The Obscurer

Thursday 30th March 2006

It's Lulu

Kevin Carson’s Mutualist blog included an interesting post a little while ago comparing the innovative Pull Economy with the more traditional Push Economy. In his post he quotes this David Bollier article which explains the difference between the two:

Briefly put, a “push economy” – the familiar industry model of mass production – is based on anticipating consumer demand and then making sure that needed resources are brought together at the right place, at the right time, for the right people. A company in the “push” model forecasts demand, specifies in advance the necessary inputs, regiments production procedures, and then pushes the final product into the marketplace and the culture, using standardized distribution channels and marketing.

By contrast, a “pull economy” – the kind that appears to be materializing in online environments – is based on open, flexible production platforms that use networking technologies to orchestrate a broad range of resources. Instead of producing standardized products for mass markets, companies use pull techniques to assemble products in customized ways to serve local or specialized needs, usually in a rapid or on-the-fly process.

Instead of companies pushing their products at us (in pursuit of their own strategic or competitive advantages), the networked environment radically empowers individuals, and communities of like-minded individuals, to pull the products and services that they want, on their own terms and time requirements. For example, small groups of people with unusual niche interests – say, extreme skateboarders or opera buffs – can now aggregate their consumer demand and successfully induce businesses to serve their specialized interests. In the process, many corporations are having to radically re-organize themselves in order to serve the emerging “pull” market demand.

If I’ve understood the concept correctly – and I’m not wholly convinced that I have – then it certainly seems a far more efficient and effective way of providing goods and services. An apt example of the pull economy could be Lulu, a self-publishing website I have recently “discovered”.

Traditionally, if you wanted to publish your own book you were faced with a dilemma; approach a printers and either organise a short print run which would involve a high unit cost per book, or go for a longer print run which would mean a lower marginal cost but a larger overall bill. As you had to “push” your book out onto an uncertain marketplace it could be difficult to know what to do; far easier, perhaps, to do nothing.

With Lulu, however, you can design the cover and format of your book, upload it to Lulu for free, and then it can sit online indefinitely until someone wants to buy a copy; only then is it printed (or the manuscript itself can just be downloaded). The price is not far off what you would expect to pay for a book in the shops, and the author gets to keep 80% of the profits of each sale, such as they are. As a result many books can now be published that would probably never have seen the light of day before. Some could even become minor hits, although I imagine that this is more likely to happen to niche non-fiction books rather than to “Just Another Novel” by A.N. Other.

This is fine as far as it goes for self-publishing, but it could also show the way forward for more general book publishing in the future. For as long as people like me enjoy browsing in bookshops then I imagine there will always be a need for long print runs in order to fill up all those shelves in the stores; but on the face of it I can see no reason why a company like Amazon will in future need to hold any stock at all if technology is able to allow each book to be printed on demand as and when a customer orders it. In addition, theoretically no book need ever be out of print again, indeed the very term “out of print” could become an anachronism; just so long as they are held on file somewhere ready to be printed then all books, no matter how old or obscure, could be available whenever a potential customer wants to buy a copy.

But for me perhaps the best thing about Lulu is that this may be the best only way that the yellowed manuscript of my novel, currently gathering dust in my loft along with numerous rejection letters from literary agents, will ever get printed and bound and placed on a bookshelf; even if it is just a vanity copy squeezed into my own bookcase between Philip Roth and William Trevor.

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Tuesday 28th March 2006

Primary Colours

Every parent of small children must know this fear, for you are never less than a few moments away from it. You are watching the telly with your little one; it is The Fimbles, or The Tweenies, or The Teletubbies, and the simple lives of those simple souls on screen hits a snag. They are in the middle of a painting assignment, they want to produce a picture of an orange in a tree, but what is this? They have only red, blue and yellow paint! How can they paint a big juicy orange in a lush green tree when they have such a limited palette to work with?

