These days, the general procedure for an IPO is as follows: A company desiring to go public could in theory sell shares on its own (that would make for an interesting Facebook ad for a change) but the time-honored ritual is for the company to screw itself by hiring a Wall Street investment bank. This firm engages in “underwriting” which is the means whereby money is raised either by debt or (in this case) equity. The underwriters either stipulate that, for a fee, they can guarantee a certain price for a certain number of securities offered by Facebook, either by buying up the entire public offering of shares themselves and then reselling them (a “firm commitment”) or else the underwriters sell the shares but can’t guarantee the amount raised (a “best-efforts agreement”).

The problem with a “hot issue” like Facebook is that the average person who uses it can’t own a piece of it right away. Facebook screws both the public and itself by hiring investment banks as underwriters who, for a generous fee, sell shares at ridiculously low prices to their own best customers: the institutional customers like pension funds and hedge funds, not the little guys.

Then these gentlemen crooks turn around and sell the cheap shares, which end up on the open market and are bought by little investors at an immense profit to the big guys. It hurts companies like Facebook. Had Wall Street priced the shares at their real value, the company and its original shareholders would get more money and the institutions would make less profit.

In May 2011, Henry Bodget estimated that “LinkedIn’s underwriters, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, et al, just screwed the company and its shareholders to the tune of an astounding $175 million. (Just the way the underwriters of another recent hot IPO, Zipcar, screwed that company).”

But, as stated previously, a company desiring to go public can in theory sell shares on its own. So, when Twitter decides to do its IPO, why not try cutting Wall Street out of the picture? Do an “IPO tweet” to everyone on the system, which would be a link to a site where everybody can purchase shares at ten cents or a buck a share? Even if it didn’t work, it would shake Wall Street to its foundations. And if it did work, who knows how much both institutional and private investors would be willing to pay up front…?

Stepping back for a moment, surely this is just the stuff of populist fantasy. Most little guys in my age bracket shouldn’t be worrying about making a fortune off of Facebook by getting a fair shake from Wall Street, of all places; instead, they should be biting their fingernails over saving enough money for retirement. A friend of mine badgered me into doing some research concerning retirement. The result: just to eke out a stable, low-level living arrangement in retirement, the average baby boomer needs at least $1 million earning interest and/or income of some sort. Wow.

How about all of those 50-ish boomers who’ve been out of work for one or more years? These are people who’ve already rifled through their 401(k) savings and are facing foreclosure and homelessness. How are they going to save $10,000 a month in the years leading up to their retirement?

During boom times, you’d always hear some stuffed shirt business pundit on TV blowing hot air to the effect that, “Companies increasingly recognize the value of the business experience and knowledge of older workers.” When the economy began to hark back to Great Depression levels, however, these same “valuable employees” were either ignored, or told by Human Resources departments that “you’re in your fifties and you’ve been out of work for months—you’ll never work again.” Quite a turnaround, eh?

Thanks to the perpetual political stalemate in Washington, D.C., cautious American businesses have refrained from hiring workers, have laid off more, and have been sitting on a mountain of cash—more than $1 trillion. It’s gone on for so long that American business, through a combination of cost-cutting, automation and increased efficiencies, has figured out how to get along quite nicely without many of its former workers. The USDA reports that about one out of every six Americans had trouble scrounging up enough money to buy food (nearly 49 million people, or 14.5 percent of the population), and more than 20 million U.S. children depend on school meal programs to keep from going hungry. Similarly, there are over 45 million Americans on food stamps and one out of every six elderly Americans lives below the federal poverty line.

In other words, you could take a pretty massive slice of the U.S. population—the part that’s floundering—and dispose of it, doubtless with nary a peep of protest out of any business or public institution.

My Draconian friend thinks that the “doomed segment” of the aging boomers, rather than face a penniless, starving existence living outdoors in packing crates and cardboard boxes, should instead “take the Oregon trail”—which is his way saying that they should head for a U.S. state such as Oregon or Washington, which permit physician-assisted suicide. It sounds more than a little bit over-the-top. “Admittedly,” he says, drawing upon his knowledge of American history and with his tongue buried very deeply in his cheek, “the excess population could visit the eugenics ‘communes’ in California, Virginia, and so forth, for America’s socioeconomic benefit.”

What my friend was referring to, for those history buffs out there, was the really scary eugenics movement in America that flourished during the early-to-mid 20^th century. The word eugenics (from the Greek eugenes or wellborn) was coined in 1883 by Sir Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin, who applied Darwinian principles to concoct his pet theories about heredity and why “the best and brightest” people with favorable genetic characteristics should mate and propagate. This immediately got all twisted around into “negative eugenics” which involved the forced sterilization (and sometimes marriage restriction or custodial commitment) of those members of the population exhibiting “unwanted characteristics.”

Between 1907 and 1937 thirty-two U.S. states had compulsory sterilization of various citizens viewed as undesirable: the mentally ill or handicapped, those convicted of sexual, drug, or alcohol crimes and others regarded as “degenerate.” Indeed, more than 60,000 compulsory sterilizations were inflicted on individuals who were mentally disabled or ill, but in other cases simply belonged to socially disadvantaged groups living on the margins of society. Thus, to eugenicists, poverty was not a social problem but just the result of a “bad bloodline” which could be fixed with  forced sterilization and selective breeding programs, all to guarantee “racial purity.” David Starr Jordan, a former President of Stanford University, who published Blood of a Nation—A study in the Decay of Races by the survival of the Unfit noted as early as 1898 in his book, Footnotes to Evolution, that “The pauper is the victim of heredity, but neither Nature nor Society recognizes that as an excuse for his existence.”

Ironically, some of the most liberal states were at the forefront of the eugenics movement: California topped the list, with 20,108 people sterilized there prior to 1964.

Today we’re ethically way beyond the more icky events of our glorious past—or at least we’re supposed to be so enlightened. But as the secrets of the human genome are steadily unlocked, as the science and business of organ harvesting of the recently deceased steadily progresses, and as the former middle class of the U.S. population slumps into “low income” and poverty, you just can’t help but feel something ominous in the air, some undefined portent of Doom. The hair begins to stand up on the back of your neck.

Yeah, I definitely need a bigger piggy bank for my retirement!

# # #

Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

“Say something funny,” he demanded.

“Belly button,” said Bean.

“Come back tonight,” said the owner. Bean did, performed his act, “and I killed. I was the house comic for the next nine years.”

There are as many theories of comedy as there are theorists. Plato thought that the basis of comedy is “foolish false conceit” in that people fancy themselves as more virtuous than they are. Aristotle thought that comic attitude is “not vituperative but ludicrous.” Elder Olson defined katastasis as the equivalent in comedy of catharsis in tragedy, easing the mind to a pleasant, or euphoric, condition of freedom from desires, concerns and disturbing emotions.

At the “twitter + Comedy” presentation at the #140conf Tel Aviv 2010, comedians Benji Lovitt (@benjilovitt) and Charley Warady (@charleyw) spoke of the impact twitter has had on comedians and humanity’s comic sensibility.

