Text Sushi by Alf Rehn

I’m always looking for the perfect program to write in, and as I’m a bit of a perfectionist in my demands (i.e. a whiny nuisance), I almost always find programs coming up short. I still have to write some things in Word, as some of my colleagues still use it and that dreadful Windows-platform, but I’m writing most everything else in Scrivener these days. The note-taking, the possibility to flexibly use multiple documents, and the lovely full-screen editing makes it a pleasant experience. I can even import my research material and consult it when writing. Wonderful. But as I’m always checking out things, I also ran into WriteRoom, which is a great little full-screen writer. The one thing that made me love the authors of this, however, is the fact that they have the grace and style to recommend other programs as well. At the bottom of their description of their program, they ask “Is WriteRoom the right tool for you?” and then answer, saying among other things that for some Scrivener might be a better alternative. This is classy.

This is quite possibly the greatest innovation in the history of the world (as presented by Homer Simpson):
The Bacon Alarmclock.

A lot of my students look forward to the world of work, and seem to feel that I’m being a sourpuss for talking about things like boredom in the workplace and unethical practices in the business world. This also ties to an ongoing discussion that I’m having with my students regarding “abstract theory” and “how it is in the real world”, where I’ve defended the use of sociology and postmodern philosophy by saying that if it seems confusing and muddled it is because the world is. Yes, stuff like cultural studies can be hazy and fluffy, but this is due to the fact that it is properly empirical rather than reductionistic. Anyway, reading BusinessWeek and their article on Internships: Reality vs. Expectations I’m reminded of these discussions. People doing internships want to do meaningful work and “make a difference in the world”. Obviously these are fine and upstanding things, but do these people understand the real world? The fact is, most people are unfulfilled by their work. A lot don’t even want to find meaning, they want to get a paycheck and go home to the kids. This is how the world is, and shouldn’t internships teach reality rather than coddle egos. I see no problem with teaching college grads how to make a decent cup of coffee, photocopy, and sit through boring meetings. Hell, sounds more exciting than most of my days.

Attached, a short essay on Alain Badiou I published in Svenska Dagbladet today (in Swedish).

Now, I’m pretty open when it comes to technology, and I like video and internet video a lot. Yet there are directions I believe should be avoided. A classic one is profiled here: Time on video résumés. Not because I dislike personal branding (hell, I might even throw something similar up, real soon now), but because one thing I do not want to do is to go through cringe-worthy videos when I’m hiring someone. Seriously, most video résumés will go the Vayner way (google it, I hear he’s lawsuit-happy), because it is so insanely easy to make fun of people’s self-promotional videos. If it’s good, you’ll look like a tool who has too much time and money, and if it’s bad… it’ll be bad. Yes, there might be a few Nam June Paik’s out there who can create something wonderful, but they’ll be very rare. And they would have probably figured it out anyway. Trust me, this is not a good thing.

Obviously, a seasoned academic has already mastered all of these points, but it is still fun to read when New York Times write about a French professors book on bluffing your way to intellectual standing. So if your bull-fu isn’t up to scratch, get reading, young padawan.

As I have had no energy to work on the two pieces of groundbreaking research I’m supposed to be producing (insert the terse and hollow laughter of the damned here), I’ve been pondering things such as:

• Can there be any more hideous description of a text than calling it “a spiritual memoir”?
• Does the New York Times “most emailed articles”-list tell us something about the state of the world, and is this enough to convince a thinking person that Ra’s al Ghul was onto something?
• In this day an age, would surreptitiously cutting off someone’s incoming email, so that they’d just think no-one was mailing, be enough to trigger full-blown paranoia (I’ve only received around 30 mails today, which is a bit odd.)?

For anyone who has seen me, or generally for anyone who knows I’m a) Scando, b) a management professor, it should come as no surprise that I’m no dancer. Laying it on y’all straight, I can’t dance. At all. This, however, does not mean that I don’t take an interest in it. For instance, I’ve taken a shine to krumping and hyphy as of late. Yes, I know I’m late to the game, and everyone’s supposed to have seen Rize already, but it is not necessarily the movement in and of itself that interests me. Rather, it is the way in which it is judged and appreciated. While I can see the differences between classic clown-dancing and krump, I have difficulty evaluating different krump styles. Yet it is obvious that aficionados see lots of differences, discerning between subtle differences and reading lots into these. It seems that true fans can even tell from what part of a city someone comes from by evaluating their krump. This, the plasticity of judgment, the way in which we humans can develop taxonomic and evaluative skills about basically any- and everything is a source of unending fascination for me.

At times, I have odd hobbies. One of these is reading stuff from the more extreme end of economics, such as the wonderfully entertaining goings on at The Mises Institute. Some people might get either scared or bored by what goes on here, but I’m always intrigued. Take this little tidbit, from a review presented as a “thrill” and as written by someone “brilliant and courageous”.

Mr. Keynes obviously arrives at this view by an artificial separation
of the function of the entrepreneurs as owners of capital and their
function as entrepreneurs in the narrow sense. But these two functions
cannot be absolutely separated even in theory, because the essential
function of the entrepreneurs, that of assuming risks, necessarily
implies the ownership of capital.

Uh, what? Not only entrepreneurship, but the very act of assuming risks “necessarily implies the ownership of capital”? What an odd notion. The problem not only with Mises, but with the horde of entrepreneurship researchers that more or less consciously follow his lead, is that they create statements such as this, and then when pressed backtrack and claim that the phrase “entrepreneur” and “capital” should include any possible form of human phenomena one wishes, all in order to save their precious formulations. For instance, it is obvious that our imaginary friend Frank, who prostitutes himself in an area where male (gay) prostitution has not existed heretofore (such as a small town in the Appalachians) , is engaging in a form of entrepreneurship — potentially a very lucrative such. He also assumes a lot of risks, including social ostracism and the threat of violence, but can be handsomely rewarded for this. But does this imply “ownership of capital”? Well, obviously one could call his body “capital” or his social standing “capital” or whatever else “capital”, if one wanted to stretch the meaning of the concept to the point of absolute and total nullity. But let us for a moment assume that his perky little ass cannot be called “capital” in any sensible use of the word. This necessarily implies that he can well be assuming risks and engaging in entrepreneurship without owning capital, which would also necessarily imply that Mises was basically just making shit up as he went along.