Seem to have survived the first day (actually a mere 6pm–11pm) of Startup Weekend Ann Arbor.

So far it’s been falling together surprisingly well. Somewhere between 80 and 90 people arrived, sat and pitched on the order of thirty ideas for projects, companies, ill-formed ideas, work-for-hire “help my pre-existing venture” and the like, and managed collectively to organize into about a dozen teams.

No voting, no formal processes, no points or markets.

No goddamned boss.

And (Cf. below) no coordinator of facilitator to speak of.

People talking to one another can do work.

People sitting in rows of chairs cannot do work. They are delayed from doing work. You cannot productively help people by sitting them in rows of chairs and talking to all of them at once. Not in this situation, which is innovating. Creating real stuff.

If you haven’t been paying attention for 25 years, you might view this as a “support” for the principle of emergence and self-organized community-building in large groups with diffuse shared goals and values.

There were a number of naysayers and explicit skeptics in the traditional business development community. Fuck ‘em. I don’t honestly care what they think about the relative merits of their “traditional” process—golf or other sports, diligent application of chinos and polo shirts, sitting in innumerable audiences to be told What Works for Your Brand!!1!, pleading and pitching and being falsely upbeat to VC and angels who are stupider than you can imagine for merely “liking the cut of your jib”. Don’t care about the whole stultified time-tested pile of crap that these folks assume is necessary and universally applicable.

I don’t care because I don’t want economic development. All that ritualized crap is how you build and support economic development institutions themselves, not companies. Not new people. Not small people. Not the long tail of economics.

Because that’s what this is. We—small businesses, startups, independents—taken as a whole we’re more than all the large-scale corporations combined. Maybe not in revenue, but that’s a hedge until I see the numbers. But in terms of work and knowledge and agility, we win.

Don’t care what those people in the big Old world think. That’s not a slangy lyric missing its pronoun, it’s a fucking imperative. Stop caring about what those people think. Stop golfing. Stop going to dawn breakfasts to rub shoulders with people who just got lucky and think being rich is proof of their acumen. Stop going to seminars. Stop asking.

Better you ask 100 random people for help—at the same time they’re asking you—than ask one Professional for Expensive Advice.

The success (so far) of SWA2 is especially noteworthy because it’s come entirely out of Ann Arbor. This event, the community and energy and all the practicalities addressed already, these aren’t some testament to the great minds from the Startup Weekend Brand. The Startup Weekend company (as such) has suffered a sad series of disappointments and restructurings over the last few months, and as a result the fellow now sitting at the helm is cut adrift. On his own. Untrained, untried, but earnest and in his way diligent. He’s a good kid; he can go far if he adapts and thinks and participates. He needs to learn about Open Space instead of doing a half-assed job reinventing it from stupid mistakes; about what “facilitating” and “leaving things open” actually means to a mob of strangers. But he may—and his “company” may, just barely—survive encounters with people meaner than we are.

To be honest, I hope he does. Then the things he could learn and pass along would have some value. You want legacies, after all. People learning and talking, that’s the only real legacy the world allows us.

But in this case, it’s 100% us. This is 100% pure-D home-grown Ann Arbor effort, innovative results, community and experience brought to bear on a “nontraditional” thing that “shouldn’t” work. Just like all the rest of the open-access, emergent communitarian events.

We make this happen. We’re not the medium, we’re not the raw material, we didn’t get molded or shaped. We did it to ourselves.

This is life. Life is bootstrapping, not asking for permission or molded out of clay. Life is interaction and horizontal conversations and ecologies of reinvention, not respect paid and traditions long held. Life isn’t rebellion or competition, it’s simply ignoring filled niches and hierarchies and seeking or creating new ones. It’s parallelism, and concurrency, and nobody watching from the top of the pyramid in the center.

So this here, this nasty confusing roil of ignorance, is life. In both senses. Not just symbolic, but a prescription. It’s how we can live, in this crapped-up old region of ours in this crapped-up old nation of ours, with not much to do with our resources, and so little money left on hand.

This is life. Life isn’t progress, it isn’t about amphibians crawling up and getting lungs and standing up and starting to type on computers. It isn’t any of those myths you rely on.

It’s just dynamics. How things interact with one another.

Figure out, in these times of trouble, what the other things are. The other ways, so time-tested and “reliable”. By comparison to what I’m calling “life”. Right? Know what I mean, eh? This is me winking, wagging my finger with my mouth hanging open.

Life, here. What’s that other thing?

Now pick.