“As I was telling Benji, this is everybody’s standup comedian’s nightmare—following a magician!” exclaimed Waraday. [Laughter] “Couldn’t they have had a guitar act before we started? There seems to be one theme in comedy and twitter that came to my mind. The definition of comedy is ‘tragedy plus time.’ Thanks to twitter that time ‘thing’ is becoming less and less. The question that I posed to Benji Lovitt is, ‘These days, how soon is too soon?’ You know, it’s an interesting concept because what immediately came to my mind was the recent incident with the flotilla. [Referring to the ‘Gaza flotilla raid,’ a military operation by Israel against six ships of the ‘Gaza Freedom Flotilla’ on May 31, 2010 in the Mediterranean Sea.] Benji got into trouble—he was bashed by tweeting… what was it, Benji?”

“Tortilla sounds a little like flotilla, so I tweeted, ‘Tortilla Grande: the newest entrée at Taco Bell,’” said Lovitt. “It’s funnier in America. But like everything in the world today, twitter is totally changing what it means to be in the media. In the States, Saturday Night Live for the last 35 years has been the ground-breaking, envelope-pushing show that gets the first crack at satire. And now there’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and funnyordie.com. So, twitter is the latest mechanism for every comedian to use to take a crack at something.”

Warady chimed in with, “So, in the case of the flotilla, I immediately I tweeted that it’s also the A&W Root Beer’s latest selection of their ‘Root Beer Float-illa.’” [No laughter.]

Lovitt knocked on the microphone with his hand, “Is this still on?” he asked the audience. [Some laughter.]

Warady went on anyway: “A friend of mine told me they had onboard entertainment on the flotilla—it was Lady Gaza.” [Laughter.] “And people kept tweeting ‘The Gaza Flotilla’ which is too long for a 140 character message, so I began referring to it as ‘The Gazilla.’” [Laughter.] He also tweeted, “I can’t believe we keep talking about this Flotilla thing when CELINE DION IS PREGNANT!”

“Twitter is really where every comedian is these days,” said Lovitt. “Has anybody here heard of Jim Gaffigan? He’s one of the biggest comedians in the States, and has a quarter of a million followers on twitter. Actually, he was here in Israel a couple of months ago and did a couple of shows in Jaffa and Jerusalem. He’s a devout Catholic. But basically, you don’t have to wait for comedians to come to your town, because they’re all on twitter. What’s great about it is that, well, if you’re a marathon runner you’re compelled to run. Whatever job you have, you’ve got to do the dirty work. But with twitter comedians can write and perform at the same time. It’s great. It’s really changing everything.”

“Twitter is forcing us to edit,” said Warady. “It forces comedians to do a ‘setup’ and a ‘punch’ all in 140 characters. For a person like me, I tend to stand on stage and tell long stories. For me to compact each one into 140 characters takes a lot of discipline. But another nice thing about twitter is that it is immediate in nature. You have your audience out there and you tweet to them and it’s just like doing a live show. There’s immediate gratification. We’re now determining our own self-worth by the number of our retweets. I’ll tweet something that I think is really funny, then I’ll wait two or three minutes, and they I’ll wonder why nobody has retweeted it—they obviously don’t understand genius. [Laughter.]”

“I did a show on the Fourth of July, and so I tweeted a lot of joke beforehand and used the best ones that were retweeted the most often,” said Lovitt.

“Even so, if you do that, by the time you actually do the show the material can become dated,” said Warady.

“Then there’s the guy Justin Halperin, who tweets about the stuff his old dad says around the house every day. He wrote it down and it became a bestselling book and then the first TV show inspired by a series of tweets,” said Lovitt.

“Twitter is so much a part of my life, I get news from it and every day I try to figure out how to make it funny,” said Warady. “Particularly here in Israel, where there’s no end to the material” [Laughter.] It used to be that a day or two would pass after a tragedy or major event before people would have the opportunity to comment on it. Now, in the age of twitter, people start making fun of it a lot sooner. As a comedian, you don’t want to be the last one. So what you wind up doing is hitting on it immediately. And there’s controversy involved. And that’s wonderful, because if everybody loved the things I tweet, then I’m not doing my job.”

Now that the era of the 140 Character One-Liner is upon us and everyone can “riff” among themselves, some professional comedians may find that they can boost or even completely rehabilitate their careers with twitter and other forms of social media.

Or just the opposite. On January 30, 2012, The Sun reported that two British travelers, Leigh Van Bryan, 26, and Emily Bunting, 24, were questioned for five hours and then barred from entering the U.S. after posts on twitter indicated they had plans to “destroy America” and “dig up Marilyn Monroe.”

Bryan told officials the term destroy was British slang for ‘party,’ and the reference to dig up Marilyn Monroe was a joke from the TV show Family Guy, but the two were reportedly held on suspicion of planning to ‘commit crimes,” spent 12 hours in separate holding cells and then were put on a flight home.

“We just wanted to have a good time on holiday. That was all Leigh meant in his tweets,” Bunting told The Sun.

# # #

Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

Schwartz admitted in the interview that he did in fact have a social statement underpinning Gilligan’s Island. The message was, “It’s one world, and we all have to learn to live with each other.”

In their 1995 book, Prime Time, Prime Movers, pop culture scholars David Marc and Robert J. Thompson looked at this TV series of seven very different castaways stranded on a desert island, and observed that, “Schwartz was pioneering a dramatic matrix built upon the emerging cultural concept of the ‘support group’: a collection of demographically diverse characters thrown together by circumstance and forced to become an ersatz ‘family’ in order to survive.”

If you look at the present-day State of NOW / 140 Character Conferences, you can see how low-cost video and broadband connections to the Internet have given us the ability to bring more than just a microcosm of humanity to the attention of everyone. The famous, anti-famous, non-famous and infamous have trod upon our stages, expounding on everything from founding schools in Tanzania (Stacey Monk @StaceyMonk) to the impact of Twitter on comedy (Benji Lovitt @benjilovitt; Charley Warady @charleyw), to kids and startups (George Haines @George_Haines) to raising digital media-literate kids (Bill Genereux @billgx) , to getting the message out locally about human trafficking (Jennifer White @jenwportraits) and even a brave, poignant presentation entitled, “Surviving Incest in a Small Town and How Social Media Gave Me the Courage to Speak Openly” (Joe Cheray @wildheart4vr).

As these people hurl out into cyberspace their personal histories, projects, causes, hopes and dreams, you can’t help but feel that, thanks to Internet video and social media, these people’s respective “support groups” are now non-clinical “social support networks” that extend from their close family and friends to their peers worldwide. After all, “online communities” consist of groups of people sharing common interests, who can interact over great distances thanks to the web. A call out into the electronic aether for advice, volunteers and money is now commonplace, as is simply reaching out to gain a sense of belonging, self-worth and security, or perhaps just to fish around for some compliments for a job well done.