Your heart sinks with the weary inevitability of it all. The multi-coloured characters on the telly go through the motions of struggling to paint the seemingly impossible until, eureka! By happy accident some of the yellow paint for the sun splashes onto the blue of the sky and there, before our very eyes, we see formed the finest green; just the thing to paint the leaves on the tree. But this strange alchemy isn’t over yet; another fortuitous blurring of red and yellow elsewhere on the painting and hey presto, we have the creation of orange, so they can now paint the, er, orange. We are saved, and the painting can now be completed.

Just in case your child hasn’t grasped the concept yet, don’t worry. Later that day it is very likely that Balamory or Tikkabilla or Doodle-Do will cover the same subject all over again, informing you about which two colours can be combined to make a third. Making colours must be considered an area of expertise so important to our children’s development that they are battered over the head with it almost daily. Furthermore there don’t appear to be any dissenting voices over its value, there is no argument here as there is over, say, teaching phonics, be it synthetic or analytic; there must be a consensus that each TV programme should feature at least one episode devoted to mixing colours in order to fill up a spare 20 minutes assist in this crucial facet of our children’s education.

The UK may be falling behind other nations in the productivity league table, we may not be equipping the youth of today with the qualifications required to gain and maintain a lead in the vital knowledge economy, but by God our children will grow up to know that red and blue make purple; and surely with that our future prosperity is assured.

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Saturday 25th March 2006

Against The Norm

Justin, at Chicken Yoghurt, suggested that buying yesterday’s Independent would be the finest 70p I ever spent, just for this article by Matthew Norman. Well, I went the whole quid and bought it online (then saved it to a word document if you want me to email you a copy) and I was certainly not disappointed.

Ah, but; I wasn’t disappointed because I have long been puzzled by Matthew Norman’s continued employment in the media; I find him a wearisome and spiteful writer whose main claim to fame is to have slagged off The Fast Show when reviewing its first episode, so his judgement is certainly suspect. The reason why Justin should rate Norman, a writer who is his inferior by a good long way, eludes me; but each to their own.

Anyway, Norman’s article takes Charles Clarke as its subject, and I have two points to make. First, there is Norman’s description of Clarke; he says that

the only vaguely fitting word I can find for this poisonous, puffed up, jug-eared gargoyle apology for a democratic politician is the one word we are not allowed to use even in so grown-up a newspaper unless it comes wrapped in sanitising quotation marks.

Er, stunning. Now I cannot abide Charles Clarke, he is one of my least favourite politicians, which is saying something, and he deserves a good going over; but I think resorting to such puerile and personal insults is utterly pathetic. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not thinking of Clarke when I say this, I really don’t care if he bursts into self-pitying tears while reading the article; I just find it childish, and fully in keeping with the Matthew Norman canon. I may sound po-faced – and probably hypocritical – in saying this, but there you go; perhaps you should just call me Victor Mature (as in the old Viz character, not the actor).

But the second, more important point, is that I wasn’t impressed with the article because its main subject matter is covered far better elsewhere. Norman tells the story of

Canon Phillip McFadyen, parish priest and father of a daughter, Rachel, who miraculously survived the King’s Cross explosion on 7 July last year with minor injuries, despite being a few feet from the bomb when it detonated.

At a meeting of clergy at the cathedral a fortnight ago, Mr Clarke was the guest. Generally at such meetings, a half hour is set aside for debate, but at this carefully managed event Canon McFadyen couldn’t ask the question he had promised Rachel he’d put to him: why does the Government refuse a public inquiry into the Tube and bus bombings?

He wrote to Mr Clarke on the matter last year, without the courtesy of a reply, so when the meeting ended he approached his constituency MP and asked it. If the canon was slightly agitated at the time, most of us would excuse this in the circumstances. Mr Clarke isn’t most of us, and but for the fact that he has since issued the ritual blithe apology, his response would stretch the credibility even of connoisseurs of the monomaniacal arrogance and sheer bloody malevolence of New Labour ministers. He stared at the canon in what the latter described as “a very nasty way”, yelled “Get away from me, I will not be insulted by you. This is an insult”, and stormed off past him, leaving the cleric close to tears and too distressed to take part in the Eucharist.

