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Why defend freedom of icky speech?

Neil Gaiman's Journal

- 12 hours and 55 minutes ago

div style="margin-bottom: 10px; font-size: 10px;"posted by Neil/div spanThis is a bit long./spanspan style="font-weight: bold;" /spanspanApologies./spanspan style="font-weight: bold;" /spanspanI'd meant to talk about other things, but I started writing this morning and got a bit carried away./spanspan style="font-weight: bold;"br /br /I have questions about the Handley case. What makes lolicon something worth defending? Yaoi, as I understand it, isn't necessarily child porn, but the lolicon stuff is all about sexualizing prepubescent girls, yes? And haven't there been lots of credible psych studies saying that if you find a support community for a fetish, belief or behavior, you're more likely to indulge in it? That's why social movements are so important for oppressed or non-mainstream groups (meaning everything from the fetish community to free-market libertarianism) -and why NAMBLA is so very, very scary (they are, essentially, a support group for baby-rapists.)br /br /The question, for me, is even if we only save ONE child from rape or attempted rape, or even just lots of uncomfortable hugs from Creepy Uncle Dave, is that not worth leaving a couple naked bodies out of a comic? It is, after all, more than possible to imply and discuss these issues (ex. if someone loses their virginity at 14, and chooses to write a comic about it) without having a big ol' pic of 14 yr. old poon being penetrated as the graphic. I also think there's a world of difference between the Sandman story-which depicts child rape as the horrific thing it is (and, I believe, also ends with a horrific death for the pervert, doesn't it?) and depicting child rape as a sexy and titillating thing. I think there is also a difference between acknowledging children's sexuality, and pornography about children that is created for adults. Where on this spectrum does something like lolicon fall? And, again, why do you, personally, think that it should be defended?br /br /Thanks for reading my ramble, and for being accessible to us, and engaged in things like CBLDF. Mostly, they are a fantastic org., but I'm really on the fence with this case...br /br /Jess/spanbr /br /Let me see if I can push you off the fence, a little. I'm afraid it's going to a long, and probably a bit rambly answer -- a span style="font-style: italic;"credo/span, and how I arrived at that.br /br /If you accept -- and I do -- that freedom of speech is important, then you are going to have to defend the indefensible. That means you are going to be defending the right of people to read, or to write, or to say, what you don't say or like or want said.br /br /The Law is a huge blunt weapon that does not and will not make distinctions between what you find acceptable and what you don't. This is how the Law is made.br /br /People making art find out where the limits of free expression are by going beyond them and getting into trouble.br /br /LOST GIRLS, by Melinda Gebbie and Alan Moore is several hundred pages long. (a href="http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2006/06/lost-girls-redux.html"I posted the full-length review I did for span style="font-style: italic;"Publishers Weekly /spanhere/a. Describing it, I said,br /br /blockquote style="font-style: italic;"The boundary between pornography and erotica is an ambiguous one, and it changes depending on where you're standing. For some, perhaps, it's a matter of whatever turns you on (my erotica, your pornography), for some the distinction occurs in class (i.e. erotica is pornography for rich people). Perhaps it's also something to do with the means of distribution â€“ internet pornography is unquestionably porn, while an Edwardian publication, on creamy paper, bought by connoisseurs, part works bound into expensive volumes, must be erotica./blockquotebr /br /and I went on to say,br /br /blockquote style="font-style: italic;"It's the kind of smut that would have no difficulty in demonstrating to an overzealous prosecutor that it has unquestionable artistic validity beyond its simple first amendment right to exist./blockquoteWhich was the kind of thing you put in a review suspecting that its real purpose may be to persuade a prosecutor that the case is already lost, and not to bother.br /br /In with span style="font-style: italic;"Lost Girls/span' many permutations of sexuality, we find some content featuring fictional characters under the current age of consent. It's a story about sexual awakenings, after all, and few of us wake exactly on our eighteenth birthdays (or whatever your local age of consent or representation happens to be). At one point we find ourselves reading a book within a book, a Beardsleyesque fantasia in which fictional characters discuss the fact that they are lines on paper, metafictional fantasies, while having underage, incestuous, sex. It's art, and it's brilliant, and it makes you think about what porn is and what art is, and where the boundaries are.br /br /The Law is a blunt instrument. It's not a scalpel. It's a club. If there is something you consider indefensible, and there is something you consider defensible, and the same laws can take them both out, you are going to find yourself defending the indefensible.br /br /I was born the day of the conclusion of the span style="font-style: italic;"Lady Chatterley/span trial in England, the day it was decided that span style="font-style: italic;"Lady Chatterley's Lover/span, with its swearing, buggery and raw sex between the classes, was fit to be published and read in a cheap edition that poor people and servants could read. This was the same England in which, some years earlier, the director of public prosecutions had threatened to prosecute Professor F R Leavis if he so much as referred to James Joyce's span style="font-style: italic;"Ulysses /spanin a lecture (the DPP was a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archibald_Bodkin"Archibald Bodkin/a, who also bannedspan style="font-style: italic;" The Well of Loneliness/span) , in which, when I was sixteen and listening to the Sex Pistols, the publisher of span