Wall Street v. Wall Street

Here we are again, on the eve of massive asset bubbles purges. And as always (see for instance "Mondialisation : du "free market" au "fair market" - 20070726, "This is not a financial crisis" - 20080711*):

• This is not a financial crisis, but a crisis of finance. 
• This is not an economic crisis, but a crisis of economics. 
• This is not a political crisis, but a crisis of politics. 

Which means, as always, that:

• we will not solve anything by rejecting finance, economy, and politics - that's exactly what brought us the rise of extremism and populism, Brexit, or of course Trump.
• we must to the contrary embrace finance, economy, and politics - at their core, starting from  their definitions, exposing smokescreens and impostures, demanding transparency and accountability.

So what happened after Lehman? Further desertion by people with basic notions of economics, or at least traces of common sense (I won't even mention 'moral compasses'). If it weren't for the A.I. algorythms and high-frequency trading that amplify and perpetuate the illusion, the most blatant bubbles would have probably alreaday burst years ago.

DJI chart (2nd biggest component after Boeing, Goldman Sachs weighs 11.6 times more than GE)

Nasdaq - better real/virtual ratio than before the dotcom crisis, but Apple (14.6% of the index, 4.9% of the DJI) and co will eventually meet reality.

Politicians? They totally surrendered. Back in 2009, they still had the power to change things by injecting tens of billions of dollars, and by passing a few legal safeguards - but now governments are weaker than ever, and they let their agenda be set by the very firms they bailed out without actually purging the system. 

Exhibit A: Goldman Sachs, who were instrumental in frauds leading to major crises (e.g. betting against toxic assets they helped create, or forging figures with the Greek government), are now stronger than ever, and still runnig the show (Steven Mnuchin, Gary Cohn, Mario Draghi, Robert Zoellick, Jose Manuel Barroso...). They aim at becoming the alpha and omega, or rather the Alphabet of finance since, like google, they're investing massively in A.I. to comfort their leadership.

Beyond this caricature, our financial systems rejected finance as an enabler for the economy. Not just Wall Street against Main Street, but ultimately Wall Street against Wall Street*. Emboldened by impunity (except maybe in Iceland, that lone country where The People put corrupt politicians and banksters in jail), these guys prolonged the bailouts with a wonderful invention, Quantitative Easings: after emptying governmental chests, they simply decided to print money for themselves - officially to fuel the economy, but actually to improve already indecent balance sheets, and to widen wealth (and reality) gaps in abyssal proportions. They brought back derivatives, fantasy league ratings, or gambling, and they're gutting Dodd-Frank like they gutted Glass-Stiegel.

What happened after Lehman was Lehman on steroids.

What happens next is for history books. 

And if by 'miracle' these guys manage to prevent the fall until after the Mid-term elections, all bets are off.

blogules 2017
Since 2003, nonsensical posts about noncritical issues in nonenglish (get your blogules transfusion in French)
NEW: join blogules on Facebook!!! and Twitter (@stephanemot, @blogules)


* also 'the ultimate stage of free market is the negation of the market' ("Le stade ultime du libéralisme, c'est la négation du marché (le déni d'économie continue") - 20110302) 

HGTP (Hypergraphia Transfer Protocol) Turns 10: 03/03/03 - 13/03/03

March 3rd, 2003 - March 3rd, 2013.

I eventually opened my personal portal on the web exactly 10 years ago and today, I'd like to apologize to the millions of victims of this tragedy: the visitors from all over the world who lost at best their precious time, at worst their sanity in what is now a multi-site, multi-platform monster. Since I cannot predict the future (even if, I'm afraid, you shouldn't expect containment until I stop living - which includes writing, my most embarrassing bodily function), here's a quick summary of what happened over this doomed decade.


0) In the beginning was the word:


naughty homepage v1.0
(stephanemot.com during
the "geocities" years)

From the beginning, I embraced the web as the perfect extension of my poor brain, as something as absurd, unreliable, vain, and fragile as life itself. But it was not until 2003 that I decided to get my own address.

The concept was simple:
- No avatar, no pseudo: I commit to all the ill-written and nonsensical stuff I spill over the web. After all, they're just words, and my name happens to mean "word" in French.
- It's at the same time public and personal, but not intimate. I'm not pushing my own opinions, they simply have to come out of my system. Pure junk writing, no literature.
- It's egotic, not narcissic. Yes that's a game of mirrors, but as in some kind of a Borghesian experiment. And in this mess / maze, I can find pricelessly inane stuff that I would otherwise lose for good. Plus I need to fuel my own ecosystem, to plug it to both reality and virtuality. If I often build inept synaptic connections that slow the whole system down, I always learn something about my own impostures and dysfunctions.