Even so, since many of our “characters” rarely encounter many of their online contacts face-to-face, solid virtual relationships can take longer to build. But they do happen all the time, even though “people with a mission” must take on a more systematic attitude when communicating with a large number of people online.

Social media and our State of NOW / #140conf online community has the power to engage people from all walks of life, spurring them to take meaningful action, be they casual advocates or well-heeled “superhero” supporters. And everyone from undocumented immigrants to people in rehab can benefit. Shared human experience and empathy, enhanced by “ripple effects” supplied by serendipity and synchronicity, drive it all forward.

# # #

Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

James Surowiecki recently wrote in the The New Yorker (January 30, 2012) that, “the people who run America’s private-equity funds must be ruing the day Mitt Romney decided to run for President.” Conservative candidates—of all people—are portraying private-equity firms, those formerly shining showcases of capitalism such as Romney’s Bain Capital, as predatory, vulture-like creatures that use both their own money and borrowed money to acquire companies in leveraged buyouts, only to suck them dry of funds by having the companies borrow even more and then use that money to pay themselves huge “special dividends” or “management fees.” This enables them to recover their initial investment while keeping the same ownership stake, but sometimes they load the debt on to the point where the acquired companies fail to meet their obligations to creditors and so go out of business, thereby destroying jobs. The private-equity firms then blame the dissolution of the companies on unforeseen changes in economic conditions and “market forces.” (But of course by using this technique with borrowed money, the private-equity firms themselves make money no matter what.)

In his New Yorker piece, Surowiecki notes, “As if this weren’t galling enough, taxpayers are left on the hook. Interest payments on all that debt are tax-deductible; when pensions are dumped, a federal agency called the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation picks up the tab; and the money that the dealmakers earn is taxed at a much lower rate than normal income would be, thanks to the so-called ‘carried interest’ loophole. The money that Mitt Romney made when he was at Bain Capital was compensation for his (apparently excellent) work, but, instead of being taxed as income, it was taxed as a capital gain. It’s a very cozy arrangement.”

Of course, although there are leveraged buyout companies that do indeed suck their companies dry as described by Surowiecki, there are also private-equity companies that bestow upon their companies equity money—but not debt—and, in the best spirit of capitalism, assist them and nurture their growth. Thanks to lobbyist-inspired quirks in the U.S. tax system, however, an increasing number of private-equity firms find it easier to rely on what are essentially government subsidies, with many acquired companies suffering as a result.

As the political scene continues to devolve and the economic gap between the rich and everybody else widens, some amusing scenes from the plays of George Bernard Shaw come to mind…

From Shaw’s Major Barbara (1905):

BARBARA. Oh there you are, Mr. Shirley! [Between them] This is my father: I told you he was a Secularist, didn’t I? Perhaps you’ll be able to comfort one another.

UNDERSHAFT [startled] A Secularist! Not the least in the world: on the contrary, a confirmed mystic.

BARBARA. Sorry, I’m sure. By the way, papa, what is your religion—in case I have to introduce you again?

UNDERSHAFT. My religion? Well, my dear, I am a Millionaire. That is my religion.

BARBARA. Then I’m afraid you and Mr. Shirley won’t be able to comfort one another after all. You’re not a Millionaire, are you, Peter?

SHIRLEY. No; and proud of it.

UNDERSHAFT [gravely] Poverty, my friend, is not a thing to be proud of.

SHIRLEY [angrily] Who made your millions for you? Me and my like. What’s kep us poor? Keepin you rich. I wouldn’t have your conscience, not for all your income.

UNDERSHAFT. I wouldn’t have your income, not for all your conscience, Mr. Shirley.

Ironically, all of the characters in Major Barbara, even the sardonic, arms merchant millionaire Andrew Undershaft, believe that the greatest crime against humanity is poverty. Undershaft’s views were later echoed by that flamboyant American minister, electronic evangelist, and self-professed heretic, Reverend Ike (1935–2009), who proclaimed that “the best thing you could do for the poor is not to be one of them.” For, as Undershaft says, it the power of money that moves governments and determines our destinies…

UNDERSHAFT. The government of your country. I am the government of your country: I, and Lazarus. Do you suppose that you and a half a dozen amateurs like you, sitting in a row in that foolish gabble shop, can govern Undershaft and Lazarus? No, my friend: you will do what pays us. You will make war when it suits us, and keep peace when it doesn’t. You will find out that trade requires certain measures when we have decided on those measures. When I want anything to keep my dividends up, you will discover that my want is a national need. When other people want something to keep my dividends down, you will call out the police and military. And in return you shall have the support and applause of my newspapers, and the delight of imagining that you are a great statesman. Government of your country! Be off with you, my boy, and play with your caucuses and leading articles and historic parties and great leaders and burning questions and the rest of your toys. I am going back to my counting house to pay the piper and call the tune….

And from Shaw’s Heartbreak House (1919):

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You frequent picture palaces.

MANGAN. Perhaps I do. Who told you?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Talk like a man, not like a movie. You mean that you make a hundred thousand a year.

MANGAN. I don’t boast. But when I meet a man that makes a hundred thousand a year, I take off my hat to that man, and stretch out my hand to him and call him brother.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Then you also make a hundred thousand a year, hey?

MANGAN. No. I can’t say that. Fifty thousand, perhaps.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. His half brother only.

These days, of course, the “99 percent” of us are “poor relations,” increasingly distant from the sources of economic and political control. With social media reinventing social activism, however, the State of NOW and the 140 Characters Conferences can make voices heard and bring about grass-roots-powered change.

# # #

Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

The uncle replies: ‘And you wonder why you’re not invited to more parties’.”

—Woody Allen, Getting Even

Normally I’m not the kind of fellow to add a soupçon of schadenfreude to our uplifting, inspiring blog here at the State of NOW / #140conf community, but you must admit things have been pretty intense lately, given the world’s uncertain economic future (and high U.S. unemployment), the crazy, oversexed representatives of a long list of special interest groups (the super-wealthy topping the list) masquerading as statesmen-like Presidential political candidates, an ocean liner bigger than the Titanic recklessly piloted to a crash/sinking within 300 feet of a rocky shore, bankruptcy hitting Kodak (makers of the greatest photographic film of all time, the now-extinct Kodachrome), and Iran’s nuclear ambitions pushing us to the brink of World War III. And to top it off, the founder of Cracker Barrel died.

Maybe it’s just because most people feel isolated, cut off from the “cultural commotion” provoked by the world’s big events. It’s a feeling that’s said to be acutely felt among people living in small towns and rural communities, places with no stoplights that, iconically, encircle a big intersection of a bunch of roads out in the middle of somewhere.

Perhaps, however, the media, with its relentless replay of daily events, exacerbates the situation, instilling the wrong mindset in us all. For example, at #140conf NYC 2011, in the presentation, “How the Real Time Web has Bridged the Gap between Towns of 1000 People and Cities of 10 Million,” liquor store-and-ranch owner Becky McCray (@BeckyMcCray) of Oklahoma asked LogicMaze’s VP, Cody Heitschmidt (@codyks) of Hutchison, KS, his theory of how “the whole world is really like a small town.”