style="font-style: italic;"Gay News/span was sentenced to prison for the crime of Criminal Blasphemy, for publishing an erotic poem featuring a fantasy about Jesus.br /br /When I was writing span style="font-style: italic;"Sandman/span, about eighteen years ago, I had thought that the Marquis de Sade would make a fine character for my French Revolution story (I loved the fact that at the time he was a tubby, asthmatic imprisoned for his refusal to sentence people to death) and thought I really ought to read his books, rather than commntaries on them, if I was going to put him in my story, and I discovered that the works of DeSade were, at that time, not available in the UK, and that UK Customs had declared them un-importable. I bought them in a Borders the next time I was in the US, and brought them through customs looking guilty. (You can now get De Sade in the UK. The arrival of internet porn in the UK meant that the police stopped chasing things like that.)br /br /The first time I got involved in fund-raising for comics freedom of speech was in late 1983 or early 1984 -- Knockabout Comics were having one of their frequent battles with UK Customs over what could and could not be imported into the UK. Some comics contained rude words, sex, or the use of marijuana in them, and Customs would seize any comics they objected to, forcing Knockabout to fight long, expensive, court cases to get them back. (I remember their outrage when, in 1996, Knockabout imported some Robert Crumb books to accompany a BBC TV documentary on Crumb, and UK Customs confiscated the books, forcing yet another court case. I'm pretty sure that it was over some autobiographical Crumb work which contained drawings of sexual fantasies including characters who were under 18. As a href="http://forbiddenplanet.co.uk/blog/?p=1515"Tony Bennett, from Knockabout said in a recent interview,/a span style="font-style: italic;""The other case was with HM Customs in 1996 over Robert Crumb’s comics and explicit sexual imagery. We won this overwhelmingly as well and Customs were kind enough to write to me after the case setting out a list of what sex acts might be shown in comics. I haven’t actually framed it but it is a precious document."/span)br /br /The first time I ever came close to sending a publisher to prison was about 1986 or 1987, for Knockabout's span style="font-style: italic;"Outrageous Tales From The Old Testament/span: I'd retold a story from thespan style="font-style: italic;" Book of Judges/span that contained a rape and murder, and this was held to have contravened a Swedish law depicting images of violence against women. The case was only won when the defense pointed out that the words were from the King James version of the bible, and that the images were a fair representation thereof...br /br /(For those of you who are a bit shaky on your Book of Judges, here's a href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=judges%2019;amp;version=31;"an online Bible version of the scene that caused the prosecution/a.)br /blockquotebr /span style="font-style: italic;"While they were enjoying themselves, some of the wicked men of the city surrounded the house. Pounding on the door, they shouted to the old man who owned the house, "Bring out the man who came to your house so we can have sex with him."/spanbr /br /span style="font-style: italic;"The owner of the house went outside and said to them, "No, my friends, don't be so vile. Since this man is my guest, don't do this disgraceful thing. Look, here is my virgin daughter, and his concubine. I will bring them out to you now, and you can use them and do to them whatever you wish. But to this man, don't do such a disgraceful thing."/spanbr /br /span style="font-style: italic;"But the men would not listen to him. So the man took his concubine and sent her outside to them, and they raped her and abused her throughout the night, and at dawn they let her go. At daybreak the woman went back to the house where her master was staying, fell down at the door and lay there until daylight./spanbr /br /span style="font-style: italic;"When her master got up in the morning and opened the door of the house and stepped out to continue on his way, there lay his concubine, fallen in the doorway of the house, with her hands on the threshold. He said to her, "Get up; let's go." But there was no answer. Then the man put her on his donkey and set out for home./spanbr /br /span style="font-style: italic;"When he reached home, he took a knife and cut up his concubine, limb by limb, into twelve parts and sent them into all the areas of Israel./span/blockquotebr /And in each case, you could rewrite Jess's letter above, explaining that only perverts would want to read span style="font-style: italic;"Lady Chatterley/span, or see images of women being abused, or read span style="font-style: italic;"Lost Girls/span or the works of Robert Crumb, and mentioning that if only one person was saved from a hug from a creepy uncle, or indeed, being raped in the streets, that banning them or prosecuting those who write, draw, publish, sell or -- now -- own them, is worth it. Because that was the point of view of the people who were banning these works or stopping people reading them. They thought they were doing a good thing. They thought they were defending other people.br /br /I loved coming to the US in 1992, mostly because I loved the idea that freedom of speech was paramount. I still do. With all its faults, the US has Freedom of Speech. You can't be arrested for saying things the government doesn't like. You can say what you like, write what you like, and that the remedy to someone saying or writing or showing something that offends you is not to read it, or to speak out against it. I loved that I could read and make my own mind up about something.br /br /(It's worth noting that the UK, for example, has no such law, and that even the European Court of Human Rights has ruled thata href="http://www.secularism.org.uk/uploads/3543216b2ccd2e5738717582.pdf"span style="font-style: italic;" interference with free speech was "necessary in a democratic society" in order to guarantee the rights of others" to protection from gratuitous insults to their religious