If you're going to only one conference a year, you might as well go to the best. For me, that's D: All Things Digital, masterminded by Wall Street Journal personal technology columnist Walt Mossberg and the scourge of Silicon Valley, Kara Swisher. They put on a great show, not only because they're able to attract the biggest names in tech but even more because they grill them like the Old School journalists they are. And after a glittering audience laps up the rapid-fire tennis onstage, the bold and the curious among us step up to the microphones and pitch some more unscripted questions.
In a room like that, you not only learn what the speakers have to impart, you get a bonus -- a fascinating internal dialogue. Because you don't sit there and think, "How can I apply what Bill Gates is saying to my enterprise?" You do -- well, if you're me, you do -- connect the dots and think of what the speakers believe in common and note the exceptions and ask yourself if what's being said makes sense in the world as you experience it.
D is an expensive, high-profile conference, and it's the DNA of the thing to present speakers who aren't regularly seen on the conference circuit -- last year, the first onstage conversation with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in two decades, this year Rupert Murdoch. Superstar CEOs are in great demand; they must be scheduled months in advance. That's not a factor in getting an audience at D -- it sells out so fast Swisher and Mossberg never need to say who will be appearing -- but it can be a bitch when the world unexpectedly changes and the schedule's too full to shoehorn one more speaker.
The change I refer to wasn't in technology. It was, you know, in everything. Start with the apparent end of the era of cheap oil, add the laundry list of problems you can recite in your sleep, and you can feel tectonic plates moving. Where will they settle? No one can say. But nobody I respect seems to feel this bumpy ride is going to smooth out any time soon.
You didn't have to be a genius to see a lot of this coming, and regular readers of HeadButler.com will note that my interests have broadened over the last year or so to include the changes in our common reality I perceive we need to consider. To save money -- and do a small bit to save the planet -- I have pushed home water filters and Sigg bottles. Nina Planck has made the pitch for organic food, locally grown; Michael Pollan has explained why living better means eating less; Barbara Kingsolver has chronicled a year of locally grown food. And I have suggested we all read Epictetus and take a deep breath.
I've attended all six D conferences. Each year, the mood's different. If this year's conference is a metaphor, we're not in a visionary time -- the economy was very much on the minds of the speakers at D, and much of the conversation was about monetization and profit margins. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer spoke of Microsoft as if "search" is the Grail -- not so much because they want to help you find what you need faster but because Google has shown how search can be brilliantly monetized. Jerry Yang and Susan Decker talked about saving Yahoo from the clutches of Microsoft; although others spoke of Yahoo as if it were an AOL train wreck in the making, Yang and Decker are convinced they can avoid obsolescence -- that is, get their stock price up.
As I listened to the speakers, I was reminded that digital media and drug-dealing are the only two businesses I can think of that describe customers as users. That fundamental disrespect carries over to products and services. Vista, the new Microsoft operating system, is so glitchy that some computer buyers are downgrading to XP; Gates and Ballmer coolly spoke of "opportunities to improve". When Mossberg read a letter complaining of abysmal customer service -- for premium customers, no less -- at Yahoo, Yang and Decker made the kind of soothing noises that suggested you might get your grievances handled if you write directly to them.
Mission? The word didn't come up. It was obvious: shareholder value. These are public companies, and they get a report card from Wall Street every day. Almost every speaker was rhapsodic on the subject of scale -- the same number of keystrokes on the corporate side, an ever-growing audience out there. The word almost lost its meaning for me until Sony's Howard Stringer bluntly talked of profit. No wonder these CEOs are so distant from what online executives like to call "the user experience" -- for them, the user is, essentially, a debit card.
Esther Dyson nailed this: "One day marketers will realize people don't use the Web only to buy things. It's as if newspapers were talking about themselves as classifieds-only, without even mentioning news and other editorial content."
Only a few seemed to care about what goes on our screens. Barry Diller -- who heads a content-laden conglomerate that baffles Wall Street --- not only seemed to be a consumer of his own products, he mocked those who just churned out any old thing for profit. (Diller's best line was about the insularity of Hollywood: "a community that's so inbred, it's a wonder the children have any teeth.") And Jeff Bezos made me think that the Kindle -- Amazon's new wireless reader -- really is a service to booklovers and information junkies.
But Dyson's comment stayed with me, and I found myself more on more on edge as the conference wore on. I usually ask lots of questions at D -- it's the recovering journalist in me, backsliding -- but this year, the conference was almost over and I hadn't asked one. Then Jeff Bewkes, the new CEO of Time-Warner, spoke. I knew him slightly from my days at AOL, when he headed HBO; I liked him then, and I like him even more as CEO. He spoke crisply, and I settled back.