I) Homepaging (Home, Sweet and Sour Home):

In 2003, I'd been journeying for 10 years into strategy and innovation. I had a lot of fun conceiving and managing online and interactive services and apps, or forecasting disruptions in highly evolutive ecosystems, but at home, the last thing I wanted was to create my own start-up (I'd already survived four of those), or to think about technology or solutions... particularly since I knew that major disruptions would come sooner than later, that the next Googles would change everything, that new concepts, platforms, devices, usages would emerge.

All I needed was a place to drop the 'junk writing' I excreted. Neither a flush toilet nor a vault: I wanted to easily access and browse it. Ultimately, I wanted my content to be in my own "cloud", as I drew it back then on my silly slides: a cartoon-like cloud accessible seamlessly from any connected device - no matter where I logged in, I wouldn't have to care about input or output formats, on which server I was.

I knew we were far from that. I'd already toyed with mini mobile sites (eg WAP and i-mode), and I wanted to stick to the web, and to its most rudimentary forms at that. I've loved Wikis from the start, and content management systems were already legion (I also missed Wordpress by a few months), but I didn't want to be smart anyway.

Opting for Geocities was not very smart. It wasn't the least user-friendly web hosting solution, but back in 2003, Yahoo! were already officially has-beens. Yet I've been "faithfool" to Y! for my personal email service since 1996 (still now!), and I knew that the transfer would be easy.

Because for starters, I really wanted the basics for my personal-content / self-editing purposes. No frills, no forum, no interactivity: simple web pages that I could easily transfer to a smarter platform when the time came.

My initial menu was very simple, even if I expected innovations for each dimension:
- Home (basic: landing page for stephanemot.com, with a few simple dynamic animations like newsfeeds - potential: media),
- Beings (basic: ego, friends and neighbors, authors I like - potential: networking/communities),
- Things (basic: books, soccer/footlog, photos, innovations/mot-bile... - potential: endless verticals, videos),
- Places (basic: Paris, NYC, Seoul, Uqbar, world, travels, maps, random... - potential: mobility, location based services),
- blogules (basic: all posts on one page - potential: dedicated blogging platform)
- About, Links, Stats, Guestbook pages
- NB: I also created a "boutique" page (Little Shop of Errors). Not to generate revenues, but to cover all bases, and to follow/anticipate innovations for key 'enablers', particularly through Amazon, a player with an unsatiable appetite.

Of course I was not satisfied with the result, but at long last I had my own room with a roof.

I forgot to mention the fact that the site was in English and in French, which made it twice as big and boring. If the main menu never changed, the monster grew to about a hundred pages, each one an ergonomic mess filled with useless junk.


II) Blogging (Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Disinformation):

From the start, I knew that I should have used 'special purpose vehicles', most notably a blogging platform for my blogules, but I didn't want to manage several sites in parallel. I didn't expect to produce that much junk that quickly.

You've got to thank George W. Bush for that.

Saying that I got obsessed with the 2004 US Elections is an understatement. Only a portion of my 2003-2004 junk posted on various fora and media landed on the two interminable pages devoted to blogules (one in French, the other in English), but I postponed until after November 2, 2004 the switch to Blogger. Not the best platform back then, and I didn't feel comfortable growing a Google-dependence, but I expected Big G to lead on the way to convergence.

I haven't invested much time on my homepage ever since. When Geocities folded, I'd already had dispatched the bulk of the content to specific sites*, so I only transferred a tiny portion of the monster. To Google Pages. Again, not the best platform. Again, more Google-dependence.

Anyway. Today, stephanemot.com is basically a non-existent hub, an empty shell with little content and traffic. Nothing like its heyday madness, when Geocities had to regularly shut my site down because flocks of visitors coming for different 'verticals' were all converging to the same spot.

So we're in December 2004: John F. Kerry is not measuring the drapes at the White House, and I've just moved 3 of my blogs to Blogger: blogules (in English), blogules V.F. (in French), and mot-bile (innovation - in English). I still don't know today how I managed not only to feed and maintain the three of them, but also to need even more sites to sort more junk.

