The Seeker Academy Bookblog

A few people who know me only through The Seeker Academy have asked what I’m doing now. I’ll give half an answer; as I’m half unsettled. And, while this jumps ahead, I’ll add the detail that a couple of mornings each week I stop for coffee in a spacious strip mall that, until 2006, had been for decades a fenced-off Superfund site.

If you’ve read the novel, even the Amazon reviews, you know I’m a literary writer. One thing this means is that I won’t write again about New Age themes, in the serial way (Three Healing Paths, then Four Healing Paths, then, Five…) of New Age genre writers. Instead, I do my best in the pages of the story and then I pack my literary god figurines and move on down the line.

Being without funds, and worn out from writing my novel and searching for readers, my next station stop has been away from fiction. I remember a day last autumn when, resting, too worn out to read even a mystery, I saw in the Woods Hole library a book about the technologies coming alive to address climate change and rising global energy demand. I could barely scan the table of contents in a thoughtful way, but I understood at once that, as I had to earn a living and had a high tech background and saw climate change as an extra-ordinary threat, this was my next destination.

Eight months later, time spent working my mind more and, before a brief vacation, gasping from the effort, I’m back in tech, consulting to a solar module startup. My recovering attention has turned to electricity: I sing not Whitman’s poetic “body electric,” but electric power’s business value chain.

And so, arriving early to beat traffic, I stop near the San Jose company at a Starbucks set among other replicant storefronts. Gas costs and a new immorality of driving keeps me from going farther afield. Nearby are barren hills. The Superfund site grew from leaks by a semiconductor manufacturer. Solar companies are here because solar, like computer chips, has a semiconductor base. Well-intentioned, I work in the service of technologies whose ultimate influences I can’t know. I view this technical flowering as but one side of the hard-to-grasp changes to our lives that climate change will bring.

I wrote my novel of the holistic movement as an act of moral clearing. What words matter, now? From the words, what practices and acts? Now I’m back in the world, where I put my hero Grace Hudson at the novel’s end. Like her, I earn my way and try (my choice) in new circumstances to do good. Like her, I look for a sense of a path as I walk the foggy forest floor.

I’ll end with the novelist’s song: Read my book!

Some work I do other than writing and (now) promoting The Seeker Academy, my novel about the liberal counterculture, concerns physical place and community in relation to the Internet. I’m proud to say that Libraries For The Future, a national advocacy group, has begun to publish on its blog, here, a discussion piece I wrote for them early in 2007. It is titled “Public Libraries In The Internet Age”; they are posting weekly installments and inviting comments.

If you favor value-based uses of technology, with the many predicaments this position entails–and if you believe in the institution of public libraries–check the paper out.

To Compete With Amazon.com,

Imitate And Improve On Its Reviewing Platform

I’m an indie publisher, a PMA member, and author of The Seeker Academy, a just-published literary novel that explores the holistic/ mind-body-spirit movement. I’ve also been an Internet media specialist for two decades: consulting in 2006 to Yahoo, and in 2007 to the nonprofit Americans For Libraries Council (ALC). My ALC work concerns how public libraries can best use the Internet, viewed as an emerging publishing medium. As an advocate for local empowerment, I find it natural to switch my concern from the 9,000 public library systems to the 1,800 independent bookstores.

I sense that many indie booksellers do not look closely at the Internet. One told me recently to take the Amazon reviews I’d brought to show him off his counter. He seemed to think he fully knew his business.

In fact, though, this bookseller’s business is being shaken, and uncertainties abound. For one thing—the subject of this letter—the reviewing infrastructure that sits upstream from retail on the book business value chain is coming apart. Two Internet-driven shocks are causing this to happen:

The print periodical business model is being upended. Much of the ad revenue it depends on is moving to the Internet—a more effective medium for most niche market advertising… for reaching fly-fishing enthusiasts, etc. Fewer print ads means fewer newspaper and magazine pages, thus fewer reviews. The book editor role is being reduced or consolidated.

