– Carlito’s Way is on Spike. I was just thinking about this movie. About how good it is. It’s a Brian DePalma movie, and in general I really love his movies. Even the ones that are flops are interesting to watch.

– DePalma is part of a group of people who were all friends in southern California in the 60’s all in film school or in the culture around the same time, late 60’s … Scorsese, George Lucas, Coppola, Walter Murch, others … I learned a lot more about the earlier years of these guys when they tried starting American Zoetrope and it’s an even more interesting story than I realized.

– I saw the documentary as a part of the new special release on DVD of THX 1138. I’d never seen the movie, even though I’d read about it since I was a kid. I’m glad I waited to see this version instead of some crummy faded video pan and scan version. It’s arresting to see Lucas’ vision as a sort of counterpoint to the Star Wars movies.

– Elements they have in common visually prick my head into wondering what other stuff they have in common, and there are similar themes. Star Wars just interleaves the dystopian THX doom with a heroic swashbuckler-in-space story, folded into a heaping helping of WWII dogfight-movie and 1940’s serials (to which homage is paid in THX with a clip of a trailer for an old Buck Rogers episode).

– Anyway, Zoetrope is sort of a big-bang for post-1970 culture. It kicked off a lot of careers, even though the original American Zoetrope met a sort of demise … it resurrected, but not in the same utopian form. (Coppola’s lovely movie Tucker: The Man and His Dream is a sort of paean to the passionate visionary ground under the wheels of small-minded power-mongering big-business — and reads a lot like the story Coppola lived with his first incarnation of AZ..)

– George Lucas himself turns out to be a lot cooler and more interesting than 30 years of pop cultural snarkage would lead one to believe. The cover story in this month’s Wired, Life after Darth, reveals the guy who made THX and American Graffiti more than the guy responsible for Yoda bubble bath.

– The Wired issue also traces the incredible impact Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic and other ventures have made on film and pop culture in general (especially the technologies involved).

– In fact, American Zoetrope could be seen as a kind of grandparent to what ILM spawned. But AZ had some amazing people whose names don’t usually get talked about as much as the more famous alums. LIke Carroll Ballard, whose few movies are universally regarded some of the most gorgeous put to film.

– Also, his frequent collaborator Caleb Deschanel who photographed some of the movies that have likely stuck in your head more than most for their photography (like The Black Stallion, The Natural, Fly Away Home, Being There, The Right Stuff, The Patriot, and The Passion for that matter … my own opinion is that a lot of the kudos for direction given to Mel Gibson really belong to this guy). Also, quick bit of fun trivia, his lovely daughter Zooey is the perfectly cast Trillian in the new Hitchhiker’s movie.

– One thing that fascinates me about this whole history of this single crowd of people is how it parallels so many other movements or coteries of artists that have formed influential “schools” or all become famous in their own right. It confounds the whole “lone genius” myth and reinforces the idea that real genius happens in nurturing environments among mutually talented peers. (The Beat movement, the New York school of art, the Dada and Surrealist movements are just a few examples of this. Hell, even the “Founding Fathers” of the US were a sort of coterie of peers, and our whole way of life and government is a result of their society. Even people we think of as lone geniuses turn out, upon further examination, to be connected to communities in vital ways even if it’s at a clinical remove — like Kubrick, who was great friends with Spielberg, but mostly communicated via a secret fax machine in Spielberg’s closet.) In the THX 1138 documentary, Lucas admits (and others confirm) that he probably wouldn’t have taken later risks that led to his success and the phenomena he created (Star Wars, Indiana Jones, etc) if it hadn’t been for his exposure to Coppola’s mercurial personality, for example. Groups promote cross-pollination of not just ideas but personal traits, elements of character. I wonder if there’s anything written about this… has to be somewhere.

– Whoa. Sean Penn just got his brains blown out and Al Pacino is wearing the coolest leather jacket I’ve ever seen. The escalator scene is coming up… time to sign off.