I spun off my soccer blog on France Football in October 2005 (in French - platform: Blogspirit). footlog quickly became a hit, and CNET France noticed this weird guy who blogged on soccer in French and on innovation in English: would you do a blog for us ahead of the 2006 FIFA World Cup? I did, for free, and it was fun. But I'm glad it's over:  I've got enough trouble maintaining the whole shebang as it is, and I regularly turn down similar offers. I did accept a stunt for a French radio, to give it a try, but writing remains more fun. Among the different citizen journalism platforms I tried, I feel most comfortable with Rue89. I don't do columns, even if various papers have published my stuff or mentioned my work (eg Newsweek, IHT, Le Figaro, LA Times, Asian Times, Korea JoongAng Daily, Korea Herald...). I've been editor in chief in a previous life, but I'm not a journalist: I'm into Weapons of Mass Disinformation, see?

Nowadays, I seldom post on footlog, which in its own heyday ranked among France's top 7 sports blogs. I still force myself to post now and then on mot-bile, because that's a way of keeping an eye on sectors and players I enjoy decrypting. And if my blogules remain hot during election cycles in France and in the US, I've been much more busy with yet another blog.

I started SeoulVillage in February 2007, 6 years ago. More than a spin off of my blogules about Korea, I initially had in mind a proto-literary project about this shape-shifter of a city. I cowarded out, opted for English, and started yet another blog by yet another Foreigner in Asia. I'm happy to count many Korean culture lovers, researchers, journalists, or urbanists among frequent flyers, but I owe this city I love something more intimate. Hopefully, I shall complete this year my first collection of fictions about Seoul, in English.

Because I have the gall to define myself as an author, remember? Not much has been published to support the claim, but I've got another set of useless websites to maintain because of that**. More empty shells, I reckon: my excuse for a literature got lost in an void that, literally, can't even be described as interstellar.


III) Social Networking (Hypergraphia meet Multiple Personality Disorder):

Even if my Facebook or Twitter pages are not part of my personal portal, I have to mention here the difficulty of coping with various selves in social networking times.
 
I mostly write as myself and as SeoulVillage, but that's only the tip of the iceberg. To name the main sites:

• as Stephane Mot, the junk writer: 1 zombie website (stephanemot.com), but relatively active Facebook (facebook.com/stephanemot) and Twitter (@stephanemot) accounts.
• as Stephane Mot, the failed author: 2 book websites (dragedies.com, laliguedesoublies.com), 2 Facebook pages (one for the author, one for his dragedies), 1 Twitter account (@dragedies)
• as Stephane Mot, the start-up veteran: 1 blog (mot-bile)
• as Seoul Village: 1 blog (seoulvillage.com), 1 Facebook page (facebook.com/seoulvillage), 1 Twitter account (@theseoulvillage)
• as blogules: 2 blogs (blogules.com, blogules en Francais), 2  Facebook pages (EN: blogules - facebook.com/pages/Blogules/263494297051758 / FR: blogule - facebook.com/blogule), 1 Twitter account (@blogules)
• as footlog: 1 blog (footlog.blogs.francefootball.com), 1 Twitter account (@footlogbis)
• as Kim Mudangnim: 1 website (kimmudangnim.com), 1 Facebook page (facebook.com/pages/KIM-Mudangnim/246625385375575), 1 Twitter account (@kimmudangnim).
  NB: I don't want to be a drag, but I had to mention this female character I created a couple of years ago (the story was published in Every Second Sunday - see "SWW 2010 Anthology"). No, Kim Mudangnim is not my female self (I'm not that sick), but I know she'll be back sooner or later. Until then, she needed someone to open virtual doors for her. 

I'm not suffering from Multiple Personality Disorder, but from Hypergraphia. Of course, these 4 websites, 5 blogs, 7 Facebook pages, and 6 Twitter accounts are only part of my online presence. Of course, I also write an awful lot of junk offline. Of course, I don't like 99.999% of what I write (starting with the parts I can't even understand when I try to read them afterwards). Of course, there are rewarding as well as embarrassing moments.

Sorry, but I can't fix my writing. Writing is my fix.

blogules 2013
Since 2003, nonsensical posts about noncritical issues in nonenglish (get your blogules transfusion in French)
NEW: join blogules on Facebook!!! and Twitter (@stephanemot, @blogules)

* in 2007, I spun off a few pages that were not meant for a blogging platform, but nonetheless ended up on Blogger, like Little Shop of Errors (boutique - in French), Citizen Came (visitors stats - in English). I also backed-up the 2003-2004 blogules archives (in English and in French), as well as my soccer pages (footlog archives).
** see dragedies and La Ligue des Oublies (nevermind Kim Mudangnim).