Heitschmidt commented that, where he lived, other than members of his family, the next person could be found two miles away. And yet, he said, because of social media and the Internet, “the whole world has changed in that my kids are now communicating with people all over the world, as opposed to this little niche that, without digital communications, we were kind of stuck in for so long.”

Moreover, by being plugged into the world in this way, small business now becomes big business.

“In small towns, out of a necessity, customer service became the only competitive advantage a businessman had in a small town. The reason is that, if you do something good in a small town, news about it travels fast. If you mess up and do something bad, that too travels just as fast in a small town. There are pro-and-con sides to it. And because of this ‘State of NOW,’ this concept that Jeff Pulver wants us to explore here, the whole world has become a small town. If you do something good or bad, the whole world can find out about it very quickly. That’s the theory. The State of NOW has made the whole world a small town because of communications.”

“That’s great,” said McCray, “because for small business owners, customer service really does become your only, sustainable, competitive advantage in this world.”

So that’s one of the great things about social media: The little guy not only has a voice that can be heard at the highest levels of government, but he or she can grab a piece of the economic pie too.

# # #

Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

Actually, it’s not that surprising, since Jeff has long been a restless, curious traveler seeking new worlds. In furtherance of this enviable pursuit, Jeff has become as much a traveler in the physical world as in the world of ideas. Like the intellectual journeyers of old, whose adventurous passages to far and exotic lands implicitly expressed their boredom and dissatisfaction with the status quo, Jeff is forever in motion, seeking out places where other restless souls, by turns both inquisitive and creative, congregate in congenial, cerebral environments to catch the many bright intellectual sparks that fly forth in such marvelous places, fanning them into raging bonfires capable of setting alight the world’s collective imagination.

One such locale Jeff will be visiting is DLD (Digital-Life-Design) 12, the flagship conference of Germany’s Hubert Burda Media empire and, in the words of David Rowan, writing in Wired, “the hottest by-invitation ticket in Europe.” Held January 22–24, 2012 at the HVB forum in Munich, Germany, and chaired by publisher Dr. Hubert Burda and investor Dr. Yossi Vardi, DLD draws over 800 intellectual citizens of the world.

The brainchild of founders Stephanie Czerny and Marcel Reichart, DLD12, like its forebears, bills itself as basically a funfest of digital innovation, though in fact its participants paint on a much bigger intellectual canvas:

Key aspects of DLD12 are data, commerce, mobile, social and the questions: Which rules apply to the data economy? What do social media and mobile devices mean for brands, retail, lifestyle and art? What makes cities attractive places for digital entrepreneurs? Which data protection do we need? What is happiness? What does the new content ecosystem look like? Will we still drive cars ourselves or control computers just with our thoughts? Are founders the new rock stars? Is there life beyond earth? Does Europe have a chance on the digital world stage? What effects do social entrepreneurs have on our society? How does one internationalize Internet companies? What makes social games so successful? India, Turkey, Africa – the markets of tomorrow?

It’s a place where you can experience everyone from Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, to physicist Freeman J. Dyson, to Yoko Ono propounding their ideas. (An old Yoko Ono story: A New York businessman wanted to hold a party for his departing secretary and went in search of a special, exotic cheese. Mysteriously, store after store was sold out of the obscure product.  As it turned out, Yoko was holding her own party that week, and had purchased every scrap of the same cheese–also her favorite–that could be found in all of the city’s five boroughs.)

Of course, when Jeff Pulver runs out of places like DLD12 to visit, he holds his own great conferences: None other than The State of Now / 140Conf community get-togethers, where speakers can hop on stage and expound on what can and should be done with the real-time Internet. It’s what we’re all about. But it’s also good to take stock of what’s happening at places like DLD12. And wherever those places are, you’ll be sure to find Jeff Pulver there, in the midst of a group of people, talking, discovering, brainstorming, and having a hell of a good time.

Marco Polo, eat your heart out.

# # #

Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

Strangely, although the state ranks second in civilian scientists and engineers as a percentage of the workforce and number of patents issued to companies or individuals per 1,000 workers (thanks partly to the presence of E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, one of the world’s largest chemical companies), Delaware has never attained the corporate “startup incubator” status of Silicon Valley, Boston, Texas, or New York.

Well, folks, perhaps that’s about to change.

On the afternoon of January 11, 2012 our own Jeff Pulver had a meeting in Dover, Delaware with Governor Jack Markell (@GovernorMarkell), to discuss how to make Delaware the innovation and startup capital of the U.S. On his way to see Markell, he stopped by the studios of WDEL 1150 AM News Talk Radio and explained on-the-air what was happening to Rick Jensen (@Jensen1150WDEL) and his audience.

Jensen: Jeff is here “in town” today for a very special reason; trying to make something good happen…

Pulver: I’m here because I was invited to meet with Governor Markell, to talk about innovation. I have this idea to make Delaware the Innovation State for America, to create an opportunity for people to want to come here, live here, to have their dreams come true. I really want to help make Delaware the Innovation State for the United States and at some level, bring back The American Dream.

Jensen: Jack Markell is one of the few governors in this country who really is totally committed to social media such as twitter and has at least one assistant who I know of over there—Felicia Pullam (@FPullam)—who works on that, as well as a lot of other communication duties. So I hear you also got to know Markell by chance through a dinner in New York City.

Pulver: Yes, since November 29^th I’ve been looking forward to be here to spend an hour with the Governor and to share some ideas, and to see whether or not it makes sense to try to make Delaware the “innovation hub” for the United States. So many people who are doing tech startups go to New York City where I’m from, or they go to Boston, or Silicon Valley. Why not Delaware? You know, many companies in the world, not just in the United States, are Delaware “C” Corporations. And yet, the companies are not actually physically here in Delaware. I want to do something to make it fun, to bring back some excitement, and then to tie together different economic interests, whether you’re into biotech, or energy, or some other kind of high-tech. Why not bring all of these different people from across the United States to Delaware to be mentors, to advise and to encourage people to seek out their dreams?

Jensen: I would think Governor Markell would be open to this. He’s been successful in bringing in a company to run the Delaware City Refinery. He’s been successful on a number of different levels… His 30,000 foot view is indeed to try to bring innovation and jobs to Delaware, and that’s what you’d like to do too. Tell us about the format of what you’re looking at…

Pulver: Well, I want to start small, perhaps do a contest. People who have ideas for businesses would apply to come to Delaware to be here for 12 or 14 weeks at a time in rotation. Perhaps there could be a TV reality show format, I’m not sure. But it would happen at an industrial loft building somewhere in an up-and-coming part of a city in the State of Delaware. It will be a place where the business community embraces it and we’re able to leverage the state to help put a “spotlight” on what’s happening. We’ll bring people together who have the dreams, the ideas, the incentives to make things happen, and match them with mentors who have experience. And at the end of the day what are we really doing? We’re giving people the chance to live a dream, to follow their inspiration and to innovate, to truly take the word “innovation” and bring it to the people. Maybe somebody will or won’t have the next Google in their head, but at least we’ll create an environment where people can try out ideas.

