Part 6: wPoLrAkY
The next session on work and play was moderated by J.C. Herz, a games columnist for the New York Times. Herz sat coyly on a stool, smiling at the audience, and allowing a long, perhaps 30-second pregnant pause to fill the room before saying, "play." She offered some statistics about game playing in the workplace, and noted that "work is the thing you get through to do the thing you want to do."

She then introduced David Weinberger, a co-author of the "The Cluetrain Manifesto," and an NPR commentator. Weinberger edits the Journal of the Hyper-linked Organization.

Weinberg focused on the workplace, and said we're more alike at work than outside it in terms of how we walk, dress, and talk. He compared 50s conformity with 90s conformity, noting the unwritten rules that determine the appropriate size of office crucifixes (6 inches is okay; 6 feet is not), shoe type, and smell. He noted that the more important you are, the less smell you have, explaining that he'd never met a CEO with any discernable scent.

The Web removes many barriers, including a relationship between size and control, he said. The ancient assumption is that "the larger the size of the project, the more important you get to be," he said. The Internet doesn't require that kind of control to be enormous, however.

Weinberger said that the Web, by increasing communication between co-workers and the folks who make things and the actual users of their products, has subverted marketing, which he said mostly prevents communication between employees and customers, anyway.

He noted a number of examples of this breakdown, and among them, cited Blue Mountain Arts, a popular electronic greeting card site. Its appeal initially eluded him, he said, because the site is so messy. But by reading about the creators and seeing pictures of them with a painted VW, he realized that their site was exactly like their old car. They appeal to people through their genuineness, he said, noting that the site is "not a slick, sterile piece of crap."

Weinberger concluded, much like Li Lu's analysis of modern China, that the Internet is driving out fear, which is one of the inhibitors of business and underpinnings of large, hierarchical organizations. Businesses based on fear won't have much of a business left, he said.

In follow-up Q&A, Weinberger was pressed for a one-word definition of the Web. He couldn't pull that off, but said the closest he's come is "persistent public space." Another audience member asked about the breakdown of boundaries between home and work life. Weinberger noted that we're allowed to distinguish between our ethics and morality at work and in our private life, and that it's like "walking around with an axe in our head." People routinely carry out marketing behavior of a kind that "we hate when people do that to us."