I’m fascinated with how societies, communities, and therefore companies, manage to create meaning, agreement, belief. They need it in order to get things done, so it’s important stuff. What the iconoclast may see as simpleminded dogma or group-think boosterism is also the very drive that allows a group of people to move in the same direction and achieve things larger than their individual selves.

But sometimes those very qualities are their undoing.

What’s amazing to me is how human systems create and agree upon truth. How they go about defining it.

In a couple of recent New Yorker articles, I saw some parallels to what I see in companies I’ve worked with (including my present employer). In Malcolm Gladwell’s review of the new book “Collapse” — by “Guns, Germs and Steel” author Jared Diamond — we see how entire civilizations can commit slow suicide simply by adhering to their assumptions about social survival, even when they’re at odds with the obvious needs for biological survival. For example, the Norse settlements in Greenland starved themselves to death because they insisted on living and working the land the same way in that place as their kin did in Norway. So, they ignored and even saw as ungodly the way the native Inuit lived on fish and seal. According to the book, “the Norse ate their cattle down to the hoofs, and … in the end, they had to eat their pets. But [excavations haven’t uncovered] fish bones, of course. Right up until they starved to death, the Norse never lost sight of what they stood for.” They starved in the shadow of their cathedrals.

The thing is that the way of life itself isn’t inherently “bad” … it’s a matter of context. He also points out that Easter Island died off not because it was any more incompetent than any other pacific island civilization. It used the same techniques for survival that everyone else used on other islands, but happened to be on the one island with a combination of factors that made it very fragile for deforestation and such.

Looking at this in a strictly moral light runs the risk of missing the point, I think. The point isn’t that we should adopt some kind of dogma about how to treat the land in all cases, but to open our eyes and realize that there’s a context in which we live, and that the context doesn’t change based on our taboos or beliefs or habits.

Anyway, I think the same thing happens in companies all the time. Perfectly well-meaning belief systems can come into being that work very well for some things, but in the end go down the wrong path. There was an article in the Harvard Business Review a while back called “Why Bad Projects are So Hard to Kill” (I can’t find a link to it at the moment) that explained how huge gaffes at major companies happened, millions wasted, because of infectious ideas that had everyone convinced of their validity in spite of all signs to the contrary.

In fact, I’m involved in a project now that could easily be derailed if we don’t look outside a particular ideological box that was itself created a couple of years ago by people who were legitimately thinking outside of their own box. The idea itself wasn’t a bad one, it just runs the risk of being held up as the *only* one.

How do ideas end up being taken for granted like that? Well, sometimes it’s from dogged proselytizing by champions who usually mean well. But how does it get swallowed so easily and propogated so quickly?

My theory is that the first person to write something down in a coherent way — and thereby give structure to that previously vague, ethereal “something” — often ends up being the author of a new dogma, whether they wanted to be or not.

How many times have you seen a PowerPoint presentation given, and that presentation’s bullet points end up propogated throughout the ideology of a company in various permutations with other ideas until you wonder if anybody remembers the original context of the original ideas? I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen it more times than I can count at this point.

Anyway, this dynamic came to mind when I read this other New Yorker story about the psychiatric manual for diagnosis, and the guy who transformed it into the “bible” it is used as today. In “The Dictionary of Disorder”, Alix Spiegel explains how Robert Spitzer managed to take as his life’s work the task of making psychological diagnosis more reliable (and in the discipline’s parlance, reliable means consistent, repeatable — that is, one person with a given set of symptoms would be diagnosed the same way by different people with the same set of criteria).

What Spitzer essentially did was create a sort of controlled vocabulary. Even though the discipline was full of disagreement on many definitions, he just pushed his way through and started defining things. According to him, his criteria for putting in a diagnosis was whether or not it was ‘logical’ — if it made sense as a category unto itself. There wasn’t a ton of empirical data behind what was happening … it was mainly him with some assistants gathering various candidate diagnoses and evaluating them, and then defining them and categorizing.