A friend of mine explained to me that most great ideas and discoveries start out as serendipity, as somebody else’s “good mistake.” In our lifetime, unless you’re doing deep research in science, most of the things we discover we stumble upon. What I want to do is to bring back the America where people again have an environment where they have the chance to stumble upon great ideas. And because Delaware is half-way between New York and D.C., I think it could work. I think if we could do something in Delaware, it will be a model for other cities, towns and states to embrace.

Jensen: To formalize Delaware as an incubator for entrepreneurship and innovation—I know that’s something they’d like to do.

Jensen and Pulver then speculated about how to monetize such a project.

Pulver: This is the First State. People do things first here. One interesting idea would be to do a tax incentive for everybody on a state level by perhaps creating a program where you could fill out a form and the first $5,000 you owe in taxes can go toward a startup. That way you get a credit toward your taxes, but you’re also investing in innovation. Everybody wants to invest in a dream, and everybody could be involved in this. Of course, the process would be vetted to keep out the scam artists. But could you imagine what the economy would be like with 10,000 startups and, once the word gets out that this is happening, the very deep-pocketed venture capitalists will start coming to Delaware to check out what’s here and invest too.

Jensen: So you’re not looking for any extra extraction of money from citizens in taxes or anything like that.

Pulver: No I’m actually trying to do the reverse, to create wealth, to create prosperity and to bring jobs to the city and state and every local level. But really, what I’m trying to do is bring people back to the level of inspiration that they once had, and to dream again. Whenever someone has a dream to do something but their life doesn’t allow them to follow it, if it’s in high tech, I want them to pursue those dreams. I’ve had a very fortunate life in that over the last 20 years I’ve done over 20 startups myself, some not successful, some very successful. But I’m always around people, and I’ve discovered that one of the best things you can ever do in your life is to believe in somebody. I do that all the time now; I focus on finding people who have ideas and I try to connect them with other people who can help them make things happen. I’ve learned a lot by traveling the world and seeing how other countries do this, and I think it’s about time we tried this in America. It can’t hurt.

Jensen: And why not Delaware?

Pulver: Yes, why not Delaware? Let’s give it a try right here, the First State of the Union. It could become the First Innovation State for the country, maybe for the world.

At this point I could go on at length, picking up on Jeff’s contagious enthusiasm and conflating various superficially-related ideas into an exuberant sales package for making Delaware the Innovation State. Fortunately, I’m sure Jeff and many other minds greater than mine will be doing just the opposite, “de-conflating” (or perhaps I should say disambiguating, after the philosopher Jeremy Bentham who first used that word extensively) the whole big multi-faceted idea into a series of smaller, realizable, measurable steps, all leading to the great goal that is the Delaware of the Future, the preeminent locus of American innovation.

And if you too, Dear Reader, are interested in helping to make Delaware the Innovation State, please feel free to contact Jeff Pulver (jeffp@pulver.com).

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

On my Facebook wall, Neil Garland, a fellow who I haven’t seen since college (the mid-1970s), commented on my story: “I’ve spent a lot of time in Blacksburg. ‘Wired’ doesn’t even begin to describe that place. . .”

Other readers, however, soon reminded us that there are other, “honorable mentions” in the world of electronic villages (aside from the obvious one, Palo Alto, California, in Silicon Valley); some very early—and perhaps unlikely— stops on what would become the world’s Information Highway.

TELLURIDE, COLORADO. In 1993, this sparsely populated (1,500 year-round residents) resort town, 275 miles southwest of Denver, embraced on all sides by the 13,000-foot San Juan Mountains and 130 miles from the nearest interstate highway, became the first rural community in the world to offer Internet access via a local phone call. Over 1,200 people signed up for this “InfoZone” program, founded by the Telluride Institute, a research, education and cultural organization that calls itself “The Think-And-Do-Tank of the Rocky Mountain West.”

The InfoZone Program’s two principal components were 1) the creation and operation of a vital, enhanced Community Information Infrastructure (CII), and 2) to serve as a research and development test-bed for systems and services, and for the social and economic impacts and implications of an information society and thus, by example, it hoped to promote an “ecology of the information society.”

Many experts thought Tulluride to be the perfect place for a project such as InfoZone, since over 70 percent of the town’s population had college degrees at the time, and so many scientific conferences and art and music festivals are held there that on one quiet weekend there was held a “Nothing Festival.”

Then-Governor Roy Romer was promoting high-tech development on Colorado’s Front Range corridor when the Telluride Institute’s Richard Lowenberg, a former artist and planner who worked in California’s Silicon Valley, persuaded Romer and others to consider Colorado’s Western Slope areas for high tech development too. New York networking expert Allen Rowath then became involved and helped set up the InfoZone after being lured to Telluride as a result of a conversation with Mary-Chapin Carpenter following a folk music concert.

A $20,000 Colorado state grant paid for installation of a Telluride node on the Internet during the summer of 1993. The state then leased a data line so that Telluride residents could bypass typical commercial access systems requiring long-distance calls that could cost $15 an hour or more. Apple Computers Inc. donated the computers that were stationed around the town.

Designed in part to improve education and health care services, InfoZone started out providing a special electronic bulletin board system for certain American Indian communities and environmental groups. InfoZone provided free email, local and national news, conferences, and other community information. Users could log on at Apple terminals in the library, a bank, a coffee shop (the Steaming Bean Café), the regional hospital and the state agricultural center. The system allowed for participation and exchange with text postings, audio, and images. Lowenstein commented that multidimensional drawings of projects, such as a proposed expansion of expansion of Telluride ski area, could be delivered to residents’ homes via InfoZone.

At the same time, another member of the InfoZone board, Greg Law, created an audio-text service enabling callers to obtain information on town affairs, such as the upcoming town council agenda, which was faxed free of charge to any resident simply by phoning into an automated answering service.

In 1995, SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on GRAPHics and Interactive Techniques) the annual conference on computer graphics convened by the ACM SIGGRAPH organization, highlighted Telluride and InfoZone by creating a special electronic public forum, with various special-interest project folders on education, the arts, tele-community planning, and live chats (“Tellu-Tell Me”). Topics of particular interest included community health, environmental issues, Native American writers, cultural master planning, and salons. Dedicated networked computers at SIGGRAPH 95 allowed visitors to connect with users throughout the Telluride Region, at home, and via the many public access tele-computing sites around town.

Ironically, the little former mining town of Telluride had had been the Silicon Valley of the 1890s. In 1891, a Telluride entrepreneur, Lucien Lucius Nunn (1853–1925) was engaged in gold mining, journalism and banking in the town. To improve his mining operations at the Gold King Mine 3.5 miles away, Nunn financed the world’s first commercial alternating current power plant, the Ames Hydroelectric Generating Plant, built by Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse. This groundbreaking development began the “War of Currents” between the Westinghouse Electric Corporation (promoting AC) and the General Electric Company (promoting DC) headed by Thomas Edison and J.P. Morgan.

