Raj Patel on Colbert Nation

Raj Patel is a political economist who wrote Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System and who has recently has published new book on consumption, called The Value of Nothing. Patel describes how the hidden cost of our consumption causes a great deal of environmental harm and social destruction.

I Love Local Commercials

I can’t think of a better subject for the inaugural post of “The Lateral Hippogriff” than to showcase my recent discovery via boingboing-the aptly named media project I Love Local Commercials. The two principal auteurs, Rhett and Link, possess an eerie resemblance to Bret and Jemaine from “Flight of the Conchords” and demonstrate with limpid clarity how two raffishly hip dudes are able to adroitly harness all their god-given man-cuteness and channel it into a hybrid venture that might best be described as “mission related social entrepreneurship”-gulp. Tooling around America in a boxy black Scion-they who love local commercials-want to work with you, yes you, hooking your business venture up with your very own free commercial. For free. The resulting “Rhett & Linkommercials” such as spots for Cullman Liquidation or a School Band Rap for Ray’s Midbell Music just might be some of the sharpest and funniest youtube clips I’ve seen all week, which is a long time on the internet.

“How are we able to make completely free local commercials for business across America?”, Rhett or possibly Link (I’m still figuring out who is who) asks in the above intro vid. Turns out MicroBilt has sponsored the whole venture, allowing deserving local business to elevate their media profile while demonstrating to you America, how the “For-Benefit” model can work in a manner that is at once playful, celebratory, and deadly effective. When collaborations are envisioned and executed in which the tragic commons described by Garett Hardin are not reflexively looted by selfish free-market agents, but instead hybrid systems are implemented in which everyone walks away with a mutual benefit, the added value of wide-bound and inclusive organizational structures is easier to see as the way of the future and not some pie in the sky dream of the idealists over at the Aspen Institute. It’s hard to see who loses in the whole situation, and easy to see how everyone wins: MicroBilt elevates its profile nationally while simultaneously enabling participating business access to some advertising band-with….all free of charge.

I Love Local Commercials is the type of project that gives me hope in Fourth Sector thinking and shows how clever strategies executed with enthusiasm and brio can actually advance the public good while reaping privatized rewards. The Lateral Hippogriff approves.