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The best parody of our political system today

For those of you who are not Stephen Colbert fans, you are missing an amazing story: he is pulling off one of the best parodies of all that is wrong with our political system today. More than just talking to his viewers every night, he has hired lawyers, created a Super PAC and is openly mocking the system by demonstrating exactly how much one can get away with. I can’t remember any example of the media taking the joke as far as he’s taking it and it is at once fascinating, hillarious and scary.

I strongly recommend you read the letter he just posted here (there’s no permalink that I can find so hopefully this will stay live on the home page for awhile). In essence, Colbert is doing everything Karl Rove is doing by way of pointing out the ridiculousness of what is allowed in today’s system. Here’s one choice section:

Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow agrees that "fully coordinated" ads shouldn't be counted as "coordinated communications." The candidate would merely be appearing as a paid spokesperson, who, coincidentally, is closely aligned with the candidate that he or she also is.

For example, an ad in which the Kool Aid man decries our nation-wide childhood thirst problem would not necessarily be an ad for Kool Aid brand juice drink. That being said, would a tall glass of Kool-Aid solve that thirst problem? To quote one expert: "Oh, yeaaahhhh!"

There’s some real funny and yet serious shit happening here. I’ve been both amazed and horrified watching it. If you’re missing the story, please trust me... it’s worth following.

Big machine and small machine

Renée and I saw Lindsey Buckhingham play at the Uptown Theatre in Napa earlier this week and saw an amazing, high energy performance. The audience was his people — not only because he’s a Bay Area boy but also because the Uptown tends to draw an older crowd. Most of the audience was alive when Rumours came out and they owned it and played it until the grooves were worn down. Although the program announced him as Lindsey Buckingham from Fleetwood Mac, there wasn’t a person in the audience who needed that additional explanation.

He has lost none of his energy or love of primal scream therapy. He took every solo and played guitar hero like the best of them. The crowd loved the mix of his new album (his best in awhile) and Fleetwood Mac favorites (including a version of Tusk that didn’t require a marching band to come on stage thankfully).

About three quarters of the way, Lindsey spoke to the audience of the big machine and small machine. He recently came off tour with Fleetwood Mac and that was full-on big machine. Big personalities, big venues, lots of gear and set list of oldies designed to please. The big machine is the engine that feeds the continued rock star lifestyle of the once successful rock stars who can’t count on continued CD sales beyond the occasional remastered/remixed/completist box set that gets issued once a decade (cf Pink Floyd, Heart, The Who).

After the Fleetwood Mac tour as Lindsey put it, he “found a hole in his schedule” and decided to record a quick album and tour behind it. Small machine all the way — he started by playing a number of songs solo before a small band joined him for the rest of the set. It was informal, conversational and one of the best shows I’ve seen in long-time (I would venture to say the rest of the audience agreed). Economically a very different model but for all I know he could make more from the small machine. Like a big-time movie actor who does independent films to exercise a different part of his art, Lindsey clearly got more than money from the small machine. We were all very thankful he did.

We are our own editors

“The threshold to have literature printed and distributed — the cost structure went down to zero dollars. Thereby, there is no gatekeeper of the truth. We are our own editors, and we are our own publishers. We are our own printers.”

Ashton Kutcher gets it exactly right before ruining his pithiness with continued talking (read the story for the rest of the quote)

Meeting etiquette

A great post from Mark Suster on the dynamics of setting up meetings. Go read the whole thing, it’s a lot of common sense advice that is so often ignored. This in particular caught my attention:

My rule: if you’re asking for the meeting, you travel. If I meet somebody super senior – even if they’ve asked me for the meeting – I still travel. I want them to be the least amount inconvenienced. I want the meeting. I want it to be easy for them to have it. I’m the primary beneficiary.

I’m often amazed at how simple the rules should be (and Mark’s extended dating metaphor is the right way to think of meeting dynamics) and yet how often they’re not appreciated. If I get an email from I someone I don’t (or barely) know who wants to meet with me and then asks me to stop by next time I’m in San Jose, that meeting will never happen. It’s not that I think I’m particularly special, but if you want some of my time, at least make an effort to come up and visit.