feelings./span/a)br /br /So when a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_diana"Mike Diana/a was prosecuted -- and found guilty -- of obscenity for the comics in his Zine "Boiled Angel", and sentenced to a host of things, including (if memory serves) a three year suspended prison sentence, a three thousand dollar fine, not being allowed to be in the same room as anyone under eighteen, over a thousand hours of community service, and was forbidden to draw anything else obscene, with the local police ordered to make 24 hour unannounced spot checks to make sure Mike wasn't secretly committing Art in the small hours of the morning... that was the point I decided that I knew what was obscene, and it was prosecuting artists for having ideas and making lines on paper, and that I was going to do everything I could to support the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. Whether I liked or approved of what Mike Diana did was utterly irrelevant. (For the record, I didn't like the text parts of span style="font-style: italic;"Boiled Angel/span, but did like the comics, which were personal and had a raw power to them. And somewhere in the sprawling basement magazine collection I have span style="font-style: italic;"Boiled Angel/span 7 and 8, which I read back then to find out what was being prosecuted, and for owning which I could, I assume, now be arrested...)br /br /The first time the CBLDF did anything to defend one of my comics, it was the span style="font-style: italic;"Death Talks About Life/span comic at the back of DEATH: THE HIGH COST OF LIVING, in which we see Death putting a condom on a banana and talking about how not to get pregnant, diseased or dead. The Chief of Police in (if memory serves) Jacksonville Florida ordered a comic shop not to sell it, because she thought it was obscene and encouraged teen sex. In this case, it only took a letter from the CBLDF legal counsel, Burton Joseph, to the Jacksonville Police Department, explaining the concept of the First Amendment (and, by implication, that there was an organisation prepared to defend this stuff) and they shut up and went away. (That's what most of the CBLDF activity consists of -- small, quiet things that stop it ever getting to a court of law.) From the police chief's point of view, span style="font-style: italic;"Death Talks About Life/span was obscene. She wanted it off the shelves.br /br /In this case you obviously have read lolicon, and I haven't. I don't know whether you're writing from personal experience here, and whether you have personally been incited to rape children or give inappropriate hugs by reading it. (I assume you haven't. I assume that Chris Handley, with his huge manga collection, wasn't either. I've read books that claimed that exposure to porn causes rape, but have seen no statistical evidence that porn causes rape -- and indeed have seen a href="http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/forumy/2006/06/rape-porn-and-criminality-political.php"claims that the declining number of US rapes may be due to the wider availability of porn/a. Honestly, it's a red herring. I'll leave that for other people to argue about.) Still, you seem to want lolicon banned, and people prosecuted for owning it, and I don't. You ask, span style="font-style: italic;"What makes it worth defending?/span and the only answer I can give is this: Freedom to write, freedom to read, freedom to own material that you believe is worth defending means you're going to have to stand up for stuff you span style="font-style: italic;"don't /spanbelieve is worth defending, stuff you find actively distasteful, because laws are big blunt instruments that do not differentiate between what you like and what you don't, because prosecutors are humans and bear grudges and fight for re-election, because one person's obscenity is another person's art.br /br /The CBLDF will defend your First Amendment right as an adult to make lines on paper, to draw, to write, to sell, to publish, and now, span style="font-style: italic;"to own/span comics. And that's what makes work you don't like, or don't read, or work that you do not feel has artistic worth or redeeming features worth defending. It's the stuff you like and the stuff you find icky, wherever your icky line happens to be. Because the law is a big blunt instrument that makes no fine distinctions, and because you only realise how wonderful absolute freedom of speech is the day you lose it.br /br /(And let it be understood that I think that child pornography, and the exploitation of actual children for porn or for sex is utterly wrong and bad, because actual children are being directly harmed. And also that I think that a href="http://news.cnet.com/Police-blotter-Teens-prosecuted-for-racy-photos/2100-1030_3-6157857.html"prosecuting as child pornographers a 16 and 17 year old who are legally able to have sex, because they took a sexual photograph and emailed it to themselves is utterly, insanely wrong/a, and a nice example of the law as blunt instrument.) div class="label_list" style="margin-top: 20px; padding-left: 15px; text-indent: -15px; font-size: 78%/1.4em; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Trebuchet,Arial,Verdana,sans-serif; text-transform: uppercase; letter-spacing: .1em;"strongLabels:/strongnbsp; a href="http://journal.neilgaiman.com/search/label/wittering%20on%20a%20bit" style="color: #999; text-transform: uppercase;"wittering on a bit/a, a href="http://journal.neilgaiman.com/search/label/The%20First%20Amendment" style="color: #999; text-transform: uppercase;"The First Amendment/a, a href="http://journal.neilgaiman.com/search/label/Bible%20stories%20that%20nearly%20sent%20publishers%20to%20prison" style="color: #999; text-transform: uppercase;"Bible stories that nearly sent publishers to prison/a, a href="http://journal.neilgaiman.com/search/label/Lost%20Girls" style="color: #999; text-transform: uppercase;"Lost Girls/a, a href="http://journal.neilgaiman.com/search/label/CBLDF" style="color: #999; text-transform: uppercase;"CBLDF/a, a href="http://journal.neilgaiman.com/search/label/Why%20I%20Support%20the%20CBLDF" style="color: #999; text-transform: uppercase;"Why I Support the CBLDF/a/div