Facebook's Initial Private Offering

Dear Friends and Neighbors,

My Wall and Wall Street are about to become an item: we're all going public, and you'll have to issue a profit warning each time I unlike you nth kitten picture.

Yet Facebook Initial Public Offering remains a non-event: Facebook has been milking our relationship from the beginning, and even with his 11M+ friends, Mark Zuckerberg has never been much of a philanthropist. The question was "when", and the answer is "now".

Now the other question remains: until when?

It doesn't have to come from the next big thing (a 4D, 5G meshroom cloud? the SOPAtriot Act?): remaining at the top happens to be difficult, even for a free, pervasive platform. And even a 800 pound gorilla can get off your back (I recently mentioned the potential Tripodization of Facebook: "Cloud Portability"). Furthermore, money won't do you much good without a vision. Look at Rupert Murdoch, who after losing over half a billion bucks on MySpace, delivers his pearls of conservative wisdom* for free over Twitter. And speaking of doing good: Google started being evil after its IPO...

... Come to think of it: Zuck started as a bad guy.

blogules 2012
Since 2003, nonsensical posts about noncritical issues in nonenglish (get your blogules transfusion in French)
NEW: join blogules on Facebook!!!

*if such a thing exists.

Korea : too soft, but not soft enough

The major blackout Korea just experienced may be the consequence of a hacking of KEPCO earlier this year. It also could be due to a simple bug.

I can't help but believe in the first scenario, which would cast yet another unsettling cloud over the country and its security.

Over the past few months, Korea has proven embarrassing vulnerabilities in strategic areas :
- conventional warfare : military / organizational fiascos following North Korean attacks (ie Yeonpyeong)
- hackings / suspicious blackouts at the core of vital networks : financial (ie banks), media / internet, air traffic, and now electricity...

So regardless of who is responsible here (incompetence) or there (most fingers pointing at North Korea or China), a malicious organization could completely incapacitate Korea within minutes without using any conventional weapon. Even if the aim is not an invasion per se (nor even a diversion preceding an invasion of say North Korea), this would definitely damage the reputation of Korea as an economic powerhouse.

With its drive, infrastructures and talents, Korea should be ahead of Israel in national security. KISA (Korea Information Security Agency) significantly improved its visibility, but the national culture remains focused on hardware.

Samsung has eventually understood it needed to evolve and change business models, but it took series of obvious wake up calls (ie Google wolfing down Motorola). The government will probably follow suit. And if spurs are needed, the potential candidacy of Ahn Cheol-soo at the 2012 presidential elections might help : the founder of antivirus specialist AhnLab has some credentials in the area.


blogules 2011
(also on Seoul Village : "Korean blitz : all bases loaded")

Googling Paris

"Parisian Love", Google's Superbowl ad. Rom@nce, cliches and snapshots... as artificial and predictable as Avatar, only cheaper. And just like Avatar, you keep watching :

Red blogule to AdSense, no sensibility

This site hosts a few ads as a part of its grand borghesian design. The aim of the game is not to raise funds (the few cents harvested will certainly not make for the time I spend / you waste on it), but to study how beings, things, places and times can get both freed and stuck in the net, the coopetition between reality and fiction, not to mention the interactions of my troubled mind and its environment (to which you now belong since you're reading these silly lines).
Anyway. Here is Google, grand provider of free traps, proposing its AdSense advertising programs and Google Coop Custom Search Engines. After resisting the urge, I decided to give both of them a try.
The custom search engine happens to be, as the name suggests, an engine that searches and can be customized. This one is supposed to browse my site but when I type "bush", a word that occurs about 3,850,926,712 times in it*, Google tells me sorry, there is no such expression to be found in this place. On the other hand, "Dubya" brings 6 pages of results, without even including the pages omitted. What when Google says "custom", do they mean "intimate" ?
AdSense is supposed to provide ads related to the content. I can specify where French is spoken and where English is broken, but it doesn't deter these kings of marketing from splashing banners in German for people visiting from Korea.
Worse : when AdSense decides to become accurate, it grows dangerous ! The other day, the Restored Church Of God was selling its crazy fundamentalist prophecies on the very pages where I was denouncing them ! I could stop the flow by adding their website to the list of advertisers banned on my site but I'm starting to wake up in the middle of the night.
Some day, when I type "bush" on my custom search engine, I will be proposed Dubya's autobiotheography.


* a little bit less according to Blogger's integrated search engine (Blogger being both the platform used by this excuse for a blog and a Google outfit !) : see "bush". By the way : still waiting for the new and improved version with tags.