A proposal from Brian Eno

Digital revolution got you down? Drowning in a sea of ringing cellphones, crashing computers and pinging modems?

Brian Eno has just what you need: a sound and light exhibition called "Compact Forest Proposal." "I wish [it] existed in more cities," says the musician, artist and producer. "It's the kind of place I'd want to be in, a place where nothing's going on."

The installation -- part of "010101: Art in Technological Times, an off- and online exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art that's set to open March 3 -- offers a respite from info-age busyness. It's simple, organic and low-tech.

Upon entering a darkened room, the first things you see are vertical ropes of white Christmas lights settling into piles on the floor. Simple, slow music -- a bass guitar and a bell and human voice (both digitally altered) -- drips from various areas of the darkened room. When your eyes adjust, other items come into view: 10 boomboxes and a handful of grids, all hanging on the walls in rainbow-shaped arc. The overall effect is a bit like waking up without an alarm clock.

Etown adds insult to injury

Oh, so that's why they needed a union!

On Wednesday, the grim news broke that etown, the dot-com whose customer service workers were in the process of unionizing, had become the latest Net company to fall apart. But it gets worse. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the workers not only won't get any severance pay, but they won't be paid for their last two and a half weeks of work. Couldn't they at least have shut down two and a half weeks earlier to spare the employees unknowingly working for free? Or at least have told the employees before they did the work that they wouldn't be paid?

Management this shoddy is the best argument we've heard for unionizing dot-coms. Erin Tyson Poh, a local rep for Northern California Media Workers Local 39521 -- the union that was working with the customer service workers at etown to organize -- explains that severance is one of the "linchpins" of collective bargaining. "A union can't prevent a company from going out of business, of course, but it can mitigate the circumstances which the employees find themselves in when it does." Even in the case of an outright bankruptcy, the union can help employees get a fairer shake than two and a half weeks of work without pay and no severance.

The death of one of the first dot-coms to spark a grass-roots union effort among its workers shouldn't discourage other dot-commers from organizing. It should just inspire them to do it more quickly before their employers' companies tank. -- Katharine Mieszkowski [3:25 p.m. PST, Feb. 15, 2001]

- - - - - - - - - - - -

President Bush isn't losing any sleep over the digital divide

If the early days of Bush's presidency are any indication, then it's fair to say that Dubya isn't terribly concerned about bridging the digital divide.

Today's Wall Street Journal reports that the new Commerce Department budget proposal, which would take effect Oct. 1, recommends eliminating over 65 percent of the budget for the Technology Opportunities Program. This program, Clintonites may recall, is the much-touted digital divide solution that installs computers and Internet connectivity to low-income regions and schools. The new budget would reduce the funding for the program from $42.5 million to $15 million, which means that a lot of inner-city kids will go without computers.

This comes right on the heels of Wednesday's assertion by a handful of very wealthy Americans that Bush's proposed inheritance tax repeal would not just aid the rich but actually hurt the poor by discouraging donations to charities. So not only won't those low-income kids get their computers from the government anymore, but the nonprofit organization that could have wired up their school may instead find its coffers running dry.

According to the Wall Street Journal, bringing technology to low-income Americans isn't much of a priority anyway. Federal Communications Commission chairman Michael Powell recently compared the digital divide to "a Mercedes divide -- I'd like to have one, I can't afford one." Perhaps Powell should try explaining that to the schoolchildren who won't be learning the computer skills they need to make it in today's job market. -- Janelle Brown [1:15 p.m. PST, Feb. 15, 2001]

- - - - - - - - - - - -

An online home for the newly unemployed

Rallying around unemployment is fast becoming the Net's new, new thing. BYOB pink-slip parties have replaced open-bar bashes while Web sites like FuckedCompany throw darts at dying dot-coms.

But few -- online or off -- have embraced the bursting bubble with as much gusto as DotRefugee.com. The three-week-old site is a haven for the lazy. It's a place where you won't find nasty dot-com death watches but, rather, a far more Zen philosophy of "easy.com, easy.go."

There's a DotRefugee campfire to gather by and a guide for how to answer the age-old question "What do you do?" Entries include "I work in the public sector," which really means "you've been collecting unemployment for eight weeks and you voted." There's also "I'm in investment banking" -- translation: "you recently sold all of your stock options so you could pay your cable bill" -- and "I'm an artist," the moniker for people who "occasionally doodle while on hold with the unemployment office."

The site isn't exactly all that different from that which it jokes about. There is an e-commerce element; you can splurge for a T-shirt or a can cozy costing $11.99 -- "only about two shares of CMGI." But so far, trying to draw a lazy audience to a do-nothing site seems to be proving quite difficult -- at last check the campfire chat rooms were completely empty.

But still, if there's one dot-com that the newly unemployed are rooting for, this may be it. Any site that lets you send e-postcards that link idyllic pictures -- of fishing at sunset, skiing and mountain climbing -- with Hallmark phrases of appreciation like "ain't unemployment a bitch" will someday strike a nerve. -- Damien Cave [1:30 p.m. PST, Feb. 13, 2001]

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Take Your Potato to Work Day

I have here a potato, individually wrapped in paper with a yellow, black and red logo and a URL printed all over it. There's also a plastic bag, a fork, knife, salt, pepper, salad dressing. "Take a potato to work!" says the packaging. And www.potatohelp.com.

I've unwrapped the potato, and it's a raw potato. Not even a washed raw potato. This is exactly what a potato looks like when you buy it from the store and, presumably, when you pull it out of the ground, though I make a habit of not pulling things out of the ground because I live in a large city, and almost nothing good ever comes out of the ground. The only difference is that someone's added half a landfill worth of packaging.

Well, I'm thinking, it's good to see that this dot-com downturn I've heard so much about isn't discouraging everyone. Here's a company that still has that old Spirit of '96. The people behind potatohelp.com have taken a completely useless and pointless idea that no one ever needed or asked for -- packaging for raw potatoes -- slapped it on the Web and waited for the world to beat a path to their door. How these guys got venture capital in this economy is beyond me, but bully for them!

Alas, a little investigation reveals that potatohelp.com is not a company that will deliver packaged potatoes at any hour of the day. It's actually the National Potato Promotion Board, which is trying to get you and me to bring potatoes to work and eat them for lunch. Potatoes, like the online economy, are in a slump. Formerly at the top of the list in terms of profits and produce section square footage, spuds have been overtaken by apples, tomatoes, packaged salads and grapes. So to get you to think about potatoes at lunchtime -- a sector in which potatoes are not performing at the moment -- the potato people are giving away 90,000 potato packages in two weeks on the streets of San Francisco, Dallas-Fort Worth and New York.

I'm not hungry for a potato, but if I can find a dot-com that will deliver a potato gun, there's still hope for some fun around the office this afternoon. -- King Kaufman [12 p.m. PST, Feb. 13, 2001]

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Got a tip for the In Box? E-mail us