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Redstone to sell Midway stake for $100K

Joystiq

- 15 hours and 11 minutes ago

pFiled under: a href="http://www.joystiq.com/category/business/" rel="tag"Business/a/pdiv align="center"img vspace="4" hspace="" border="1" alt="" src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.joystiq.com/media/2008/12/midway_sinking_ship_top.jpg" //div The week begins with more bad news for a href="http://www.joystiq.com/2008/11/10/midway-report-76m-in-losses-for-q308-pins-q4-hope-on-mk-vs-dc/"financially-hobbled/a Midway. Just days after finding itself on the business end of a a href="http://www.joystiq.com/2008/11/21/midway-receives-delisting-notice-from-nyse/"delisting notice/a from the New York Stock Exchange, the company's majority stockholder, Sumner Redstone, is now preparing to row away from the sinking ship and its suffocating $1.6 billion in debt entirely. br /br /According to the a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122810340075068473.html"Wall Street Journal/a, Redstone is expected to strikeinflict/strike sell his 87% controlling stake in the troubled publisher to private investor Mark Thomas -- obviously someone who enjoys a good fixer-upper -- for the bargain basement price of about $100,000, or $0.0012 a share, well below the previous closing price of .38 a share. The WSJ also points out that the sale is but one point what has become a highlight reel of bad investments for Redstone, who sunk millions into a href="http://www.joystiq.com/tag/midway"Midway/a in hopes of the company's heroic return, only to see it do a fatality on his bank account.p style="padding:5px;background:#ddd;border:1px solid #ccc;clear:both;"a href="http://www.joystiq.com/2008/12/01/redstone-to-sell-stake-in-midway-for-about-100k/"Redstone to sell Midway stake for $100K/a originally appeared on a href="http://www.joystiq.com"Joystiq/a on Mon, 01 Dec 2008 09:55:00 EST. Please see our a href="http://www.weblogsinc.com/feed-terms/"terms for use of feeds/a./pp style="clear: both; padding: 8px 0 0 0; height: 2px; font-size: 1px; border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0;"nbsp;/ppa href=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122810340075068473.htmlRead/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.joystiq.com/2008/12/01/redstone-to-sell-stake-in-midway-for-about-100k/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent link to this entry"Permalink/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.joystiq.com/forward/1387169/" title="Send this entry to a friend via email"Email this/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.joystiq.com/2008/12/01/redstone-to-sell-stake-in-midway-for-about-100k/#comments" title="View reader comments on this entry"Comments/a/p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/VgtWnZ28OKB5JuwBc6Xd7UBO8kI/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/VgtWnZ28OKB5JuwBc6Xd7UBO8kI/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/joystiq?a=o67iuBvI"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/joystiq?i=o67iuBvI" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/joystiq?a=qsiPVXVi"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/joystiq?i=qsiPVXVi" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/weblogsinc/joystiq/~4/vbNJIDlnoA4" height="1" width="1"/