The Internet’s emergence as a social space challenges the book editor’s cultural authority. A city with two daily papers and a weekly paper has at most three book editors and a few dozen freelance reviewers. Yet it also has many thousands of readers. With collective opinions about every topic, used to reading reviews and responding only rarely with letters to the book editor: these readers now can choose to also write reviews and to engage in more open-ended online conversations.

These shifts redefine the bookstore business. Customers, who until now consumed reviews, can have more of a say; they can join the taste makers. Amazon.com has begun to figure this out; ABA has not.

A book’s Amazon page displays editorial and customer reviews. If the customer reviewing platform can be abused—if an author’s cousins can write reviews—it is transparent enough to be reasonably credible. One can read and compare reviews, see reader comments on a review, and look at a reviewer’s other reviews. Once a number of reviews are posted, they give taken together a sense of what the book is like.

The ABA in its Web presences provides, on the other hand, a closed system, weak features, and a poor showing of its value. It has no customer reviewing platform. It only points to Booksense Picks, a tallying of the favorite books of member stores. Browsers see signed blurbs—not reviews—and lack a way to discuss a book or a blurb with other readers. ABA booksellers, rather than invite engagement, rest on what they must see as their positions of influence.

This attitude is shortsighted, as it sees neither Amazon’s game nor the chance ABA has to compete. The game is about online social networks, joining published works to conversations. These networks make print culture-exclusive bookstores (and libraries) relatively less valuable.

In fact, though, this network model points to an advantage ABA can have over vendors like Amazon, and to how ABA-member bookstores can extend their local reach. If the Amazon reviewing platform lets one gauge a book by browsing it, by comparing reviews and evaluating reviewers, and by tapping into reader discussions, it remains ungrounded: it offers no physical connection. It lacks the warm local presence and the communal air of, say, a Main Street Books.

Building An ABA Reviewing Platform

Booksense Picks samples at a miniscule rate the staff-written reviews displayed in most indie bookstores. Yet in the space-is-cheap frontier of online social networks, value resides in volume, not samples. Among 1800 ABA members, how many current and recent reviews have been written, on average, by staff—50 per store, or 90,000? And, was there a value to the staff reviews that carried beyond the local store, and offered prizes, how many might be written in the next year—again, 50 per store, or 90,000 more? And finally, could customers write reviews that would display across the network and be eligible for prizes, how many might they write in the next year—once more, 50 per store, or 90,000?

In this scenario, using what may be low estimates, we see gathered 270,000 reviews. Add the discussions that can augment reviews and you see the potential of an ABA-managed community-reviewing network. Then let it build over time. Readers would know that each review and discussion linked to a bookstore that, like our Main Street Books, is a local anchor. Each store would add its local accountability to the network. And each could use the network as a promotional tool: deepening its local ties by letting its staff do more than sell and by letting its customers be more than just consumers.

The ABA, by imitating the Amazon reviewing platform and by adding its based-in-the-local credibility, can build an online-and-physical social network more purposeful than those of its corporate competitors.

Singularity and Synchronicity

When Destinies Collide

Five months after the release of The Secret, its DVD remains the #1 seller on Amazon, with a million plus purchases and nearly 500 customer reviews. Of the ten reviews voted by readers “most helpful,” the top one (528 votes!!) gives the video Amazon’s highest rating; it is titled “FINALLY - The Truth Be Told.” “All my life,” it begins, “I have secretly known what THE SECRET exposes to the world in this fabulous DVD.”

The next eight “most helpful” reviews, though, dislike the video. One is title “Yet another New Age Psuedo-Spiritualist Materialistic Multi-Level Marketing Gimmick.” A few say the video simply twists out of proportion a sometimes-useful old idea.

Called “the law of attraction,” this idea is now debated in Amazon reviews and holistic forums. Mention is made of the underlying resonance of the “law,” called once “the power of positive thinking.” When one is clear about goals, they can be more achievable. Anyone counseling a friend would obey this lowest level of the law. To become a professional web developer—one might tell a student—get at it, and take the technical classes you’ll need. Yet, one’s advice to a friend with weak eyes would likely point to different goals. Most often, common sense suggests, the universe listens best to those who can best be heard.