I suspect that if the book had gone through those years (in which Spitzer was running it) with true democratic committee-based decisionmaking, it would’ve been very different. It seems like it needed one guy to say “ok, this is the picture I have in *my* head … and it makes sense, it hangs together, there’s an internal logic to it” and suddenly here was a workable system. Why stick with your own partial set of terms and ideas if there’s now a documented system that’s more complete, and that now defines the language with which you can discuss your work with peers and diagnose in a way that’s clearly defined?

Now, of course, the DSM is being maintained and updated by a more committee-like structure. Which makes sense. But that’s only possible because a logical framework is already in place, and agreed upon by enough people (either tacitly or explicitly) that the essential structure will continue to stand, evolving through gradual work.

It strikes me that defining things is such a powerful act. Just think: a document like the DSM is just language, but it’s a document that affects the way people work and live. It provides a landscape for people to be defined and define themselves, for good or ill. It changes the way our culture talks about (and therefore acts toward) people with various unconventional patterns of behavior.

These are just WORDS! And yet, much like the U.S. Constitution or other documents that have influenced the way societies work, the words are just as tangible a presence as if someone had wrought giant walls and roadways and plopped them into a civilization, causing people to walk and interact in different ways than they did before.

So, no wonder the Norse settlements starved. They had belief structures so palpable that they blinded them from the obvious routes to survival — dying of starvation next to waters so full of fish, that to this day you can just reach down and grab them out with your bare hands.

Any community, country, or company that thinks it’s immune to this kind of blindness is only proving the point.

If you’ve ever wondered why companies and other organizations and communities end up with their own jargon, take a look here:

See this article at CNN…
Deaf children thrown together in a school in Nicaragua without any type of formal instruction invented their own sign language — a sophisticated system that has evolved and grown, researchers reported on Friday.

I think this throws a lot of light on how powerfully gathered humans can come to shared understandings with some kind of language, even if they have to invent it themselves.

I’ve been wanting to put up a wiki at my new place of employment, for purposes of tracking projects and sharing information between project teams about what’s being done, learned, archived, etc. But it would take months of discussion and getting approval if I did it the right way. I wonder what would happen if I just snuck one onto my desktop Mac?

Anyway, I ran across this site (many of my colleagues likely know about it already but I’m just recently getting my head back into the larger IA-related sphere) which is basically a blog for a company called SocialText. Here’s an article on wiki’s in corporations.
Socialtext — Enterprise Social Software

Like all great horizontal productivity applications, Wikis and Weblogs are disruptive technologies that emerge in the enterprise from the bottom-up. Louderback goes on to share how similar this is to his experience at Chase during PC adoption, the same could be said for spreadsheets and local area networks.

I’ve been utterly slack at posting here for a while. But I’m alive, really!

And, here’s a tidbit from Wired… I’m thinking my company should send people to Pixar to learn a thing or two.

Wired 12.06: Welcome to Planet Pixar

Producing a string of blockbusters may be difficult; creating an environment that produces them is harder still. “We’ve got this question that we’re constantly asking,” says Randy Nelson. “How do you make art a team sport?”

Levittown, Pa. | Building the Suburban Dream

Very cool site exploring the cultural history of Levittown, PA. This particular page shows the “Levittown Kitchen” which looks pretty unsurprising today, but when compared to the typical prewar kitchen at the bottom, it’s amazing how many advances were made in a few years’ time.

A great quote from John Bogle in The Marriage of Information Technology and Investing Oct 22, 2001

“In a wonderful interaction of Internet technology and human values, the message was clear: Even in this world of electronic communications, human contact remains the desideratum. Information technology will be for the better only as it provides better communicationócommunication that educates as well as informs, that reminds us of our obligation to serve the needs of honest-to-God, down-to-earth human beings, who have entrusted their hard-earned assets to our care, each with their own hopes, fears, and investment goals.”

Even though we have the Internet, we’re still flesh and blood, right?

How a meme travels through the blogosphere… that’s the subject of this interesting bit from Joi Ito at Joi Ito’s Web: Ivan’s adventures in weblog space.