Well okay; in fairness you can see where Matthew Norman’s indignation comes from for his anti-Clarke diatribe; but where can you read this story better? Well, all across the (ugh!) blogosphere for a start which featured this story weeks ago, including the aforementioned Rachel’s own blog, where again as a writer she is streets ahead of Matthew Norman. Now I don’t know what the source was for Norman’s article, but what I find interesting is that this seems to be one of those rare occasions when the mainstream media has taken its lead from a blog, rather than the other way round. And it’s not just the Independent; The Sun also mentioned the story in this editorial attacking Clarke (although in criticising Clarke because “we pay the price for his tolerance”, my italics, they don’t seem vexed by the same civil liberties issues that trouble many bloggers). That the media have picked up on a story from a blog appears to have been missed in the adulation some have heaped upon Matthew Norman’s article.

For a long time bloggers have had a largely one-way relationship with the media; the newspapers print it, and the bloggers either praise or slate it. Perhaps this incident indicates how this pattern is changing, with The Guardian’s Comment Is Free project, a place where journalists and bloggers (including Justin) mingle freely, as another example. It is a shame, though, that when a newspaper commentator does cover a story inspired by a blog, the result is an article that mimics the type of posts written by the sort bloggers who I usually try and avoid.

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Wednesday 22nd March 2006

Test The Nation

Sod the budget; before Radio 4 began their coverage this afternoon they featured a short half-hour programme entitled The Secret Migration, about English people who have moved to Scotland, and I caught the tail end of it. It was quite interesting, as many of Radio 4’s idiosyncratic documentaries often are.

They interviewed Scots, about what they thought of the new arrivals, and the English, about how they had been received as immigrants and about their feelings towards their new homeland. The English people I heard were uniformly positive; the Scots sounded not so sure.

One Scot, though, (I could find out who he was if I “listened again”, but I’m not going to) said that the real test was who the newcomers supported when it came to sport. Sure, you could move to Scotland, fall in love with Scotland, fall in with all the local customs, but unless you supported Scotland against England in a football match then you weren’t welcome in Caledonia. I don’t think he was being entirely serious, but it’s an interesting point, one that recalls Norman Tebbit’s (in)famous “cricket test”.

If that argument is part of a well-oiled machine in some people’s minds then perhaps I can consider myself a spanner in the works; for where do I fit into this? It should be easy. I was born in England, I have lived all my life in England, I support England in football against any opposition, and I consider myself to be thoroughly English.

But my mother hails from Perthshire, I was delighted when Scotland beat England in the rugby the other day, and I feel attuned to and at times aggrieved by what I perceive as the pro-English bias in much of the media. I may support England in football, but the only national team’s football strip I’ve ever bought is Scotland’s (that gorgeous tartan one from a good few years back).

I think it comes down to this; my head insists I am English, but it hasn’t cleared it yet with my heart. So in football, a sport I follow week in week out, it is easy to support England because I think I know what I’m talking about and most of the Scotland team are alien to me. In rugby, however, a sport I happen upon each winter for the 6 Nations and every four years for the World Cup, and whose rules seem impenetrable and arcane, I come with no preconceptions, no knowledge, and I can’t help but feel my heart tug towards the boys in navy blue. The same happens in most other sports. Perhaps it is partly that gut feeling for the underdog, which Scotland often are, that sways my allegiance their way, and I was particularly anti-English in 1990 when their rugby team was captained by Will Carling, smugness personified. The Scottish grand slam in the 5 Nations that year was particularly sweet as it followed weeks of English propaganda about the “inevitable” clean sweep for Carling’s lads.