A few people in 1993 speculated that projects such as InfoZone were a scheme for subsidizing people called “Lone Eagles,” the first generation of wealthy telecommuters who transplanted their jobs to America’s resorts, countryside and small communities. (In 1994, Denver’s Center for the New West estimated that there were about 10 million of these Lone Eagles scattered about the countryside. I even recall that, back in the 1990s, Rupert Murdoch was spending about six months of the year in Aspen, Colorado.)

Today, “teleworking” is common. As for Telluride’s InfoZone, it’s use is restricted to private communications for staff and consultants of the Telluride Institute.

GLASGOW, KENTUCKY. In 1994 this town of 14,062 people situated in Barren County, KY (halfway between Louisville and Nashville near Mammoth Cave National Park), became fully “networkized” by the local electric utility, the Glasgow Electric Plant Board. They used coaxial cabling that supplied not only cable TV (54 channels) and telephone, but also email, high-speed Internet access (50 times the existing dialup speed of 28Kbps) and a local network for homes and businesses called HomeLAN, which eventually would allow residents to program household appliances to run at the times of day when electric rates were lowest. Indeed, the whole project actually began in 1985, when the Glasgow Electric Plant Board investigated the idea of creating a wired network to connect to all of the town’s electric meters, a concept too advanced for that time, but commonplace today. The board decided, what the heck, let’s wire the town anyway for cable TV and that way the cabling would already exist to carry Internet traffic to-and-from residents when and if that became popular.

In 1989 cable service arrived via Scripps-Howard, then Comcast bought the network, eventually selling its 3,000 remaining customers to Glasgow in 2001. In the early 1990s Internet experts from MCI approached the town when they heard about the town’s cable TV wiring, offering Internet technology and expertise.

Although originally a coaxial network, Glasgow later upgraded to a hybrid fiber-to-the-neighborhood network, with fiber-optic lines going to groups of 200 homes serviced by coaxial cable.

At the time of its creation in 1994, sponsors and enthusiasts of HomeLAN and high bandwidth fiber optic Internet connections felt that things live videoconferencing would become commonplace, workers would telecommute, students would eventually take many classes from home, and high-tech businesses would be attracted to a town that placed signs on the roads reading “www.glasgow-ky.com.”

Unlike Blacksburg, Virginia, however, the impact of high-speed communications and networking on Glasgow wasn’t quite as great. For Glasgow, “high tech” business continued to be its production of auto parts. Farming (tobacco, dairy and cattle) remained the principal aspects of the local economy, despite the fact that it had a five-year head start on other, wealthier communities.

In an interview in August 2000, Andy Carvin (@acarvin), then running an email discussion group from Washington, D.C. on equalizing net access, told AP that “Just because you put technology in place doesn’t mean people have the skills to use it successfully. If you lack skills and content, access doesn’t add up to much.” Billy Ray, who had run Glasgow’s Internet service from its beginnings, was also quoted as saying, “Some of them [towns looking to follow Glasgow’s lead] think… just by dragging a reel of fiber-optic cable to town, the high-tech companies will come. This is only an element of a well-planned, well-operated community, It’s not going to heal all your ills.” Still, some companies in town had websites and were selling and shipping products worldwide.

Even as late as 2000 Glasgow was doing pioneering work. The town used its network to control sets of traffic lights along U.S. 31E, and its agencies shared computerized maps online to coordinate utility repairs and plot school bus routes. And that summer the town was finally experimenting with monitoring 7,000 electric meters and automatically shutting off water heaters during periods of peak demand. This proved to be an excellent move: By 2003, Glasgow residents were paying just $19 a month for 70 cable channels and super-fast Internet access for an additional $25—half the national average at that time—because the city-owned electric utility provided both cable TV and Internet access over the wires that monitored power usage, and (best of all) the utility was simply recovering its costs, not trying to actually profit from its service.

In fact, Billy Ray, still utility superintendent in 2003, estimated that since Glasgow began offering cable in 1989, $32 million of residents’ money stayed in the town, as opposed to being funneled into the pockets of giant telecom companies, most of which would not have been able to offer the advanced services available to the wired community of Glasgow anyway. (Not surprisingly, the mammoth phone and cable companies panicked over the 500+ utilities that were deploying cut-rate broadband and other services around the U.S., and began to fight to block any public gas, water and electric utilities from providing telecom services.)

TAOS, NEW MEXICO. Taos has long been known as a tourism and arts mecca, but at one time it had a rickety phone system and its populace dwelt on the other side of the “digital divide.” Fortunately, two financial grants aided the La Plaza Telecommunity Foundation (www.laplaza.org), a non-profit organization formed in 1994 partly to help compensate for the lack of ISPs in Taos County (pop. 27,000) by furnishing low-cost and free public access to everyone in the Taos, New Mexico, region. By 1994 nearly 25 percent of the area’s 10,000 residents signed up. For those folk who didn’t own computers, 15 computers were available for use 12 hours a day at the La Plaza Telecommunity Center. Residents used the program for sending and receiving email, research and home schooling. A website was built to act as a cybercenter for the town.

Free public Internet access was available at three locations, one of them being the La Plaza office building, equipped with a T-1 line from Albuquerque; the others were in Questa and Penasco in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The least expensive way to project Internet access out there was to use wireless microwave connections between towers.

In April 1997 the days of free Internet surfing through the La Plaza Telecommunity Foundation came to an end, with home users charged a flat rate of $6 for six hours on online use and 75 cents for each additional hour after that. Users prior to that time were able to stay online up to 15 hours per month at no charge (which would now cost $12.75), though computer use at La Plaza Research Center and at their labs in Penasco and Questa remained free of charge.

Network access was all the more meaningful in Taos because many residents in remote Questa didn’t have telephones and used services such as Dialpad.com to make online calls. Internet access also helped the The Michael McCormick Gallery (still found at www.mccormickgallery.com) generate a third of its business thanks to visitors to the gallery’s website.

“We can sell artwork all over the world. It’s convenient for someone in Saudi Arabia to see the site and send me an email,” McCormick said.

Other towns in the 1990s that dabbled with dedicated Internet connections include Harlan, Iowa, pop. 5,128 and Barbourville, Kentucky, pop. 3,973, where local utilities were responsible for installing high-speed networking. Fort Morgan, Colorado, pop. 20,049 arranged for state grants to purchase new equipment and subsidize high bandwidth service for five years.