This idea of aligning one’s life, specifically, in a careful practice, is a tenet among holistic students; so, many of them cringe as The Secret turns the idea into a mechanical process whose successes it guarantees. Be materialist and be specific, the video declares. If you want an Italian villa, you will get one whatever your situation. Beneath the guarantee is a prospect of mystical forces that help people who are believers. So, the law pertains potentially to everyone. And giving it conceptual cover is Carl Jung, who in the 1950s extended his theory of the collective unconscious to an idea that a non-causal pattern of meaning he termed synchronicity shapes some life events. Tap into, exploit the pattern, The Secret (unlike Jung) promises, and you’ll be given whatever you want.

The kernel of cultural wonder present in all this—think of Homer, whose gods, to suit their moods, play with human lives—is fueling a discussion (my input is here). Yet, to me, the Amazon numbers spoke as much of The Secret as a mass culture phenomenon. So, I took a detour with my browser, using The Secret as a Technorati search term and filtering the search to find blogs that had “a lot of authority.” Outside of Amazon, Zaadz and my book-marked holistic blogs, what would the larger world say? On the first results page I saw a blog not clearly pro or con, with two hundred incoming links. Clicking it, I turned away from this milieu of impressions to a law that is written in stone.

The blog, Schlueterica, has the tag line “Yet Another Web Geek’s Web Site.” The blogger is a web developer, and most of his posts and links are techie: concerning Javascript, DOM, FreeBSD, etc. Yet, he is also, as he says, an atheist, an objectivist and a capitalist, and his atheism and perhaps his other leanings led him to The Secret. “Get in on the New Hot Thing in Religious Bullshit!” his post about it begins. “Christianity? Islam? Hinduism? Old hat! We need shiny new idols to pray to! How about a picture of a bike? Yeah, that’s reasonable… ” Then, two paragraphs down, he adds some opinionated cultural reporting:

“Shame on Oprah for pushing this cult on her brain-dead legion! They might be mindless, but she should know better…. Though I’m blessed to be in a relatively nonreligious place, Los Angeles seems to be the veritable Holy Land for stupid ‘we’re all energy’ new-age cults like this one. It’s no wonder that Scientology is so rampant in this place. The Secret is all over the place.”

Reading this, my thoughts flew in several directions. From opposing positions, this blogger and many holistic students came to a similar dislike for The Secret. His Los Angeles as a “veritable Holy Land, etc…” sounded like the Amazon forum, which in turn seemed to represent people everywhere or at least in the old USA. And then I thought: “Oprah[’s]… brain-dead legion.” Was or wasn’t that a little harsh?

Then—probably with the word “synchronicity” in my synapses—I began to think about “the singularity.”

More accurately, I thought about “technological singularity,” a scientific theory that when borrowed by science fiction is called “the singularity.” Fiction and theory aside, it refers to an altering of human life far greater than any in recorded human history, which science and business may bring about in forty years. A respected technologist, Raymond Kurzweil, is forecasting this time frame. The singularity predicts an earth governed by a superhuman intelligence. This may come from human-computer interfaces that increase dramatically (quoting Wikipedia) “the power of human thought,” or from computers themselves coming to have “at least human-level thought.”

The validity and time frame of this theory are scientific matters, and sci-fi is imagining what this new species might be like. What relates it to the current anxieties of Oprah, Los Angeles and Amazon is Moore’s Law, which is the basis for Kurzweil’s projections on the singularity, and for much of the everyday reality that fills the life of the atheist blogger at Schlueterica. Actually, it greatly shapes how we all live today.

Moore’s Law, articulated in 1965, states that every two years, twice the transistors fit cheaply into half the space on an integrated circuit. This law has remained in effect, and a circuit design unveiled this year extends it for decades more. Kurzweil and others think new computer technologies will replace these circuits and extend the law forever.

