"Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!'" -- Hunter S Thompson O And my good friend RC shits on me for doing a pansy job on the DLD reporting. Unfortunately he's right. Enjoying things like food and shelter caused me to NOT play Hunter S. Thompson at a conference that could have used it. O Rewind. O "God. I hate you. I hate you until the end of my life in that way, David". This came from someone who had previously been the closest person in my life. It looks like I'm well on my way to living the life Dr. Thompson suggested. Pretty beat up, but I don't want to live with this person's hate so I told her that I would only love her until the end of my life, that I had no hate to give. Why do I think she won't care. O It snows all night in Munich but the Germans are so fucking efficient that by the time I awake, they've gone and mechanically cleaned even the walk out of my house, so I have no fun at all plowing with my feet t
hrough fresh snow. Something wrong about that. O Being a journalist at a conference is a whole lot different than being a participant. It's like being the catering staff. Oh sure, you can eat the food, and have as many drinks as you like but it's always obvious, from the tag hanging around your neck, that you're staff and not guest - more like a professional mosquito. O 01.25.10, 10pm - The Star Party at DLD begins. One thing I do like about Germans is that they don't like to get real soirees going too early and prefer to let everyone stay up until 5am and thoroughly waste themselves. When you see the photo of Cheryl Cole, our songstress for the evening, here no that's not poor photography - that's what she really looked like - and all the other fuzzy photos too. O Not five minutes into the conference I realize that I am not only dealing with the type of German security that made WWII prison camps famous, but that this is a prison designed to keep poor people out. Tickets went for a reported $3000 for not quite 3 days and this is not the TED Talks. They've got Bill Gates this year and we've got Donovan? No slight to Donovan, but in the paraphrased words of Senator Lloyd Bentsen to Dan Quayle, "Donovan, you're no Bill Gates". O And in another letter from the fallen love 
- "How can I know that I am not part of your marketing, business plan, like always in your life?" I always thought I could separate business and personal fairly well, but here I am in the middle of probably The Most Commercial event of the year, short of Oktoberfest, in Munich (Bunny photo by Jonathan Harr
is) and being judged by someone on that. I'm just trying to do my job. Why don't people understand that you leave that work at the office. I am frustrated by this. O And then there's the idea that for a three day conference, I got a pass for 1/2 a day and a big freaking party. Even with no Bill Gates how am I going to cover over 100 speakers and the ensuing events? Answer = I'm not. O And one of the speakers, a really nice guy and computer scientist spends well more than an hour macking on a girl in a room full of drunk techies. This IS fun. O We blow a joint outside and Jimmy Wales talks to some guy's Indian girlfriend on the guy's iPhone. O The fucking robot is annoying. Shit, there was a goddamn robot at CES in Chicago in 92. Can't somebody get a new friggin' idea? O Funny, I have a copy of Hunter Thompson's "The Rum Diaries" which I caught the girl who hates me reading one day. Is that why she hates me? O For as much Winter of Love they wanted to inspire in this conference it is all too apparent that this crowd is wealthy as fuck. Everybody. Jonathan Harris, who was a DLD speaker, st
ates it best when he moved on to Davos for the World Economic Forum just a day after and quoted a Nobel Prize winner he met, "She was saying how she thought Davos was mostly bullshit, and how people only talk about changing poverty so they don't have to change themselves. "Talk, talk, talk," she said. "I'm only interested in talk that turns into action. All of this talk about adding conscience to capitalism is ridiculous. These guys just want to convince people they care about others, which they don't, and then get back to making money as fast as they can."- This was a lot of what DLD was - a lot of people who were doing extremely well talking about being altruistic and a lot of other people who paid, or whose companies paid, 3K a pop to get them in. O Gotta love Capitalism. O But wait, why am I there? Same. Same, same, same. O And will bloggers change the world? Sadly, this event makes me feel no. Even I kissed butt to get a ticket so what does that say about me? But more importantly, this is an event, hosted by a wealthy and powerful media company to court a new industry, digital media, that they don't do very well in...yet. But they can buy their way in, and they are. And everyone in new media needs funding, and once you have funding, you have a boss, essentially. So will bloggers save the universe? No, not if they want to eat. O Circus stilt performers pretty much screw the Donovan image the conference set up the day before. Red Bull is free and so are all the cocktails. A shitload of cocktails. O In order to live free and happily, you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice. -- Richard Bach O And I sit and wait for a mail from the girl who hates me - because I don't think she knows that all of this bullshit is just the way business is. Bullshit. And nothing more. OFor more in the Stream of SubConsciousness series, click here:
Stream of SubConsciousness I