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

Seneferu’s successor, Khufu (Cheops), built the Great Pyramid of Giza, and workmen calling themselves “The Craftsman Gang” left their graffiti on a limestone block, unearthed 4,500 years later by Yale University archaeologist Mark Lehner. These fellows were not slaves, but conscripts (perhaps they could avoid army service by working on the pyramid). These work gangs tended to have vivid and competitive names such as “Step Pyramid gang,” “Boat gang,” “Vigorous gang,” “Sceptre gang,” “Enduring gang,” “North gang” and “South gang”. These gangs were part of larger groups working under an overseer. (There appear to have been four principal overseers, one for each side of the pyramid.)

Lehner discovered that much of the workmen’s graffiti were “tags.” The work gangs would “tag” construction areas for which they responsible—their “turf.” Today, of course, the simplest and most simple and widespread kind of graffiti is that signatory mark known as a tag. “Tag” has also become a verb meaning “to sign.” Moreover, there are also “tags” on blogs and websites, allowing for informal, unstructured classification of content. People are also “tagged” in photos on Facebook, etc.

But graffiti is still with us, even in this electronic, Internet age. At the 140Conf held in New York City, July 16, 2011, Jeff Pulver assembled the graffiti artists Jessey Pacho (@ArtofPhade) and Kedre Browne (@BubzArt), along with Scott Mills (@GraffitiBMXCop), the Social Media Officer and Graffiti Art Coordinator of the Toronto Police / Crime Stoppers International, for the presentation: “Graffiti Art, Twitter and The Police.”

As Pulver said, “When I create these events, I try to go out of my way to find people who maybe you never heard of before, but are just changing the world and making the world a better place. I think it was in December [2010] when I was in a diner in Toronto and I had a chance to meet a constable, a police officer, from Toronto, and he brought with him a couple of graffiti artists. In fact, one of them, the one who made the logo here, refused to sign his name to it, even though I asked him to. Scott Mills here is just this incredible person. He does work with Crime Stoppers International, and not only is he a cop who tweets, but he has a big heart. He’s been working with people—particularly graffiti artists, using them to leverage and effect change in ways which I never thought was possible.”

“These people have been in New York for a few days and they’ve done some incredible work here already,” said Pulver. “Scott is an incredible human being and I just want to put a lens to him and have him come out and share a story and bring out his ‘crew.’”

And with that Scott Mills emerged from offstage, soon accompanied by graffiti artists Jessey Pacho (@ArtofPhade) and Kedre Browne (@BubzArt), and photographer Steven Walton, who Mills described as “an important part of the team.” One artist who couldn’t make it that day was Nicholas Maharaj (@twittnick) who had to be in school. “School’s first,” said Mills, “and that’s what this is all about.”

“I’ve been a police officer for 21 years, in two different major urban police services,” said Mills. “Peel Regional Police, which is Mississauga and Brampton that you see when you fly into Toronto, into the airport, and Toronto Police, where I’m currently the Social Media Officer. I work in the Media Office, corporate communications now, but I was assigned to work about five years ago with the Crime Stoppers program, which is a community program, run by the community for the community. The goal is to provide a service for anonymous tips to help stop, prevent and solve crimes worldwide. “

“One person, one officer, was assigned to educated 2.5 million youth in Toronto as to how to use that service,” said Mills. “I asked, ‘How can we do that better?’ We had three missing teens at the time, one from my old school. I said that we needed to use social media. And so we started a YouTube account. We’ve got close to 3,000 videos on YouTube now. If you go on YouTube or Google ‘Toronto Crime Stoppers,’ you’ll see all types of videos, and it’s not just appeals for information from wanted fugitives or appeals for crimes. It’s community building.”

“I realized that graffiti had a really great place in the hearts of many people, including—and especially—youth,” said Mills. “I also realized that BMX Bikes had a soft spot in their hearts for the kids, and it was good for them. So we started up separate YouTube accounts called TorontoBMX and Legal Graffiti Art. We started giving kids opportunities and posting them on the Internet. Kedre reached out to me on the YouTube Legal Graffiti Art account and said, ‘Scott, I know you’re a cop. You don’t know me. I don’t even live in Toronto—I live in Mississauga,’ which was the area of my old police force. He said, ‘I want to have an opportunity.’ That was four years ago. In 2008 Kedre was given the honor of Crime Stoppers International Student of the Year, from among 1,300 Crime Stoppers programs worldwide. [Applause] He was introduced in Des Moines, Iowa at the 28^th annual training conference for Crime Stoppers International as a graffiti artist working with the police. Absolutely phenomenal, because we could actually now get anonymous information and build trust between police and crime stoppers in the community to get the information to actually prevent a crime, to get the gun off of the street before somebody dies.”

“Our tips went from 300 a month to over 1,000 a month in two years, using social media,” said Mills. “But it’s not just social media. It’s relationships and technology. And Joanne Wallace, thanks so very much for introducing us to Jeff Pulver, who believed in us. We had a chance meeting in a bar in Toronto, because of an invite from Joanne… I said to Jeff, ‘I have these great guys working with me on the theme of Graffiti and BMX and many other positive activities. Can you help me?’ Jeff looked at me and he said, ‘Let me help you.’ Well help he has. He introduced us to Invisible People (@invisiblepeople) through these guys [three men, Mark Horvath and the two artists, appear on stage]. We decided that we believed so much in raising awareness about homelessness that we wanted to raise the hope for the homeless. We wanted to show the world not really what our ‘angle’ was, but we wanted to help something for the State of NOW. And so these boys came with me down here. We didn’t know where we were going to paint, and we ended up at Tuff City Tattoos in the Bronx, and they painted this mural which the boys are going to tell you about. It’s entitled Hope for Homeless, and I hope that everybody out there is going to put some hope out there for the homeless.”

Mills elaborates: “How this fits in with Crime Stoppers is that, when we were driving down here, I got a tweet from Mark Horvath saying, ‘You need to hook up with @singlesteph380. Well, she’s Stephanie Barnes, and she’s now my friend. We’re all hooked up on Facebook and twitter. She installed our ‘Leave a Tip Tab’ on Facebook from Crime Stoppers. While we here [in New York City] we helped Tuff City Tattoos install a Leave a Tip tab, and they’re out there tweeting us today. They’re feeling the love, all because of relationships and technology.”

“Back home, people are watching,” said Mills. “I got an email backstage saying that the mayor, who is probably one of the most conservative mayors Toronto has ever had—but he’s a good guy—wants to have some police-sanctioned murals in Toronto, and ‘can Scott Mills give us a list.’ That email just came to me backstage, and I sent a message to my boss Megan on twitter saying, ‘You just changed my presentation!’ Thanks for that information. Very timely. The State of NOW!”

“We want to do a social media campaign,” said Mills. “We want the boys to paint airplanes with stuff like this. We want to have a social media campaign for Crime Stoppers International and have people take photos of themselves in front of beautiful artwork like this, with messaging like Mark’s, and these guys’ messages, and the world’s message, and the community coming together, and then you install the mobile apps, you go to places where you connect with relationships and technology. You download Crime Stoppers and you submit a tip anonymously when you have that bad feeling that something might go down, and we prevent something like a terrorist attack.”

