20 February 2007

Prosumers



The Ice Age may be over today, or at least on its way to history. Warm air will arrive from the Gulf and will give us the warmest day in the last two-dozen. It will turn the hardedges of the mounds over the curbs to salty soup that will coat everything moving in gritty white. There will be rain late in the day; mixing sweet water from the clouds with the toxic chemicals we have been dumping on the streets and sidewalks to defeat the dense compressed ice.

The process will go on for a few days, and the cars will be coated in corrosive scum, eating away at the proud paint and chrome.

That is just part of the transition from the late winter to what I hope will be Spring, It is worse elsewhere, of course, and should be viewed in context and perspective. We all consume and produce things, and in this town that is about news. Hopefully it is more of the former and less of the latter.

But In Baghdad, for example, a dozen people died and a score were wounded overnight in an attack on a gas station and a market. It is part of the new targeting campaign, which is designed for internal and external consumption and feedback. The Bad Guys are smacking infrastructure, leveraging the presence of consumers with volatile materials for more spectacular results.

The most troubling of the attacks was the chlorine tank truck that was booby-trapped to explode near a restaurant in Taji, about ten miles north of Baghdad. It is near the tank plant that I targeted in the first Gulf War, and was General Powell's favorite target.

The wounded suffered lung injuries from the dispersed toxic gas, which is something I worried about here in Washington when the chlorine tank cars used to run on the railroad right past the dome of the Capitol. The gas has the same effect as the nasty stuff they used in the First War nearly a century ago, that caused spontaneous secretion of mucous in the chest cavity, and difficulty breathing.

I worry about things like that in a rhythm. They say that al Qaida is on the mend, and plotting another massive attack somewhere. I was on a conference call on the partial holiday and mentioned that it was likely that the Bad Guys would try to duplicate what they did with box-cutters and personal sacrifice what they did on 9/11.

Which is to say they would try to turn the elegant fittings of our complex commercial infrastructure against us, in a port complex or rail yard. Something that is low budget in resources but high pay-off in effect.

You have to get on with life, though, and I thought I might stop at he Mr. Wash yesterday and get a $20 sluice down to get the chemicals off the car and on the way down the watershed to the Chesapeake. Unfortunately, the line of waiting vehicles stretched out to Glebe Road, and the County Police were waving people away to prevent grid-lock.

Mr. Wash is the only real way to preserve the cars here, since it is the only full-service brushless automatic facility. The coin-operated wash machines are in the control of the MS-13 gang, or people who look like they might be members, and the outside hoses at Big Pink will not be turned on until the danger of the last freeze and bursting fixtures is gone next month.

I'm a little antsy. The new job is going fine, and I like it as much as it is possible to like working for pay. But the volunteer work has its own rhythm, pressure building to its once-once-a-quarter head that I must lance like an angry boil. I have to get the Spring issue of the quarterly publication I edit into the process to be printed and in the mail before the April general membership meeting of the association of old spooks.

Alvin and Heidi Toffler, the noted futurists, first coined the term “producer consumer” back in 1979 in their book The Third Wave. The "professional consumer" interpretation of the word first emerged in the late 1980's, and is now the most common sense.

I am not smart enough to really understand what everyone talking about, but I not too dim to understand when something hits me over the head. In the parlance of the tech world, the new generation of digital film equipment is designed with the 'prosumer' in mind, by which I think they mean the consumer who thinks of himself as a semi-professional.

I aspire to semi-pro status on a good day, being trapped in Arlington's industrial age infrastructure and America's colonial-era political process. But I recognize that the internet and globalization have changed everything, retail, medicine, design, architecture and fashion. Even terrorism is more of a boutique concept with internet feedback loops.

As we try to move out of one business model in Iraq, the Bad Guys are working their own prosumer model. I wonder if they will be dumb enough to try their next big product launch outside Iraq. It might put the urge to withdraw on the back burner, and get people as irritated as the people who are being attacked each day.

That is the thing with the electorate, you know? We only respond to the last thing that we remember, and I am thankful that here in Washington it is only the ice.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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