Clay Shirky wrote the other day, in what might be the most-​​linked item in my volu­mi­nous and wide-​​ranging deli­cious stream:

When real­ity is labeled unthink­able, it cre­ates a kind of sick­ness in an indus­try. Lead­er­ship becomes faith-​​based, while employ­ees who have the temer­ity to sug­gest that what seems to be hap­pen­ing is in fact hap­pen­ing are herded into Inno­va­tion Depart­ments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunt­ing aside of the real­ists in favor of the fab­u­lists has dif­fer­ent effects on dif­fer­ent indus­tries at dif­fer­ent times. One of the effects on the news­pa­pers is that many of their most pas­sion­ate defend­ers are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the indus­try they knew is vis­i­bly going away.

As I’ve come to expect when read­ing Shirky: yes, that’s what I’ve been try­ing to tell peo­ple for years. [You know, if that Cas­san­dra chick had been a smarter cookie, maybe set up with some agents or a PR firm or some­thing, I bet she coulda made a fuck­ing For­tuna. [Ba-​​dump-​​bump]]

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As part of the “guerilla eco­nomic devel­op­ment” work I do at our com­pany Vague Inno­va­tion, LLC, I spend a lot of time meet­ing with the nom­i­nal movers and shak­ers of the local busi­ness devel­op­ment com­mu­nity: folks from the Ann Arbor Cham­ber of Com­merce, the Ann Arbor SPARK, mar­keters and Real­tors and land­lords and bankers and peo­ple who pub­lish shiny color mag­a­zines have sunny offices in tall buildings.

I hate to stand alone against the stream of big­oted invec­tive I hear from most of my New Econ­omy peers, but peo­ple who wear suits and work in offices are good folks. They’re try­ing their best to help their town and region, their towns’ economies, to iden­tify and shore up the entre­pre­neurs they rec­og­nize as the future of their local worlds.

They’re good people.

That said, a lot of my con­ver­sa­tions revolve around the future of these nice folks’ careers. Like all of us, these are plain old human beings armed with the stan­dard human cog­ni­tive heuris­tic toolkit. You know, the same one you have: some stu­pid map­ping of your per­sonal expe­ri­ence onto the whole world, the 5 ± 2 most mem­o­rable cul­tural norms they can bring to mem­ory uncon­sciously, and the sense of mas­sive impor­tance of all that Received Wis­dom they’ve been exposed to in their canal­ized plum­met through life. Just like yours, you know?

As part of my work I keep a foot in both worlds (and a cou­ple of oth­ers, too; you don’t want to know how that feels). And so:

• I men­tion see­ing some­thing in the News­pa­per the other day, and an up-​​and-​​coming local banker doesn’t under­stand I mean the paper I read, the one that actu­ally talks about local gov­ern­ment and salient events, not the sports-​​filled fish­wrap some dude in Grand Rapids deigns to pub­lish. This leads to deep con­fu­sion; hijinks ensue and we both part shak­ing our heads in embar­rassed but omi­nous disbelief.
• As part of a chal­lenge exchange, both the CEO of the Cham­ber of Com­merce and a dude for the local “tech devel­op­ment” firm promise to get their folks to edit the appro­pri­ate Arbor­Wiki entries… and months later I hear that one of them has “hired a per­son to do that.”

I could go on. Hell, I did already. But I felt bad.

I deleted them all because they got more egre­gious and far more embar­rass­ing for the “tra­di­tional busi­ness” folks as I tot­ted them up. A list of search­able terms (and teach­able moments) might do: “cowork­ing”, “com­mer­cial insur­ance”, “busi­ness plan”, “admis­sion price”, “intel­lec­tual prop­erty”, “next Google”, “cor­po­rate blog”, “per­sonal brand”, “online mar­ket­ing”, “open source”, “boot camp”.

Every one of those rep­re­sents a lit­tle check­box on the octag­o­nal paper titled “Decom­mis­sion­ing Sched­ule of Bat­tlestar BizDev.” A defaced grave­stone in an over­grown fam­ily plot on a dirt road some­where in ten years. A mile­stone on the road to obsolescence.