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Found Footage: A working NeXT Cube

The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

- 18 hours and 6 minutes ago

pFiled under: a href="http://www.tuaw.com/category/retro-mac/" rel="tag"Retro Mac/a, a href="http://www.tuaw.com/category/blast-from-the-past/" rel="tag"Blast From the Past/a, a href="http://www.tuaw.com/category/found-footage/" rel="tag"Found Footage/a/pimg vspace="8" hspace="8" border="0" align="right" src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.tuaw.com/media/2008/11/nextlogo.png" alt="" /Al Diblasi over at a href="http://www.alfred.tv/" target="_blank"Alfred.TV/a keeps coming up with fun videos with old Apple or related devices as the centerpiece. In this latest 53-minute masterpiece on YouTube (below), Al boots up a 1991 68040-based NeXT Cube, and then shows off some of the built-in applications, an original brochure for the NeXT, a cool NeXT black turtleneck (Steve Jobs' influence, obviously), and a couple of versions of the NeXTstep OS and development environment.br /br /For those of you who are new to the Mac world, a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT" target="_blank"NeXT/a was the company Steve Jobs founded after being kicked out of Apple. Originally, they produced both hardware, of which this NeXT Cube is a prime example, and software. NeXT was purchased by Apple in 1997, and the NeXTstep environment evolved into what we now know as Mac OS X and the Cocoa development suite. A NeXT computer used by a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee" target="_blank"Tim Berners-Lee/a was the world's first Web server.br /br /Be sure to watch or at least skim through to the end of the video, where Al finds a couple more Apple gems in his brother's basement. You can follow Al's trips through retro computing on a href="http://www.twitter.com/adiblasi" target="_blank"Twitter/a.br /centerobject width="425" height="344"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/uXHFfc3btCIamp;hl=enamp;fs=1"/paramparam name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/paramparam name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/paramembed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/uXHFfc3btCIamp;hl=enamp;fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"/embed/object/centerp style="padding:5px;clear:both;"a href="http://www.tuaw.com"TUAW/aa href="http://www.tuaw.com/2008/12/01/found-footage-a-working-next-cube/"Found Footage: A working NeXT Cube/a originally appeared on a href="http://www.tuaw.com"The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)/a on Mon, 01 Dec 2008 07:00:00 EST. Please see our a href="http://www.weblogsinc.com/feed-terms/"terms for use of feeds/a.br style="clear:both;"/ph6 style="clear: both; padding: 8px 0 0 0; height: 2px; font-size: 1px; border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0;"/h6a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXHFfc3btCIRead/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.tuaw.com/2008/12/01/found-footage-a-working-next-cube/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent link to this entry"Permalink/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.tuaw.com/forward/1386640/" title="Send this entry to a friend via email"Email this/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.tuaw.com/2008/12/01/found-footage-a-working-next-cube/#comments" title="View reader comments on this entry"Comments/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/Wrqv33fWQ1aqNPRudOettCIygEE/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/Wrqv33fWQ1aqNPRudOettCIygEE/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/tuaw?a=7VGOOfVU"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/tuaw?i=7VGOOfVU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/tuaw?a=KlwIRwZ1"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/tuaw?i=KlwIRwZ1" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/weblogsinc/tuaw/~4/iy9rN5ByBqU" height="1" width="1"/

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ETOBICOKE KIPLING and LAKESHORE

The First-Time CEO’s Recession Survival Guide

TechCrunch

- 1 days and 16 hours ago

Editor’s note: The following guest post is written by Glenn Kelman, the CEO of Redfin, an online real estate broker.Â His industry went into recession a year ago, so he’s had a little more time than most startup CEOs to think about how to deal with the current downturn. Below is his advice to his fellow entrepreneurs.