“We were at Ground Zero today here,” said Mills, now almost overcome with emotion. “We drove down here in a Canadian Heroes van, and we’re driving home in a Canadian Heroes van, thanks to Chris Eckland. We never want another terrorist attack like September 11^th. We can prevent this people! We can prevent it, with trust and relationships and technology. We can. That’s why we want to paint airplanes! Think about when you’re going to get on a plane when you’re leaving here, and you take a picture with one of Richard Branson’s Virgin planes, or anybody’s plane. And they actually take it, put it on twitpic or Facebook, they go to our page, they download the app, and when they get that spider sense that something’s wrong, then they get that tip in and the authorities can actually go and stop something like that from happening before it starts. How many people up for that? Anybody up for that? [Applause]”

Graffiti artist Jessey Pacho then mentioned how he met Scott Mills in 2007 through Kedre. He at first didn’t trust Mills because he was a police officer, but decided to take a chance. “And from 2007 to the present,” said Pacho, “we’ve just been working together. We’ve become friends, and it’s been amazing. It’s such a blessing to know him because we bring his message and his movement to a crowd that he can’t necessarily reach, being a police officer. And vice versa—I mean, I never thought back then that I’d be on this stage or anywhere talking to these professionals, talking to these people about what we’re doing. I’m just a graffiti artist, right? But it’s not being ‘just’ a graffiti artist. When you look past the negative stigma that graffiti has, you realize that it’s actually a pretty powerful tool to effect positive change and to help build communities. I remember a mural project I managed in Toronto, and last summer we painted a mural for the Highway of Heroes dedicated to the fallen troops. The residents of the building and the condos nearby didn’t necessarily care about those back alleys, but from the mural that I facilitated with that group, they were inspired to organize a community cleanup and they came down and cleaned up all of the alleyways and really made their area beautiful. And all of this community building was inspired by the painting of a mural that came from the graffiti that we do.”

Kedre Browne explained how they wanted to do a large scale mural in New York, what was in the mural and how Tuff City Tattoos gave them the opportunity to have some fun in the process.

The whole presentation was the result of a perfect amalgam of synchronicity, social media and earnest goodwill. Another little monument in the State of NOW.

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

In any case, the most controversial art book of that time (1975, to be exact) was Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word. The legendary author of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, and The Bonfire of the Vanities had taken aim at the world of contemporary art, coming to the conclusion that “Art” (with a capital “A”) was defined by a clique of super-influential critics of the day—in particular Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg and Leo Steinberg.

This controversy has become heightened in recent years, as social media can literally make every blogger an art critic, complete with his or her own “art theory.” It surfaced at the 140 Characters Conference in Tel Aviv, held on July 6, 2010, in a panel discussion entitled, “Twitter and the Arts,” moderated by Romi Itzhaki (@romi99).

Itzhaki started by saying, “…what I’m talking about is to combine art and technology in ways that includes audience participation as part of the experience.” noting that, in a visit to an exhibition at a museum or art gallery, “you experience something: Excitement, boredom—you’re moved, you’re sad. And no one has that but you. You have no control over the experience. You leave the room and you leave no mark. A visitor who visits the exhibition after you has no clue about your experience, your feelings, your thoughts. And they have no control over the exhibition or see interpretations of the work. And I’d like to change it. First of all, I’d like to enable audience comments and display them as part of the exhibition. Our consumer is an art critic. You could display more context, do you think, using augmented reality in order to allow the user to explain his experience of the exhibitions to create continuity in the space? And we haven’t thought about Twitter as a tool to gauge the audience preference and affect the exhibition selections. And in one sense the audience reactions should be an intimate part of the exhibition. And in this panel we will look into this concept, trying to evaluate it, good or bad.”

Panelist and publisher Deddy (David) Zucker, said, “In listening carefully to the speakers, the message of many of them was very clear. And that was that authority—“The Authority”—does not exist anymore. Or you could call it the diminishing of authority, of power. We can talk about the source of the news. Who or what is the source of news? What is truth? Everybody participates, and nobody knows what’s true and what’s not true, what’s false and what’s real. So why should we behave differently in the arts? I mean, who is the authority to decide for me what’s a good piece of art? Why should 10 critics or 20 or 30 teachers decide for me what’s a good piece art? I have friends who may understand a piece of art, much better than most critics.”

Romi Itzhaki responded with, “So what you’re saying is that not only should the audience participate, the audience should decide what is considered art?”

Zucker replied: “I would even say more. I can see us dispense the idea of an exhibition being of great artists. I mean, who said that we cannot be the greatest? Let us assume that your mother’s gallery presents us a proposition of hundreds of works, and the walls can take only 15. Who says you couldn’t create a better exhibition not with critics, but with the decisions of one thousand people who are twittering on the web?”

Fellow panelist Miki Kratzman (head of the Photography department of Bezalel Academy of Art) was more in favor of critics, saying “I think the problem with this idea is that, when you see a piece of art, if you don’t know anything about it, like when you see Picasso’s Guernica, you need some knowledge to put things in context. You combine the context, and the [existing] knowledge when you view a piece of art.”

David Zucker reacted with, “It’s not a journalist or a professor who knows about the background of Guernica, it’s definitely necessary to know it, however. But since we are all living in the liberal world, we all know that Guernica is part of the Civil War in Spain. We are part of those who admire and support the Republicans rather than the Fascists. But I can think of many people who could look at Guernica quite differently than we ‘liberals’ do. So why give them the power, or the ‘authority’ to interpret Guernica? I could think of people who supported Franco, or may be even more dedicated—people who are revisionists looking at the Republicans in Spain and thinking of their crimes during the Spanish Civil War. These people look at Guernica differently than we liberals do. And if you are a Catalan or a Basque, you look at Guernica differently than an authority who sits somewhere and tells us what he thinks the painting is all about. Guernica is about many stories. We can all make stories to be part of the [painting’s] background. There is no single background. There are backgrounds. It is in the eyes of the visitor to an exhibition what is Guernica and what it expresses. For some people it expresses a disaster, for others a hope. They are all very equal [in importance] and they all have the right to explain to me what Guernica is.”

The third panelist, performance artist Maya Elran, said she wanted to “take a middle line between what these two gentlemen are saying… Like it or not, there is a mass of people who create extra content and context for each work that has been created in the real world. The way I see it, in terms of those of us who have been engaged in performance art, I am interested in what happens in between the people who are creating the artifact and the audience itself. To me this is the arena in which all of this is happening. Performance art is actually based on assembling of three things: First of all, the human body is your material, and the two other elements are that it is time-based and space-based. It’s almost as if it’s only the experience that the audience can take back. There is no way to create a ‘souvenir’ out of this art. We have to be there to experience it in real-time. But many people within the Internet community may have a clue or think they have a clue about such art. Even so, one can meet a varied audience, people I know who know the history of each and every work. “

The questions posed by Tom Wolfe decades ago still reverberate in places like 140conf Tel Aviv 2010. What do you think? Are you one of the “I know art when I see it” crowd?

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.