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Privacy Gear Checklist

Paper, notebook, pencil. The stealthy thrill of being a resistance fighter when you whip out new-fangled technology at the supermarket – a shopping list. Pre-planning a menu with specific meals you’d like to prepare optional but highly recommended.

Take the joyous route around nonsense, no software required.

The near-constant piracy privacy invasions sweeping up everything we do and all we think we want to know, primarily on our insistence of sharing, uploading, making things visible [he writes on a website], requires a kind of slow acceptance endemic to the tools. During the heady decades of the Cold War, school children would regularly have drills for what to do in a nuclear attack, so no surprise about what we can become socialized to. It’s akin to what dating apps are doing to interpersonal relations – the apps are not designed to help you find the love of your life, but to keep you using the app. Reflecting on the difference produces amazing results in less than a week.

Information intake. Reading books, for one; listening to records, for another. Sure, I have dogs in this fight. But whatever you’re reading or listening to, you can talk about it or not. I do talk and even write about some of what I read, because I am sometimes asked. But I don’t have to. Even conversations you have about what moves you can be privately maintained. They might even get more interesting. A note of caution here about building intrigue. But only a note. You’re worth it.

Can you we practice privacy? Certainly, especially while you still know how. This goes for so many things, obviously, but get this: you can also purchase bound books full of empty pages, on which you can write ideas or jokes or scandalous stories, or draw things. It sounds crazy but most paper will stand up to watercolor. Spend some time and update your own software. In order to bring the phrase ‘playing it close to the vest’ back into common parlance, some people must wear vests.

 

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A stage play about climate change

Is it possible? Thanks to Flagpole for the coverage of the readings for my new project:

Suppose you, unlike most people, start taking climate change seriously. Suppose, too, that your skills lie in areas having to do with communication—you’re a writer, a publicist, a blogger; you interview people on television. So when you start taking something seriously, something as all-encompassing as climate change, you naturally begin thinking about how to share your climate concerns, which, you realize, should concern us all, but which you know are far from most people’s consciousness.

Climate change is so far from our everyday lives (and so near) that it is almost impossible for the finest scientific and academic minds to wake us up. But if you’re Alan Flurry, who has all the communication skills mentioned above, plus more (he’s a drummer), you’re still going to have a go at finding a vehicle that tries to bridge the wide gap between everyday and everywhere.

Alan’s solution is to write a play. You say that’s more likely to put them to sleep than wake them up. Nevertheless, a communicator communicates, and Alan has written a play about climate change, which will have a staged reading a couple of times next week, directed by Alexis Nichols.

Flurry uses the device of a play within a play, or actually several plays within a play. The main through-line belongs to the character known as “Director.” Director, you see, is staging a play and is at the point of read-throughs when he begins musing with Adam, one of the actors. In fact, Director, thanks to split staging and multiple time frames, is staging several plays, but the one foremost in his mind is about climate change. So, we’ve got all the plays in the process of production, but Director continues to bring us back to the main event—his preoccupation with climate change.

Continue reading…

Hopefully coming to stage near you in the near future.

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Hello… is this thing On?

Ah, the question. The answer is self-evident but we will continue to provide it.

The master’s of business administration, a gateway credential throughout corporate America, is especially coveted on Wall Street; in recent years, top business schools have routinely sent more than 40 percent of their graduates into the world of finance.

But with the economy in disarray and so many financial firms in free fall, analysts, and even educators themselves, are wondering if the way business students are taught may have contributed to the most serious economic crisis in decades.

“It is so obvious that something big has failed,” said Ángel Cabrera, dean of the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Glendale, Ariz. “We can look the other way, but come on. The C.E.O.’s of those companies, those are people we used to brag about. We cannot say, ‘Well, it wasn’t our fault’ when there is such a systemic, widespread failure of leadership.”

With apologies to the Thunderbird School of Global Management, all of the time, energy and soul expended separating you from your money has taken a toll, with interest compounded annually somewhere in the range of 8-10%, when the margin for error was minuscule. We/they didn’t have that much time, energy or soul to spare and now it looks a bit pathetic to say we need to tweak the edges of how we were doing things and somehow tack back toward some mythical center. Systemic means systemic and there is no polite way to systematically factor out people and planet as liabilities in pursuit of higher profits. So fond are we of the quote that sums up our civilization with two words and a contraction, “It’s just business.”

What’s left when that’s all that’s left? In an inconvenient bit of symmetry, no polite route will right this no-future course. Change your ways or have them changed for you. Smartest guys in the room, indeed.