__ Episode 2: People Are Talking __
You can tell a lot about the state of a civilization from the quality of its gossip. The more intricate and interesting the hearsay (and hearsayers), the more fluid and healthy the culture. I think that's from Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, or from I, Claudius. I haven't read either, so I can't be sure. But I did catch the latest Drudge Report, so I've got that going for me.
This thought was prompted by the presence of Cindy Adams at a party I attended recently for the Intel New Music Festival and the Yahoo! Internet Life Online Music Awards. Cindy Adams is the geriatric gossip columnist for the New York Post. Cindy Adams is married to a vaudevillian even older than she is, Joey Adams, who still has a joke column in the Post, even though his idea of topical humor goes, "I was having a martini with Eddie Cantor the other day ..."
That's what it's coming to down here in Silicon Alley. Ninety-year-old crones are being squired around "hip" downtown parties and introduced to Jason Olim of CDnow, all so these paper-rich guys nobody's ever heard of can get their names in a paper nobody buys in a column nobody takes seriously near a boldface mention of Imelda Marcos. I saw online music titan Olim (net worth US$65 million) and the wizened and heavily made-up Adams huddled in deep conversation in a corner of the party. I could only imagine the discussion they were trying to have over the Jesus and Mary Chain, which was playing at the time.
JASON: The record companies are all worried about MP3 decoders, that's why they need to partner with online retailers like us, rather than disintermediating us and going direct.
CINDY: What? I can't hear you. Do you like Sid Caesar?
The party was loaded with many of Silicon Alley's best and brightest, including a guy I call Wonder Boy. Wonder Boy is about 26 and runs one of those firms that is deeply involved in online advertising but somehow isn't an advertising agency. Most firms engaged in online advertising are quick to assure you that they are not advertising agencies: They're "strategic design consultancies" or "integrated media shops" - anything but advertising agencies. This has more to do with raw fear than with market positioning or technological snobbery. If they called themselves online advertising agencies, they might offend one of the real advertising agencies that still control most of the $175 billion spent on advertising each year. Somehow, that wouldn't be good, especially if you want one of them to eventually acquire your online advertising agency. (Oops, your strategic design consultancy.)
Wonder Boy is a genius. That, at least, is what a lot of people on his staff will tell you. "Sam's a genius," they say breathlessly. They base their opinion on the fact that Wonder Boy had the idea to replicate one of the functions of real advertising agencies and port it to the interactive space. It is a decent idea, and a good company, but his factotums somehow think they're in the presence of greatness.
I know this because a particularly cynical staffer at Wonder Boy's company is one of my ex-girlfriends. I get a lot of good information from my ex-girlfriend network. From this one I know that Wonder Boy's company is exceedingly "flat." It is "flat" because Wonder Boy read in Fast Company that "flat" is a good thing to be. Everybody at Wonder Boy's firm gets a free subscription to Fast Company, which also explains why managers there like to "empower" their staff. As in (direct quote): "I'm going to empower you to make change." When my ex first heard that, she wanted to say, "OK, can I give you two fives for a ten?" She didn't, though, because she didn't want to jeopardize her options.
Thanks to Fast Company, a lot of different firms in Silicon Alley have deeply considered, painstakingly crafted, fiercely individualistic mission statements, all of which proclaim how they are staffed by "change agents" being led by "visionaries" who encourage "empowerment" in "flat organizations." "Flat" is supposed to mean that Wonder Boy's company avoids having a complicated hierarchy. In reality, it means anyone can barge into anyone's cubicle at any time because not much real work is going on for real clients. Of course, nobody here says what they mean, which is why they use words like "flat," and why gossip has become a force to be reckoned with in Silicon Alley (a term nobody uses, by the way).
Well, almost nobody says what they mean. The Intel New Music Festival and the Yahoo! Internet Life Online Music Awards party was held at Irving Plaza, which used to be run by Andrew Rasiej, who is a club mogul-qua-new media guy. He and another nightclub impresario, Michael Dorf, are tinkering around with ways to make money by streaming rock performances over the Internet. They are quick to tell you, though, that the money just isn't there, which is why they haven't abandoned their old businesses. They're both pretty sharp, something that distinguishes them from most of the other entrepreneurs in the Alley, whose business plans also aren't going to work. (That's probably the biggest difference between Silicon Alley and Silicon Valley, no matter what anybody tells you.)
Jon Stewart, the comedian whose career arc has gone from "the next David Letterman" to "the next Tom Snyder" to "the next Craig Kilborn," was the host of the online music awards, and looked none too thrilled to be there. The crowd just wouldn't shut up as he valiantly tried to do the Oscar/Grammy/MTV Music Awards hosting bit. He scored some minor points with very run-of-the-mill bits - "just got a call from Bill Gates ... he's bought the building [implied rim shot]" - that kind of thing. Luckily, there were only four or so awards to give out, so the entire ceremony came to a mercifully quick end. Stewart probably fired his agent for this, but I'm sure he pocketed a quick 50 large. At least someone is making money in the online music space, other than Olim and Larry Rosen, the cantankerous founder of N2K (or is it Music Boulevard now?).
Two nights later, I went to another soirée, this one the New York launch party for Imagine Media's West Coast version of Fast Company, a publication called Business 2.0. Imagine and its CEO, a would-be mini Rupert Murdoch named Chris Anderson, spared no expense, holding the event at the incredibly tony West Side bar, Lot 61. (Excellent hors d'oeuvres.) After the Cindy Adams spotting two nights prior, I was treated to an encounter with Silicon Valley's own gossipmonger, Michael Tchong. Tchong, a fortyish NM hipster type, doesn't come east much, but you wouldn't know it from the way he was dressed: all in black. He pens a weekly email scandal sheet, the Iconocast, that tries to pass as a newsletter on the NM advertising scene. Although worthless as an information source (Tchong cribs bits and pieces of insight from the big research houses and critiques them in a very apples-and-oranges sort of way), Iconocast is fantastic as a gossip source. It had all the great dirt on Halsey Minor asking some people to pay to attend the CNET Christmas party. Everybody on both coasts skips all the serious stuff and goes right to the endpiece, called the Jacobyte. That is supposed to be some kind of reference to bytes and the French revolution, I think, which goes a long way toward explaining why Michael Tchong annoys people.
Tchong is working as "chief information architect" for Business 2.0, which explains his rare East Coast appearance. I couldn't help but think his presence said something about the state of civilization in Silicon Alley. If the best we can do at our parties is import Valley boys and dig up old baguettes, we must still have a way to go before the collapse. To be certain, though, I'll have to look it up in Gibbon. Or Drudge.