If we are to lose our human sensibility, of course, “forever” may only refer to the next forty or fifty years.

The journalist Thomas Friedman, in his 2006 book The World is Flat, describes ways in which market forces, riding Moore’s Law, are reshaping everyday life. Largely, he is speaking of the Internet. Its making information cheaply publishable and accessible may mostly encourage readers of this weblog. Yet these decentralizing energies are matched by centralizing energies in terms of outsourcing and supply-chaining: these terms take us quickly to the Wal-Marts and Macdonalds down our roads and on our screens, and to economic forces that both favor big companies and make them even less responsible to actual human communities.

Wherever our society is in half a century, the march from now to then will be defined at least in part by continuous, momentous technological change. To Friedman, the many Moore’s Law-driven shifts are and will continue magnifying one another. Today among other end-results, we have high definition TV, which comes enticingly to further reorient our lives. As with facing east to pray, facing this carrier of continuous entertainment is a chosen or an imposed fate.

These changes, even as they captivate and sometimes inspire us, grind into us at various personal, family, local, generational, communal, and occupational levels. Physical life and its mandates continue to change, and objects functional in one decade are nostalgia in the next. Meaning and value becomes harder and harder to pass on to the young. Reasons why a society might choose not to adopt any particular technology or even not to mate with machines become less and less identifiable. A rampant cult of people hungry for connections that they feel they need begins to roam around Los Angeles.

In various ways and with varied levels of self-awareness, others try to deepen—beyond this materialistic reckoning—their sense of what the human experience can be. Many see The Secret as a cultish object, but they would, I think, view our society’s faith in strict materialism, capitalism, and science as equally and more ominously cultish.

Seen this way, the cult-laden, Oprah-watching L. A. (e.g., everywhere) viewed by the Schlueterica blogger is a place he fits into perfectly. To borrow from Firesign Theater, we are all of us now bozos on this bus.

From a binding idea that life in the world, for non-fundamentalists, today holds extreme uncertainties, this weblog will comment and report on and gather resources around three thematic groupings. They are related, often plainly and at other times less so—that is, the postings and conversations will try to work out the relationships.

The Mind/Body/Spirit movement sets its sights on wellness and spiritual presence and more generally on how to conduct one’s life. Practical and philosophical, it looks beyond consumer culture and codified religions to take an individualistic, experiential approach to self discovery. Following or adapting various wisdom teachings, its members explore, give attention to their minds, their bodies, their hearts and their souls. For a tangle of reasons the explorations can feel to participants and observers alike both deeply meaningful and deeply silly.

The Spiritual/Progressive movement, founded in recent years, is taking steps to build a progressive political movement anchored in spiritual beliefs and practices. It opposes the politics of conservatism and reaction, which has a fundamentalist and often hierarchical spiritual orientation. Yet, it is emerging in a progressive movement that is now weak; it faces opposition from some progressives, who don’t think spirituality matters or should matter in politics; and its leaders are taking positions that the movement will probably wrestle with further as it matures. Having just begun, spiritual progressives may have also just begun to know what they believe and what their questions are and who their allies are.

These first movements undergird The Seeker Academy, my literary novel, which 4361 Press is publishing; and an aim of this weblog is to foster a conversation about ideas the novel presents. My posts will provide journalism and commentary. These movements, Mind/Body/Spirit (or Holistic Healing) and Spiritual/Progressive, complementary at times, both against the grain of mainstream culture, provide a rich, worthy subject.

A third thematic area, Virtual/Physical, seems not to fit the other two. Yet it is a point of entry for this weblog to the vast ongoing technology-driven changes to everyday life that are a source of this era’s uncertainties. A reason to seek spiritual grounding and a related political stance must be to better face life’s turmoil. Thus this weblog will on occasion probe the Internet, a creator of turmoil and the one technology I am equipped to write about. My primary area of study will be the impact of virtual space and community on physical space and community. I now consult on this question, which has strong moral components, to the non-profit Libraries For The Future.