to concentrate on high-value items -- though there's some talk about people experimenting with field corn this year.

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Koske @ 261:

My thinking is that many of these O/N/L businesses and products come closer to reflecting the actual costs of the food

That is certainly my observation. The organic vegetables I get from my CSA actually cost no more in $$ than buying the same thing in "non-organic" form at the grocery store, and are *much* cheaper than buying the organic equivalent at the natural food store.

Basically, I do not spend more money by getting food from the CSA, but the quality is enormously higher. They're not just tomatoes, they're a religious experience.

albatross @260:
As I said above, farming is not-just-a-business because we need food to *live*, in way that we don't need hardware stores.

I live literally next door to the CSA where I get my food. It is enormously easier for me to put up with the local externalities -- tractor noise at odd hours, some pretty organic smells from time to time -- because I know that I'm not living next to a mere business of which I happen to be a customer, but a source of my physical existence. Even so, I wouldn't be nearly as tolerant of a non-organic farm, because the externality of breathing pesticides & herbicides would be too high.

Greg @236:

One thing about "boutique" farms is that, to be viable, they need to grow an enormously greater range of crops than the farms you grew up with probably did. The CSA farm (less than 100 acres) where I get my veg grows 40 different crops, each in multiple varieties (there must be 30+ different kinds each of tomatoes and peppers). The orchard (200 acres) where I get most of my fruit grows 30 varieties each of apples and peaches, along with 20 other crops.

This is clearly enormously inefficient by agribusiness standards -- but it buffers the farmers against the random factors that always make agriculture precarious. That buffering is what agricultural subsidies are supposed to be *for*, so in many ways I'm paying the subsidies for my food upfront -- by getting only what they are able to grow despite their inefficiency.

The way I get my food has an "anti-capitalist" feel, because it involves actual human relationships, not just the exchange of money. But this discussion has made me see that a lot of what we see as part of capitalism is passing the buck on externalities. What I'm experiencing is not really romanticism, it's "not escaping the externalities".

Lurkers support us in email

I've been thinking about the Myspace suicide hounding and reading the discussion at Making Light. Oddly, no-one at ML knows of a similar case in the Nerd World.*

This is surprising, because the Nerd World *built* the Internet and includes most of the early adopters. The Nerd World went online earlier, spends more time here, and has a longer track record with most of the up- and down-sides.

And it's not because everyone in the Nerd World is so nice that they would never, ever do anything really horrible and nasty. Over the years Nerd historians have seen elaborate displays of sock-puppetry, emotional scamming, financial shenanigans, marriages being deliberately broken up, people's jobs being threatened or even lost, stalking both online and in the flesh, re-enactment of seventh grade only with more swear words, and every degree of drama, posturing, assholery, and sociopathology.

And it's not for lack of people who are emotionally vulnerable or clinically depressed, either. The rate of depression or psychiatric illness cannot be less in Nerd World than in the general population and may well be more, because Nerd World tilts toward people with unusual minds. Nerd World suicides are not common, but they do occur -- no-one is questioning that.

The question is, has anyone been hounded toward suicide? and if not, why not? What protective factors have operated in the Nerd World, and how can they be translated outside it?

I know of three suicides among online Nerd World inhabitants within the past 5 years (I'm sure the actual number is higher, these are just the people that I have some info about through word of pixel). It occurs to me that all these cases were pretty much the opposite of poor Megan Meier. Far from being hounded or isolated online, these people committed suicide despite considerable and even heroic efforts on the part of their online friends. This doesn't mean their efforts were pointless, just that there's a limit to how much you can help someone with life-threatening depression if you're not their doctor.

I think, then, that there's some evidence -- or at least a solid possibility -- that something in Nerd World culture is preventing the absolute worst sort of online bullying, or protecting people against it when it starts.

I can come up with a long list of factors, but I think the most important is: Lurkers support us in email. In Nerd World you're never totally cut off. Even if you're in the wrong, even if you're batshit insane, even if you're a plagiarist (though that one's really pushing it) there will be people on your side. And if you're hurt, if you're unhappy, if you've said something really stupid and don't know how to apologize, there will be people who will still communicate with you, who will tell you it's not the end of the world.

The other factors:

2. Separation from RL contacts & environments. The Nerd World tends to be organized by interest, not physical location, so it's easier to see that whatever part of your life is sucking right now isn't your whole life.

3. Pseudonymity. It's not just that the Nerd world has longer experience with RL/online conflcits and how useful a pseud can be, though there is that. It's also that one of the foundational elements in the Nerd World is *pretending*. This includes still loving to play dress-up -- the SCA is one of the older, core communities of the Nerd World.

4. Mixed-age. Compared to places like Facebook, and to many RL social groupings, the Nerd World is a place where teens, twenties, and older adults can interact freely. In my experience, this means that it's easier for a young, hormonally-challenged person to see that hir problems will not last forever. It's also easier for us crones & codgers to give advice that a kid will actually listen to, because we have no power over their lives.

Although the larger society is very concerned (even hysterical) about the possibility that youngsters will be seduced by creepy older people online, I haven't known that to happen in the Nerd World. This may be because --

5. Interactions tend to be many-to-many, so people monitor each other's behavior. I think this may be part of the reason Making Light is such a successful blog, and DailyKos such a powerful online community.

What do you think?