So where does that leaves me? I am English. Part of me must feel as if I’m Scottish, but I’m not. To all intents and purposes I’m English; yet what sort of Englishman will often cheer England’s defeats in sporting contests, and can be irritated when he sees what can too often seem to be an English trait of arrogance fused with an innate sense of superiority? But I’m not Scottish, and I certainly have no wish to be a plastic Jock; you won’t find me in McShea’s Scottish Bar, downing pints of heavy whilst donning a McEwan’s hat on St Andrews Day.

Thankfully, official forms make it quite clear what my nationality is. I hold a British passport, so that must mean that I am British, plain and simple. Sure, it’s a cop out, but that will do for me. And anyway, I’m not really bothered one way or the other; this is just yet another contrived excuse for a blog post.

PostScript: If Sam Allardyce becomes the next England “head coach”, don’t be surprised if I start supporting Scotland in football as well.

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Sunday 19th March 2006

Tempting FAte

“Fuck off Wigan, you fucking pie eating wankers, go and fuck off back to fucking Wigan”, he quipped. I was sat on the top deck of an idling bus after yesterday’s match, waiting for the convoy of Wigan coaches to drive past. A fellow City fan was holding court with a stunning piece of oratory; his pals cackled their encouragement.

He continued “Go on you fucking pie eaters, fuck off you fucking Wigan bastards”, an allusion, if memory serves, to a statement made by Raskolnikov in a discussion with Razumikhin in Dostoevsky’s epic Crime And Punishment, echoing the redemptive theme explored within that classic text.

Our hero concluded his soliloquy with a neat encapsulation of his thesis; “Fuck of to Wigan, you fucking pie eating knobheads”. The Wigan supporters, cocooned inside their air-conditioned coaches, were oblivious to the Swiftian genius on display. The final coach passed, followed by the accompanying police motorbikes, and then our bus moved off.

So far so good, but then – too soon – it was all over. The whole bus had been rapt, hanging upon every utterance of this ingenious wordsmith, but with the passing of the Wigan fans he fell silent. My fellow passengers exchanged anxious glances. Was that it? Would we hear anymore of this inspirational rhetoric? Would we ever hear the like again?

But our luck was in. The bus’s very own Algonquin Round Table began to discuss the imminent FA Cup quarter-final between City and West Ham, and our Dorothy Parker sprang back into life.

“Yeah, we’re fucking going to Cardiff, aren’t we…fucking gonna win the FA Cup this year…fucking brilliant…yeah, we’re fucking gonna fucking dick fucking West Ham on Monday…no fucking problem…gonna fucking batter them…fucking fuck the fucks.”

I paraphrase, of course, I cannot possibly do justice to his awesome talent. His speech made my spirits soar. We are going to Cardiff! To win the FA Cup! Get in there! I knew then that I would have to write a post in praise of this poetic giant.

One tiny reservation, though; whilst I admire great wit and literary ability I can also be a tad superstitious, as I think many football supporters are. On entering the sixth round of the FA Cup I think it is impossible not to start thinking of the final, but I tried hard not to. Even when I checked my diary to see what I was up to for the semis and the final I felt I was doing too much, like I was tempting fate and jinxing us to even think that far ahead, as if just imagining reaching the final would cut short any possibility that it could happen. I am but a mere mortal, though; no such concerns for our God-like orator, for such a seer. Not only does he have an extensive vocabulary but he is also suitably and impressively fearless in predicting the future.

Of course, greatness comes at a price, and if, by chance, the sage is wrong, if it should all goes pear shaped tomorrow and we get dumped out of the cup, all the plaudits will count for nothing. Having raised my hopes I will have that bit further to fall. My superstitious head will reassert itself, and I will know exactly who to blame.

The fucker.

Update 20/3/06. The fucker!

That said, my wife and I are in New York for the semi-finals, with my parents looking after the boy. As they would have undoubtedly wanted to attend the semi-final, that would have created a problem.

So thank you, Dean Ashton, Sun Jihai and my football bus compadre, for preventing a babysitting crisis.

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