Then someone asked him about Lou Dobbs, a once-savvy broadcaster who has turned his CNN show into a nonstop blast against immigrants. Bewkes said he'd talked with Dobbs, and while they had their differences, he was satisfied -- the Dobbs show was clearly labeled opinion, not news.
With that, I found myself moving to the mike to ask about Glenn Beck.
Glenn Beck, for those who have somehow avoided him, is a radio commentator who has added CNN -- a Time-Warner network -- to his workload. He calls himself a conservative, but consider some of his views:
"I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I'm wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out. Is this wrong?"
Al Gore's "not going to be rounding up Jews and exterminating them. It is the same tactic, however."
Jimmy Carter: "a waste of skin".
Gloria Steinem: "a self-centered self-righteous socialist out of control dangerous man-hating bitch".
Beck's ratings are atrocious -- he seems to peak at 375,000 views, about a quarter of the number that Fox and MSNBC attract in the evening -- and at some point, even the dumbest TV executive will pull the plug on his show. Still, it astonished me that "the most trusted name in news" would hire this creep in the first place.
So I asked Jeff Bewkes: "How do you defend Glenn Beck?"
Opinion, he said. Glenn Beck is opinion.
"Yes," I said. "But he represents the kind of opinion " -- and you'd better believe I was aware that Rupert Murdoch was sitting twenty feet away -- "that you'd expect to find on Fox."
"Actually, we get a lot of opinion that suggests we ought to have more people like Glenn Beck on."
"Uninformed opinion," I shot back. And he disagreed, and we left it there.
Had the world stopped and our little conversation moved to the center of the conference, Bewkes might have talked about free speech and the value of disagreements.
And I might have said that while no one prizes free speech more than I do, Glenn Beck is hate speech -- at the very least, he's crying "fire" in a crowded theater. And I might have said that it doesn't matter how few viewers Glenn Beck has; the simple fact that CNN gives him a platform degrades public discourse. Yeah, he's only one opinion. And someone else has another. And that's exactly what's wrong with TV, both network and cable; the facts don't matter. Facts are pesky -- expensive to acquire, hard to argue with. Opinion is cheaper, hotter, louder, much more fun. So the networks, all of them, opt for shrill and stupid.
I'm not debating the politics of Glenn Beck here -- I'm religious about keeping this site far away from the squabbles that divide us, often over nothing. I'm saying this, and this only: Public discourse, historically shallow and craven, has sunk to a new low.
And then I'm saying that, this time, there's an alternative: the Web. And one good reason the Internet is so important is that it's not yet big and corporate. A nerd who can write can draw an audience, even scale. And while Time-Warner doesn't have reason to fear any time soon, fact-based media with a clearly stated point-of-view is gaining traction. And the audience it's attracting is smart and young (if only in spirit) and still solvent enough to buy stuff -- in a bum economy, it's the dream demographic.
What does this audience want? A paradox, perhaps. More. And less. It wants authenticity. Quality of life. Things that are good enough, not necessarily the newest and shiniest. In a word, lives that feel sane -- as our lives often don't these days.
Over and over during D, I found myself thinking about Bill McKibben and his 2007 book, Deep Economy. And when I returned home, I opened it and looked through my underlinings. Essentially, McKibben argues that endless growth is no longer possible. We can't afford the energy costs. And if global warming isn't arrested -- well, by one estimate, climate change could kill 184 million people just in Africa this century. McKibben's solution: localization. It makes life manageable. And more collegial -- did you know that Michelangelo's Rome had 55,000 people and Leonardo's Florence just 40,000?
Reading McKibben, you ask yourself: Must I desire Sony's $2,700 11" whisper-thin TV? Is a faster operating system really going to improve my life? Is building a company that de-emphasizes service and community the only way to profit? And, for those who care: How do I want to spend my days at this crucial period for the planet?
Dangerous questions. Most of our fellow citizens will never ask them -- they're on the hamster wheel for life. But you and I may, and our defection from the "more" and "better" economy might jumpstart another shift of the tectonic plates. Technology companies stepping up and leading that change -- that's a topic D might explore in years to come.
But enough about the moguls; they can look after themselves, and, if history is any guide, they will. This is really all about you. Feeling frazzled and dissatisfied and looking ahead to more of same? Consider this rant one final bleat of encouragement for you to read one prophetic and hopeful book, on paper or Kindle. Because not every problem can be solved by search or cable TV.
Crossposted in HeadButler.com