GRAVITY THIRTY -- Friday, October 16, 1992

This the last day, and I am pumped for it. Music quite as loud as it gets, and my head now foggy from impending flu. My brain is suitably turned off, but my heart and soul are wide wide open. Now at the top of a slick icy tobaggan ramp and peering down through dark mountain mist toward my uncertain path, I'm a little afraid, afraid to push forward, afraid to let go and slip-slide down to my inevitable and possibly dangerous destination. Quite a ride ahead, but there's no choice. No turning back. Here goes!

Joe Lucia writes, "It's markets that drive innovation in a commodity culture. What we need is a mechanism to rescue our public/political/social discourse from commodification. That's one promise of the new digital communications technologies. But where anarchy and possibility now reign, darker forces of monopoly and economic control are likely to hold sway before long."

Right on Joe! Chills the bone, doesn't it? For eleven years I've seen the on-line world as our hope out of the age of cola wars and designer jeans and slick-as-spit music video ads for chewing gum and tampons. Nearsighted money-minded corporate twits dream up our national evening sit-com chuckles, and unseen throughout are the real efforts... the lasting works. Sometimes I watch today's TV commercials, and sit back and dream of a world where the same effort and talent were put into making lasting beauty.

Holmes Welch wrote a book about Taoism, and in the last chapter, he brings Lao-Tse to life, and Lao-Tse's first words are: "America's greatest troubles come from the advertising business. Do not smile. That business is very harmful and dangerous--oh! very harmful and dangerous. It makes people want to buy things they would not otherwise want to buy. It fills their minds with desire for ingenious devices and with ambition to have more than their neighbors. How, confused by ingenuity, can their characters become simple? How, being full of ambition, can they turn inwards and grow quiet? ... Advertising agencies are Press Gangs in the warfare between manufacturers where one pits his brand against the others."

I grew up in a Press Gang. I'm an ad agency brat. Bred into my bones is a sense for the rhetoric of industry, and the forthrightness to be heard. More valuable than a marketing degree, I've inherited a sense for how to play the pulpit, how to head off change at the pass, label it, and broadcast it to the right people at the right time for the right effect.

My father is a formidable man. He's achieved quite a lot by being a big
deal, and writing influentially about new technologies, and impressing
editors, and getting clients on the cover, and arranging press conferences, and teaching executives to speak, and writing their speeches, and producing trade journals, and basically holding their hand while commercializing their new ideas. People hire him because he gets your attention. His attitude makes you stand up and take notice. He makes you listen.

Big words leave deep footprints in the mind of a child. My father has had an enormous impact on me, in two very different ways. First there's the attitude. I've got it. I know this software industry, and have a sense for its rhetoric, and forgive the ego (a necessary part of an ad-man's attitude) when I say that The Press Is My Sandbox. Given a suitable budget, I can get industry-wide recognition of any information product, period.

Then there's the other side of his impact. I Can't Stand The Attitude.
It's a tool within my arsenal, and a powerful one, but my artistic
sensibilities scream loudly and painfully whenever I feel the influence
of my father, whenever I see clearly how easy it'll be to manipulate
the market. Living under the cloud of such a powerfully insensitive man, I'm aware of the danger of ego, of the imbalance it can bring. I'm afraid of the attitude.

So when Joe writes about the "darker forces of monopoly and economic control", I start to get afraid. This is most certainly where the on-line world is heading, because it'll take quite a punch to commercialize the new medium, and only the big boys have the resources, and they'll do it only if they're certain they'll profit from it. It frightened me greatly to hear that CBS, IBM, and Sears were getting together to make Prodigy. It especially frightened me to know that one-third of each access screen is devoted to random advertisement for commercial products. They Built Commercials Into It. Shiver and shake, they're out to emblazon a corporate logo on every open surface on the planet. Would you be surprised if people started getting
Coca-Cola tattoos at this point? People would do it if they were paid
enough. Thankfully big-boy bureaucracy made Prodigy a joke. Their
failure has given us breathing room to do a better job.

So then, the plan. Here's how to commercialize the new medium without comprimising its ideals, without bleeding all hope and sincerity from it. Here's how to rescue our society from the mindless money-minded onslaught of product logos, corporate rhetoric, and well-washed political pap.

As the pulled-plug is impending, and I'm soon to get cut off, I'll send
this, and continue in another note.

From: Joe Lucia