[And some­day, when what­ever is next comes along, the nanobio rev­o­lu­tion or what­ever, that will make peo­ple like you, you old fart, into stu­pid con­ser­v­a­tives who still type into inor­ganic com­put­ers using some kind of “for­mal lan­guage”. And you’ll say you learned busi­ness sense the hard way on Face­book and with Google, and you’ll say you’ve looked at the Senso but you can’t fig­ure out why peo­ple want to smell crap on other plan­ets all day. And then you can look this blog post up “by Googling” on your stu­pid octag­o­nal DVD of the “blo­gos­phere” and be reminded: this has all hap­pened before.]

These are good peo­ple. They try, really. But they’re crip­pled by insu­lar­ity, by the peo­ple they hear and choose to lis­ten to, by their dis­tance from the Actual World. Hell, it’s a hand­ful of them that even know the world exists as it does. No sense of the timescale “we” use, or of “our” means of action. A lot of these folks have heard about blogs and Face­book and Twit­ter now they’ve been in Forbes and NPR and stuff, but they don’t pos­sess the cul­tural infra­struc­ture with which they can parse what they’re see­ing as rel­e­vant com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

At least three peo­ple in very nice suits have made in my pres­ence the joke about “Twit­ter is about what you ate for din­ner” in the last month. So there you go. It’s no sur­prise that these peo­ple still aren’t wel­come in the “tech com­mu­nity”. Which is sad.

And to be prag­matic about it all, and think about how cities and com­mu­ni­ties actu­ally work in this capital-​​driven world we inhabit, kindof stu­pid: They have all the fuck­ing money.

Ah, well. Cul­tural diver­sity gets short shrift these days. On both sides of that par­tic­u­lar line: geeks and suits don’t get each other, though they often assume they do. [And Cf. “don’t get me started on the other ones.”]

Which, by a long and rant­ing road, brings us to our mile­stone park­ing spot for the day: Park­ing Data.

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This won’t take nearly as long as the preamble.

We have a bunch of park­ing struc­tures here in Ann Arbor. The Down­town Devel­op­ment Author­ity con­tracts with a com­mer­cial firm called Repub­lic Park­ing to man­age them, and park­ing is a huge source of income. The DDA also gets taxes from new build­ings, as I under­stand it, and man­ages liquor licenses and over­sees new devel­op­ments and stuff. There’s more involved: it’s com­pli­cated and political.

[As a symp­tom of my own increas­ing frus­tra­tion with cul­ture clash here: If you’re a geek? And you self-​​identify as an Interwebz-​​using com­put­ery per­son? And you’re think­ing or say­ing that pol­i­tics or busi­ness prac­tice is “unnec­es­sar­ily com­pli­cated” or “opaque” or “use­less”? That sounds to me like you’re one of those ass­holes who say they “don’t get math” as an excuse for not pay­ing atten­tion to it. Busi­ness prac­tice and the law and local gov­ern­ment infra­struc­ture are com­pli­cated because they deal with real-​​world public-​​good com­plex­ity, dumb-​​ass. I don’t care if you run some kind of “alter­na­tive com­mu­nity” or you’re Lord High King Open-​​source Maven or a Lib­er­tar­ian Fun­da­men­tal­ist or what­ever: don’t dis­miss “pol­i­tics” or mar­ket­ing or these other people’s cul­ture as triv­ial just because you’re not famil­iar with it. It really under­mines the argu­ment you’re “smart” when­ever you do that in pub­lic. And when you do it in “pri­vate”, think­ing some­body like me isn’t there as well, it makes me treat you like the child you are.

Or, shorter: Don’t diss “the Man”, monkey-​​boy. We’re all man.]

If you’re tired by now, here’s a time­line of what happened.

Some time back, the DDA started putting coun­ters on the park­ing struc­tures, and around that time they started pub­lish­ing online feeds that updated as the num­bers of cars parked in the struc­tures changed.

This was cool and geeky. We want a cool and geeky town, and this was a good step. +2 points for trans­parency, and for actu­ally exper­i­ment­ing.

Then some folks I know, includ­ing these guys and Ed Viel­metti, did what good mod­ern Inter­net cul­ture peo­ple do: they cre­ated a handy open source soft­ware pack­age that took the pub­lic data and repur­posed it into a free way to use your phone to call a num­ber and find out how many spots are avail­able.

This was cool and geeky. We want a cool and geeky town, and this was a good step. +5 points for mashups, repur­pos­ing pub­lic domain data, open source, and some others.

Then the geek points added up to the point that the Ann Arbor News wrote a cover story about the mashup.