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*For purposes of this discussion, the Nerd World is the set of people ranging (with much overlap) from mostly-male computer geeks through science fiction fandom to media fandom and mostly-female fanficdom.

Spin, Internet PR, Corporate Culture, and Genesis 3

Teresa Nielsen Hayden has a great summary up of how to deal with internet scandals and other PR disasters: Talk, Don't Spin. My comments, in the midst of a discussion with many useful examples of the Right Way and the Wrong Way to run companies & projects:

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But why don't they *listen*?!? Seriously, is there something in the culture of large institutions, corporate or otherwise, that makes them forget or ignore your teachings?

It reminds me of how David Pogue, NYT Technology columnist (not a low-profile guy) has been telling cell phone companies for *years* that:

the way to dominate the cellphone industry isn’t taking out more ads on billboards and newspapers. It’s creating a service that’s so good, the customers love you, recommend you and (here’s the big one) don’t leave you at the first opportunity.

In other words: reasonable service + accurate billing = world domination. It shouldn't be that hard to do, so what's stopping them?

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we have this culture in which admitting a mistake is a sign of weakness

Everyone says this is so, but I don't see it. I need examples of public/corporate figures who got into *more* trouble by admitting mistakes than they would have by blustering, dodging, and covering up.

I think that instead there is a problem *within* corporations/institutions where the person who admits a mistake loses big time. Basically, finger-pointing is an effective strategy within an institution, especially a large one, so the PR & spokes people try to use the same strategy when dealing with outsiders (e.g. customers).

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Unfortunately, it occurs to me that every one of Teresa's original points is contrary to usual (and AFAICT effective) strategies for dealing with problems internal to a large organization (TNH's Rules in italics, Dogbert's Rules in bold):

(1.) Get out there and say something, fast. Delay. Something else will come up.

(2.) Acknowledge that there have been screwups. Avoid passive constructions. Deny that anything has gone wrong. Use as many elaborate and passive constructions as possible.

(3.) Explain what you’re doing to help fix the problem. Be telling the truth when you do it. Explain what you're doing ("proactively") to fix the problem. Take all the credit. Lie.

(4.) Give up all hope of sneaking anything past your listeners. You’ve screwed up, the internet is watching, and behind each and every pair of eyes out there is a person who knows how to Google. The higher-ranking officials or managers don't know how to Google. They probably don't know what your business actually does, either, so they'll be easy to fool.

(5.) Corporate-speak will do you more harm than good. Instead, speak frankly about what’s going on. React like a human being. Talk like one, too. Corporate-speak shows you are an insider, one of the important people. Talk like a corporate insider and you will become one, too.

The question then is, how do you persuade spokes/PR people to set aside the habits that work well for them inside the organization?

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I don't know if it's a question of us being in "a culture" where no-one wants to admit they've made mistakes. Clearly, there are different cultures that we all move among, and there's also a basic human desire for mistakes to be somebody else's fault (cf. Genesis 3:11-13).

It's interesting, though, that Teresa's 5 Rules apply on the Internet. As David Harmon points out @25, these Rules pre-suppose that "we're all in this together", contrary to the hierarchical assumptions of most large organizations. The human connections on the 'Net aren't very strong (e.g. it's easy to get away from someone who bugs you, compared to RL), yet the feeling of horizontal community, of being "in this *together*", is more important than hierarchy.

If one of TNH's and our goals is to persuade capitalists to follow her Rules, instead of my list @13 (which might be called Dilbert's PHB's Rules), one line of argument might be that capitalist free-market relationships are like the weak connections on the 'Net, not the strong hierarchical relationships you get in aristocratic or communist societies.

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That passage from Genesis was written at least 2600 years ago, so I don't consider it to be in the "same culture" as our present one in an anthropological sense. It was a very different place and time in almost every way, but the basic human strategy of finger-pointing is still visible.

Now that I think about it, the way this particular passage is interpreted is diagnostic of whether finger-pointing is an acceptable strategy, at least among Christians. The traditional-authoritarian Christian interpretation is that the blame-shifting is correct: Satan is more at fault than Eve, Eve more at fault than Adam.

But the other way to look at the story is to say that Adam is a jerk, that his true original sin isn't disobedience, it's finger-pointing -- and look at the mess *that* made. There's a kind of bitter humor in this story, a dry mocking of human folly and our propensity to pass the buck (IIRC Harold Bloom talks about this in The Book of J, but the point has been made by more conventional scholars and rabbis, too.) -- even though, as S. Morgenstern would say, this was *way* before bucks.

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I think it my be more useful not to say that e.g. the chain of command is "broken". Rather, the Bush administration tries to run everything like an especially cut-throat, hierarchical corporation. It's no coincidence that Bush II's biggest donor was Kenneth Lay & Enron. Bush II really is what he promised he would be, "the CEO President". The question people should have asked was, "CEO of what?" -- and the answer was "Enron."

Back on topic, one thing people like TNH have to do is figure out how to persuade upper managment that the Pointy-Haired Boss Rules aren't in their own best interests in communicating with the outside world -- and by implication they aren't a good idea inside, either, but I think that's a tougher job because too much of their experience says otherwise.

Those of you who've worked in large corporations (or other institutions) where bug-fixing was more of an internal priority than finger-pointing, do you think this priority *has* to be set at the top of the organization? That is, is there any hope of changing the corporate culture if you're Dilbert?

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It kind of sounds like I've answered my own question, doesn't it?