Whither and Wither, Amex

I got a postcard from American Express today, telling me that all I need to do to is call a toll free number and they will give me double “points” on all my gas and grocery purchases. (Points can be turned into miles on airlines and that sort of thing.) But rather than call the number, I threw the postcard away.

Why? Because I don’t trust American Express. They fooled me a bunch of times on things, and I gave up on them.

For instance, they once sent a long letter explaining that they were giving me a free, really nice, leather-bound calendar. Then, in the tiniest of print on the back of the envelope in a place I really wasn’t supposed to look, they informed me that if I accepted the free gift, I would receive another calendar every year for something like forty dollars, and that to cancel I would need to send a letter to a special address.

Another time, they sent me a letter explaining that I had been subscribed as I requested (which I hadn’t) in some type of revolving credit account. I didn’t even understand what the credit account was. The letter was signed (stamped) by a head of customer care who offered to answer any questions I might have. All I had to do was call him at the number provided. I did, twice. Waited 45 minutes each time, and gave up. I sent a letter addressed to him instead, to the address on the envelope, kindly asking for any information about what I was enrolled in. Never heard back.

There are a bunch more, but you get the point. I signed up with American Express when I was traveling a lot, earning a lot, and felt I had the two hundred bucks to spare for access to all the airport lounges. Now, I don’t.

Of course, I wouldn’t have thought to have this conversation with myself after a dozen or more years “membership” had American Express not foolishly exploited their real relationship with me to sell silly things like calendars, and to do so in a shady manner. Or kept sending me letters that looked like bills just to get me to open them, when they were actually offers for other unrelated products. It’s not nice to leverage a relationship in that way.

There’s a lesson in this for businesses of all kinds: do really shitty things and set your consumers free.

More soon

Running out of town for another talk, but not before completing the final draft of my new book, now entitled “Life Incorporated: How a Business Plan Took Over the World, and How to Take it Back.”

I’ve got some web and life help, incarnated as Janine Saunders, who will be making some posts here of some recent talks – like a podcast-audio of the lecture I gave last week for the Institute of General Semantics. She’s also working on a short companion film for the Life Incorporated book that I hope we’ll have up and finished pretty soon.

In the meantime, I want to make sure you all know about the Life Incorporated course I’ll be teaching through the MaybeLogicAcademy in January. I’ll be released the chapters of the book as readings, so this would be a way to engage with the book six months before it’s released.

Now that the book is done, I should have more time for the Forums here as well as even coming out and attending some events. Thanks, all, for your patience in the meantime. I’ve even gotten the Inbox down below a thousand messages!

Writers and Alcohol

Last winter I gave an interview to the NY Post about writers’ favorite cocktails. Looks like they finally ran the piece.

“Real writers don’t drink cocktails. Real writers drink straight liquor. You’ve got to be able to dose it properly. When I was a drinking writer, I would write with a bottle of sipping whisky with me. But very few of us are still drinking writers. Writing has been divorced from some of its essential chemicals…”

Quick Update

Wife and child at the town pool. I’ve got time for a brief update.

I just finished the first draft of my next book, now tentatively called “Life Incorporated” (and before that called “Corporatized.”) Now I’m working full time and hard on an overdue graphic novel for Vertigo, to be announced shortly.

The fourth and final volume of my comic series Testament will be out the second week of August. That same week, I’ll be speaking in Las Vegas at a meta-meeting about meetings.

I am going to teach one course in the Fall at NYU/ITP, but it’s only open to ITP students and it’s already filled. In October, though, I should be teaching another online course at MaybeLogicAcademy, looking at the issues in my new book and what to do about them. That course will then, hopefully, spill over once it’s done onto the “corporatized” bbs on this site.

I’m doing a big lecture in NYC, for free, at the Princeton Club, on November 14. It’s the annual Korzybski Lecture for the Institute of General Semantics (a big name for a lot of the stuff we talk about here: awareness, agency, communication, coercive language and systems). It’s pretty far out in the future, but there’s a symposium of some kind the next day that I’ll be at – and there’s not so many free events where I get to speak and interact with people to this extent. So it might be worth the trip and I wanted to give some advance notice.

A text version of my recent talk, below, at the Personal Democracy Forum is now available at TheEdge.

Okay – back to work.

Loose Ends

Here’s stuff I’ve been meaning to tell you about but haven’t made the time.

Our good friend Propaganda is at it again. He’s made some deep posts here and on the forums – thought you’d be interested in what he actually does on his own time.

I’m speaking at the Personal Democracy Forum at the end of June in NYC. This should be an interesting conference – but it costs. With any luck there will be a simulcast of some kind. I will push for that. Mark Pesce will be in town, so let’s try to force him to go out with us.

A rare – and maybe my last voluntary synagogue talk – for the Sutton Place Synagogue on the evening of June 8. An old friend used to officiate there, so I relented. Every brush with organized Judaism pushes me further towards the Brights, so enter at your own risk.

I met a very cool guy, Alan Gershenfeld, who is doing some bottom-up, decentralized business experimentation, including Filmaid International, which shows giant-screen movies to refugee camps in Africa, and a company that lets inner-city kids create T-shirt businesses for way way cheaper than Cafe Press. I’ll be writing about him in my next book.

Which I better get back to.

JaseZone

First, apologies to the hundreds of people who have received emails seeming to come from me, inviting you to join something called JaseZone. Until I received your complaints, queries, and bouncebacks, I had no idea JaseZone existed. This episode has led to an interesting exchange with the company, though, and renewed fears that artificial Internet traffic may further cripple the real stuff. And I hate to think of people whose first contact with me or my work is a fake invitation to a social networking site.

I had a brief email exchange with JaseZone, who kindly removed my “user page” from their website. They said that they wouldn’t have created a user page for me without my permission, but also insist that their email verification would make it impossible for anyone else to have done this, and that it is impossible for their server to have been hacked (unlike every other server in the world). The only other possibility is that I have split personality, and did this without my knowledge.

But then, other somewhat prominent cyber-community people must have split personalities as well! On JaseZone I found pages for:
-Wired Founder Kevin Kelly,
-Berkeley researcher Danah Boyd
-Long Tail author Chris Anderson
-Harvard Business School guru Andrew McAfee
-Apple Founder Steve Jobbs

and so on.

Now, these aren’t fan pages at all – like the pages for William Burroughs on MySpace – but pages pretending to be created by the user in question as a way of developing his or her social network. We know this, because the pages invite others to the site by email, using the actual person’s email address in the replyto field.

The straightest inference to draw would be that JaseZone created these pages and invited people to the site using their names. But the people at JaseZone say they make no money off any of this, don’t create faker pages for users, and have no motive to do this. They are a small company that helps people with sports clubs. I’ve offered to help them figure out what happened by looking at the IP addresses of the page creators, or the email addresses that were used to verify them, but they insist that their site was not hacked and are quite miffed that I would even suggest such a thing.

So where do all these meticulously created profile pages come from? Your guess is as good as mine.

In the meantime, if you do get an email from me inviting you to JaseZone, sorry – but it ain’t me. If you get one from Steve Jobs, I suppose it’s real.

Lady Jaye

A dear friend, colleague, and fellow adventurer Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge passed away Tuesday evening.

I’m shocked and saddened by the news, and that such a uniquely bright light has been extinguished – at least in this realm – after such a short time. My heart goes out to her partner in sacred crime, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. We love you both and hold you in our thoughts.