On 02/23/09, Claus, Thorsten wrote:

I finally have time to try this out - I re-found the disk drive of the homeless person again after packing it away in some IT stuff into the attic after I came home and cleaned up after the move. So here it comes, I'm excited...

On 06/25/08, Claus, Thorsten wrote:

I'm in a train back from D.C. and finally have some time to write again. Something strange happened today in D.C. to me:

We're currently moving to a new place, six blocks away. Because I still have to do some work I'm packing up stuff in between my working hours. Your Free Memory Disk landed on a stack of things that need to be packed, but when I grabbed the stack the Disk must've slid down. This morning I saw it and hectically packed it into my laptop bag before I left so that the cleaners don't throw it away accidentially (yes, it's chaos at home right now ;))

Standing in the middle of DuPont Circle outside after the meeting today, I was fingering for my sunglasses case in my bag and pulled out the disk together with my charger to get better access to the abyss of my bag. A seemingly homeless person sitting on the bench next to me with a large backpack of paraphenalia (what happened to the shopping carts in D.C.?!) yelled to me "You need one of these to read them disk" holding a portable 3.5" USB disk drive in his hands.

He declined any money, coffee, or food I offered him "No, man, listen, it's free, just free." When I asked him what he knew about computers, or how he knew I needed a disk drive, he just replied "take it, it's free."

Very scary.

I have to get up to D.C. again tomorrow at 4am, but will be done earlier in the afternoon. I am planning of video recording my experience of connecting, reading the disk and will send it to you...

It's interesting to think about this "remote" aspect of the experience. Every communication is asynchronous - light and sound waves need time to travel a distance, so even when you had your face-to-face encounters during the Free Memory project, your communication was actually asynchronous - even overlapping, as some people came back later to interact with you again. So the question for me is now: what changes if the a-synchronization increases, when time between receiving, reacting, and communicating gets larger, spatial and temporal?

How are my feelings affected, how are your feelings affected? What do I experience, more specifically: how do I experience the change before/after I put the disk in? How will the value of Free Memory change for me? Will consumption de-value the consumed? Will consumption increase the emotional binding through active usage engagement and thus increase the emotional value? Will my opinion about what I see and experience and feel change how I feel about the project - not about the disk or you, but about the goal, process, and reason of the project?

A study of a German University deliberately placed pennies before public telephones. An actor then tripped a couple meters along. People who found the penny were over 70% more often helpful to the poor fellow who tripped than the ones that didn't find the penny. Only 29% of the people who didn't find the penny later on confirmed that they were hurring to an appointment, were very busy, or preoccupied with other thoughts and thus either didn't have time to help, or didn't see that someone needed help, or didn't have time to look around / stop / being perceptive to the penny...

I'll let you know when I find an English translation of it, but it reminded me of the experience of receiving something free - with the difference that you actively volunteered the Free Memory, while in the study people found the penny themselves...

Will my self-esteem grow when I find something free / of value for myself, or will it grow when someone offers it to me? If I'm more happy in the first case, does it mean I am more proud of myself that I was so perceptive and found it? If I'm more happy in the second case, does it then mean more to me because a human being voluntarily interacted with me, with no specific expectation on a value exchange?

In business, my clients are more perceiptive to disruptive ideas if they think they came up with them themselves. I guess very few people value having smarter or nicer people around themselves, or having someone else having this one idea a second before they came up with it themselves, or having an idea that is so simple and obvious that they envy the person who came up with it while they didn't; more people value if they are seen as the smarter and nicer person that others want to have around.

Even if you want to get laid you make the other person belief you're interested, that they're smarter and nicer than you are, while in fact you think you're actually superior as they don't get your spiel (and you get laid). And if you don't, then they didn't value your niceness and listening and attention you "freely" invested... And any investment should have a return, that's what we learn in business school, preferably an ROI great than average market return, within a timeframe that fits into your investment portfolio timing for short-term, mid-term, and long-term investments, etc. pp.

Very, very, interesting, ..........

Thorsten Claus
+1 (415) 904.7925

On 12/21/05, Claus, Thorsten wrote:
>
>
>
> Darn.
>
> I missed the free memory. I was thinking about freeing memory this
> morning, but then I decided someone else is probably already doing it,
> so I didn't feel as if it was my responsibility now. I once freed
> some memory and copied it onto a floppy, but this was in 1989, on an
> Apple II. I did, however, give this free memory away, so I wonder
> what happened with it's freedom.
>
> I also talked to my colleague about free memory, and he said that he
> "doesn't need it" and that he "probably [is] the wrong market for such
> things."
>
> Maybe I can get your 37 cent copy of the brochure so he can see
> himself what it can do for him. … you can send it to the address
> below, which is my company's address, Take Care, and have a great
> holiday season,
>
>
>
> Thorsten Claus thorsten.claus@detecon.com