We do have a lot of great restaurants in Half Moon Bay you know. 

Damon Lindelof talks about Lost

A great amount of info for all you Losties from Damon Lindelof about how the show came together. I miss the show and with both True Blood and Weeds closing out their seasons, it’s probably time to pull out the DVDs and start watching it again. Two teasers (although if you’re a real Lost fan, you’ve no doubt already clicked over to the story):

“‘There should be a hatch on this island! They spend the entire season trying to get it open. And there should be these other people on the island,’” Lindelof recalled Abrams saying. “And I’m like, ‘We can call them The Others.’ And he’s like, ‘They should hear this noise out there in the jungle.’ And I’m like, ‘What’s the noise?’ And he’s like, ‘I don’t fucking know. They’re never gonna pick this thing up anyway.’”

And:

“There were these two things happening on the show from the minute it began. The first thing was that the audience really wanted to feel like they had an impact on the show,” he said. “And the other thing was, you didn’t want us to be making it up as we went along. You wanted us to have a plan, you wanted us to have a big binder with the entire show and you didn’t want us to deviate from it. And the audience didn’t realize that there’s a huge contradiction between these two ideas. If you want to have a say, then there can’t be no binder. And if there is a binder, then we’re basically gonna be like, we don’t care what you guys have to say. We’re just turning to page 365 and we’re doing Lupitas.”

So good.

Meg on her qualifications to be CEO of HP

“So I actually understand this space relatively well.”

Meg Whitman doesn’t protest too much about her expertise running a $120 billion hardware company

Felix Salmon on e-books

Felix Salmon (who has been doing some great media blogging lately) writes about e-books, Kindle Single pricing and Gothamist’s first foray into the market. The pay-off — which I totally agree with, natch — is that this is an important new market:

We’re still in the very early days of micropayments for books, but my gut feeling is that people are increasingly willing to pay small sums for shorter pieces in the 5,000 to 30,000 word range — much as they’re increasingly willing to pay small sums for apps. And the pricing models are, of course, still very much in flux.

Also interesting in the piece is the back and forth on pricing between Apple and Amazon. I’m not finding myself using iBook at all to purchase books since I’d like my DRM-ed media in one place and I trust Amazon more than Apple for books. But I love the fact that iBook is also a PDF reader and have read a number of books with it (I have a fair number of book author friends who send me stuff). The pricing anecdote does show how much all of these new e-content markets need competition.

Let’s hope an Apple/Amazon duopoly ends up being competition.

via David Jacobs

Yes, we’ll pay

Paul Carr on the explosion of crapola content and a growing willingness to pay for quality again. A great piece well worth reading.

The fact that the Economist’s North American circulation has just reached its highest ever level tells us that the audience for quality content isn’t going away. It also suggests that those of us who prefer our content unsullied by payola, and who appreciate the beauty of a well-crafted headline are turning our backs on the web. Increasingly the best writing and reporting is to be found in books and Kindle Singles, where readers are happy to pay directly for high-quality information and entertainment. As web content continues to get dumber, and more ethically compromised, the market for high quality content away from the web will continue to grow.

Do the math

“First, consider that over the last 10 years, something like 22,000 companies that have been funded. That’s 2,200 a year. What’s happening is that in the seventh year of the venture life cycle, you better know who you’ll double down on or drop off the boat. Do you think there will be more than 400 exit events a year, meaning IPOs, mergers, and so forth? Maybe. There definitely won’t be 600, though. That leaves 1,500 companies, give or take, that will die. The world can only absorb so much.”

Marty Pichinson, cofounder of Sherwood Partners, undertaker to the Silicon Valley deadpool

Feel watched

In my continuing pursuit of the unsubscribe, I was just given another reason to fear behavioral targeting — fear of being watched. Thanks Staples for planting that idea in my head and sorry to hear about your ability to be too relevant.