This was cool and geeky. We want a cool and geeky town, and this was an unusual good step from a typ­i­cally clue­less news­pa­per (Cf. “fish-​​wrap”, above). +2 points for cul­tural crossover to the MSM, and pro­mot­ing the local geek cul­ture to a main­stream audience.

Cue fan. Cue shit.

Appar­ently this is where the DDA first heard of the cool, geeky thing that had hap­pened as a con­se­quence of their pub­li­ca­tion of the data. As far as I can tell, they reacted just like any­body in the 1970s would have done: they noticed belat­edly that their cul­tural role as gate­keeper was being under­mined, and so they shut down the phone ser­vice access to the num­bers.

This was nei­ther cool, nor geeky. Burn –10 points for rein­forc­ing stereo­types on both sides of that god­damned line I men­tion above, and throw in an extra –10 points for the ongo­ing online shit­storm of bad pub­lic­ity and even news­pa­per pub­lic­ity this is build­ing into.

And here we are, today.

We’ve got peo­ple who are core mem­bers of the geek com­mu­nity up in arms about it. Folks are step­ping around the stu­pid and inef­fec­tual block­ade the DDA started off with. They’re writ­ing open let­ters that smack of out­right polit­i­cal threat. They’re bring­ing in the big guns from out­side town. They’re sub­mit­ting FOIA requests for the numbers.

It was a sim­ple lit­tle thing. A triv­i­al­ity, really. Susan Pollay’s email clearly misses the fact that this was an exper­i­ment, the very sort of thing that the phrase eco­nomic devel­op­ment means today in this agalmic open-​​source world.

But it brings the two cul­tures together in what are prob­a­bly the worst pos­si­ble cir­cum­stances: The old-​​skool scarcity-​​driven infra­struc­ture prob­a­bly didn’t know these peo­ple even existed. Or if they did, they had wildly inap­pro­pri­ate expec­ta­tions about demo­graph­ics and val­ues and poten­tial impact on the sta­tus quo. And the scarcity-​​avoiding geek cul­ture that didn’t until until now give a damn about what “suits” did is now sud­denly swing­ing the full mea­sure of its atten­tion to bear on this affront, and they’re pro­cess­ing it on fuck­ing Inter­net timescales, with­out old-​​skool hand­i­caps like “busi­ness hours” or “week­ends” or “face to face meetings”.

To any of us who are watch­ing with one foot on either side of this line, this is quickly turn­ing into what you might call “spec­ta­cle”. No joke: hairs stand­ing up on my arms as this lit­tle fooferaw started to come into focus. This (to para­phrase what the cool kids say) is what we call the fire we brought you long ago.

I wrote an email to a col­league from the Cham­ber of Com­merce Fri­day, as soon as this dynamic became obvi­ous to me. A heads up, mainly, since he’s not directly involved.

For a few weeks now (non-​​Internet time, remem­ber?) he and I have been talk­ing about what the Cham­ber and the old-​​skool infra­struc­ture might able to offer “the 1099 com­mu­nity” or the “inde­pen­dents” or the “Not An Employee crowd” in the com­ing months. Admit­tedly we’ve spent a vast pro­por­tion of our meet­ings try­ing to rec­on­cile our dra­mat­i­cally dif­fer­ent assump­tions about work and com­mu­nity, and last week we were just get­ting to a place where we could say stuff that didn’t make the other one smirk or look confused.

[Though he made that con­fused face when I men­tioned glibly the bit about tear­ing down the hideous mid-​​century bank build­ing at the cen­ter of town and get­ting a Town Square back. I’ll win that bet, too, by the way.]

He’s fram­ing what he sees as the future role for the Cham­ber in the com­ing decades in terms like expan­sion and cul­tural adap­ta­tion so that it can cope with the dif­fer­ent lifestyles “we” NAE folks rep­re­sent. He’s try­ing to help, and to make what has tra­di­tion­ally been per­ceived as a use­ful and nec­es­sary busi­ness sup­port infra­struc­ture avail­able to more peo­ple who need help. Maybe he doesn’t see 100% that they don’t need that help, but he’s try­ing. He wants to help out and reach over the line for the sake of the city, the region… and to some extent to drag his orga­ni­za­tion into the 20^th cen­tury [sic].

