So here’s a thought on why listening might matter: in order to form a coalition you should be in agreement with whomever you are speaking with. Theater has some of the best rules in that regard, within the discipline of improv. One of the first rules of improv is never say “No.” Say, “Yes, and…” Why would that simple, intuitive rule often create great entertainment? Or, in other words, freedom. We don’t have to have a horse in every race. Sometimes it’s nice enough to agree and keep your opinion to yourself. This is an act of informational generosity. Listening can be a way to agree to stay within consensus for the purpose of future engagements—one’s in which we might need each other’s help—even when we disagree with the information being presented. “I don’t disagree with you, I just want to ensure our unity in the future.” So the next time someone you like tells you something about politics or religion that you don’t like, remember that disagreement may not be the best way to broach the subject. Merely listening, and not having an opinion can be highly beneficial to you.

Some suggestions for Can I… 1. have your number 2. has cheesburger 3. tap that 4. be pregnant and still have a period

Suggestions for “May I…” 1. be frank 2. have this dance

Not quite as entertaining as others, but then I guess folks aren’t generally asking Google for permission. I find the larger take away to be what an associate of Ben Casnocha said: we don’t lie to Google. The search box is the confessional of the 21st century.

“It’s too expensive.”

“But sir, did you know we will never charge you more than bla bla bla…”

I had some actuary tables from a project I worked on a while back and I did some back-of-the-napkin calculations and I figured that the probability of me losing my job or getting injured or the probability of my death is currently at about 3.645%¹ I called and I waited and the operator came on and after the initial exchange the inevitable question occurred “Would you like to tell us why you are canceling the service?”

Yeah, I’ll tell you why.

I responded, “You charge $1.35 / $100 in credit per month, correct?”

::Looks some stuff up:: “Yes that is correct, but only if you have a balance on your credit card.”

“Well, let’s say I often do. Let’s say it’s $100 a month in fact. That means you would charge me $16.00 annually. And if I, for some reason, ran my card up to the max and tried to pay it down, you might charge me $300 and up annually.”

::Long silence::

“The thing is, I’ve calculated the probability of my injury, loss of employment and death and that only comes out to be a 3.645% chance per year.”

“Did you really–is that–?”

“It can be done.”

“What we do is cover your payments and bill in case of–”

“Oh, I understand what you do; that’s why I calculated the probability. You see, you’re asking me to place a bet for a $1.35 per $100 per month per twelve months that I won’t die or get injured, etc. And the percentage of losing my money on this bet are roughly 96%. Does that sound like a good bet to you?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“It’s a little bit more tricky but essentially at your lowest rate, you would be charging me an additional 16% interest per year on my credit card.”

“So I will get your cancellation confirmation…”

I have to admit that doing this in the interest of saving time was obviously a red herring. I just relish the opportunity to harass corporations. However, I did figure out some interesting stuff about interest and credit protection and mortality statistics and corporations. And here’s the real value of working out the calculations: a credit card protection program like this is a scam, plain and simple. A credit protection program will only help you if you don’t pay off your balance every month, but then, if you pay off your balance every month, why would you need protection? It is better in the long run to put the money you would otherwise put toward protection, toward the bottom line of the credit card, especially because in the long run we are all dead.

The other thing that occurred to me was that this girl (fairly obviously a girl, fairly obviously Indian) that I was harassing had done nothing to deserve the harassment—I also wasn’t that harassing; technically I was just being factual. But even so, we have to stop thinking of corporations as monoliths and the “poor” people working for them as innocent drones. We all have a choice in this. Like so many things in post-postmodern life, it’s like the Matrix. Those who are in the system are part of the system and you can’t pretend that they are not the enemy.

But I don’t like saying things like that either—that she’s the enemy. It’s just that all the metaphors for economics and business that we use that stem from concepts of war aren’t appropriate anymore. They’re just the leftover detritus of the testosterone-filled suits of the 1980s who couldn’t stop reading “The Art of War.” You’re competitor shouldn’t be your enemy, you shouldn’t talk about your customers’ loyalty. People should give loyalty to hearth and home, not financial products and cars and soap. The customer support woman was not my enemy, but she was in my way. I wanted to cancel the account and move on with my day. They want to use the opportunity to up-sell me—at my inconvenience. Business shouldn’t be about war; it should be about quality of life. Corporations that deliberately take action to cut their bottom line while keeping you on hold or, even worse, to keep you on the phone so they can trick you out of your money are not the kinds of corporations that US consumers should be supporting. It’s our support of these corporations that is going make the phrase “Where’s my bailout?” the most popular phrase of 2009.

Some mortality statistics: * http://www99.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=car+accidents * http://www53.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=heart+disease+risk+33yo+male

“A new regulatory regime that puts the secretive central bank in charge of everything would sanctify the policy of “too big to fail” that Fed officials have long followed but never honestly acknowledged. It would also revive the Wall Street club, albeit smaller than before, with which the Fed has been so cozy. If the largest bank holding companies are given privileged proximity to the source of government protection, then everyone in finance and commerce will want to become a bank holding company, too. We are already seeing this happening as former investment houses like Goldman Sachs and non-bank financial firms decide to join the system. Why not General Electric and Microsoft? Where does this end? What does it mean for smaller enterprises that lack the scale and influence?”

The idea of a corporate state like the kind Greider is driving at is damn frightening. Regulation might bandage the wound today and in the near future, but the real problem is a market structure that persistently creates oligopolies. It stifles innovation and drives prices up. We need corporate reform.

Lake Superior State University (Lake Superior is a state?) does the world a favor every year by maintaining this list of banished words for the year—words and phrases that have been generally overused and abused through no fault of their own. These are the sorts of utterances that make you wish there was such a thing as copyslap; the ability to just slap someone who uses them after their reasonable expiration date. As you can see from my own mutation above, the phrase “Orange is the new black,” and its innumerable iterations are a particular architecture of bone-picking with me.¹ Definitely, a second runner up is the phrase, “It is what it is,”—a phrase that requires more energy to utter than it has power to explain. In other words, to use that phrase is like letting the Universe die just a little.

The whole business of the media picking a catchy phrase or term and just beating it with the rubber truncheons of mediocrity, until the belief that it was ever clever in the first place seems about as remote as the possibility of a blonde cable news anchoress being ugly, makes me want to email Susan Blackmoore to let her know that she could sum up her talk in about 19 fewer minutes by simply pointing out that all memes are bad.² I’m very certain that George Orwell would agree. These phrase fads are just bad for all of us. They reduce conversation to a level of bipolar uselessness. The funny thing is, I really don’t blame us. That is to say, I don’t want to <sarcasm>throw modern culture under the bus</sarcasm>.³ I do think the media is to blame, the Media with a capital ‘m’, that is—the crew that’s a shill for paid advertising and wouldn’t know a serious story if it stopped them in a dark parking garage. You just don’t hear this kind of regurgitated drek on PBS Frontline. We hear these phrases over and over again and it induces a laziness of thought, a willingness to give in to the agenda of other people’s choice of words, rather than making the effort to think of something new for yourself. I don’t think it’s the end of the world or anything, but it just adds to the drudgery, you know?

So, I’ll end this bitter goodbye to the sheep-thought of 2008 with a New Year’s resolution for the writing on Banapana in 2009.⁴ In the coming year, I resolve to do my best to not use but identify these black holes of ingenuity and only mention them when I intend to call them out. Enjoy and Happy New Year’s Day to you!

if the Singularity ever does arrive, I expect it to be plagued by frequent outages and terrible customer service. …

-Noam Chomsky