In our con­ver­sa­tions I find that I’m fram­ing what I see as the future role of the Cham­ber using con­cepts I’ve men­tioned here already: as a safe decom­mis­sion­ing, as an oppor­tu­nity for out­reach between cul­tures that are fun­da­men­tally irrec­on­cil­able, as a model of what to do and what not to do in a nonover­lap­ping orga­ni­za­tion… and frankly because I like peo­ple and also money, and there must be some way of ame­lio­rat­ing the dam­age this whole thing will cause in the next decade (Cf. bank tear-​​down).

But I look at that list of ben­e­fits, and I real­ize that nei­ther I, nor any of the peo­ple I know, want any of those “ben­e­fits”. But just like my friend in the Cham­ber, I also want to help the city… so it doesn’t end up aban­doned when us New Econ­omy peo­ple just leave in dis­gust. And the region… because I want there to be trains and con­ven­tion cen­ters and some non-​​provincial build­ings built, and fuck “human scale” I want to see the bleed­ing edge of posthu­man scale. And to some extent to drag out the use­ful sal­vage from the wreck of his orga­ni­za­tion and set it up and dust it off and intro­duce it to the 21^st cen­tury [sic].

And in that email I sent last week, in which I explained briefly what I’ve said here in this ram­bling blog post, I pointed out that this lit­tle park­ing fiasco has some­thing to do with the bal­ance he per­ceived between our dif­fer­ent views of the local landscape.

I said to my friend two things, and I hope I’ve set this up so they might make sense when I repeat them here in public:

(1) That it will prob­a­bly seem from “his side”, among the suits and hall­ways in which peo­ple come and go accord­ing to agenda and busi­ness hours and rely on tele­phone con­ver­sa­tions, that noth­ing much has hap­pened. Some extra phone calls to the DDA maybe, some annoy­ance felt as this pis­sant inter­net crowd throw their weight around and com­plain about some­thing this triv­ial. That in the long term this tem­pest in a mole­hill will look like it blew over and dis­ap­peared, and then “his” folks can get back to busi­ness as usual. Or maybe that things will get smoothed over, and the data will be free and things will get all geeky and fun again and all the frowns will turn upside down.

…but also, inde­pen­dent of how it plays out on his side: (2) When we look back years later, this will be the week we say the ground shifted. Or if we don’t iden­tify this exact “triv­i­al­ity” as the turn­ing point, then it’ll be one of the sev­en­teen cued up and wait­ing in the wings.

Last week it was a decent and smart thing, an appro­pri­ate use of his time, for my friend to be pay­ing atten­tion to his goal of “out­reach to the inde­pen­dent tech com­mu­nity”. It was good that he was mus­ing about how the two cul­tures might mutu­ally adapt to fit together for one another’s benefit.

Today, though, a switch is thrown: it’s now possible—no, it’s now the most likely out­come—that folks from the Cham­ber of Com­merce will be watch­ing in a year, or two, or five as all the busi­nesses rush to join some­thing else. Some other orga­ni­za­tion, not the “answer” to them because it won’t be set up in response to the Cham­ber or the SPARK or the DDA. Some­thing new that just doesn’t give a damn about any of that old junk, or even rec­og­nize its exis­tence.

An orthog­o­nal institution.

Because of this fiasco about the park­ing, or maybe because of any one of the sev­en­teen other acci­den­tal clashes that could func­tion just like this, what­ever rises up will not look at all like a part­ner­ship founded on prin­ci­ples of out­reach and mutual support.

It won’t be founded on any­where near the kind of coop­er­a­tion it might have been.

The New Thing is not fully formed yet. It sham­bles on towards its Beth­le­hem, inde­pen­dent of what’s hap­pen­ing under its feet. But its eyes are open briefly, and today it’s pay­ing atten­tion to the friendly, help­ful peo­ple in the suits who only want to help. And I sus­pect what’s mov­ing though its col­lec­tive mind are appraisals, a kind of siz­ing up that should make the friendly busi­ness devel­op­ment old-​​skool insti­tu­tions pause. A look that increas­ingly feels like a brief con­sid­er­a­tion for sal­vage, of food value. Not a spirit of friendly sym­bio­sis, but a glance that takes in all the hinges, all the con­ve­nient places for a pry bar to lodge.

I sus­pect these things hap­pen too fast to respond to, when you insist on keep­ing your eyes to the path you started on, when you lis­ten to the cues you’ve learned long ago.

And to be frank, maybe that’s best for everybody.