Startups can be the most conservative organizations in the world. We spend so much energy nurturing our delicate egos against naysayers and self-doubt that we can hardly admit mistakes. This is especially true of first-time CEOs. Thousands of new web companies were born in the last few years, and many of us just got the job.

We set off with the same directions: tackle a big problem, listen to customers, work hard, pinch pennies, hire slow, fire fast. Still good advice. But I think we’ll have different advice for one another once we’ve come through this downturn, about how we had to change to survive. Since real estate crashed before the overall market, Redfin (my online real estate company) has had a year’s head-start sorting out which changes seem to be working for us.

Not that we don’t still have a long ways to go.Â We’re still on track for our first profits in 2009, but we’re going to have to fight to make it.

The time we have left to succeed or fail is really just the measure of how long it took to adapt to our downturn. If I had been more experienced, we’d have adapted faster. Here’s the survival guide I’d give my former self, the one just starting to face the storm:

1. Compete With Your Successor

I often think about what my replacement will do after I’m fired. She won’t have emotional commitments to decisions that I already regret. She’ll look at everything as an outsiderâ€”as a customerâ€”refusing to tolerate problems that have lasted so long I’ve forgotten they’re there, re-considering initiatives we already passed over for want of imagination or energy. And she’ll have nine or even twelve months of leeway to build the business, so she can think long-term. Worst of all, she’ll get credit for turning Redfin into a successful, thriving business. I think, “I hate her! I hate her!” And then I try to be her.

2. Act Like an Owner

You’ve probably spent most of your life hating your boss, pleasing others (so you can blame them later) and spending other people’s money. These are hard habits to break. When I was still settling into being a CEO, I wasted a lot of time driving initiatives designed to please others, acting as if someone wouldn’t let me do what I wanted to do with Redfin. My moment of clarity came when a board member said, “as far as I’m concerned, you’re the owner of this business.” And he was right: you won’t own all the proceeds if the company succeeds, but you’ll certainly own a failure in its entirety. This sparked several reptilian impulses:

“I can’t blame anyone else if this sucker goes down.” This made me feel powerful and savage, like Arnold at the end of “Predator.”
“If it were all my money, I’d invest it in Redfin today — but there’d be some big changes around here.” We’re making those changes now. (This is about focusing on the part of the business that you really believe in.)
“If we had to get our wallet out every week for that expense, would we?” (This is about focusing on the part of the business you don’t believe in.)

3. Get a Board You Connect With (Not Just One With Connections)

Startups have so much size anxiety that nothing can stop us from recruiting big shots onto our boards. But first-time CEOs need someone we can talk to about practical details, too. So in our case, Redfin chairman Paul Goodrich recruited Marc Singer for his experience with businesses run out of the cash register: restaurant chains, bean-bag manufacturers, installers of electronic animal fences. I used to be dubious that we had anything to learn from these companies. Not anymore.

Now I catch myself gazing at a parking-lot coffee cart and thinking, “what a great business” (it’s more profitable than most venture-funded startups). Marc has cultivated a nuts-and-bolts, make-money-now execution focus at our company. But there’s another benefit to working with him: it was easier from day one to think out loud with someone I wasn’t so anxious to impress.

Where I’d always imagined my board conversations would be like Richard Gere’s in “Pretty Woman” or even Willem Dafoe’s in “Spiderman” — conversations with Marc were more like telling a guy on a Greyhound bus about a bad breakup, where it all just came pouring out. In tough times, you need a board you connect with more than a board with connections.

4. Run Weekly Revenue Meetings

A job applicant from Amazon suggested holding a weekly revenue meeting, which has been an immediate hit. We focus on what we can do to drive revenue from week to weekâ€”tactical stuff, like hiring another field agent or changing a call to action on our site. We catch glitches that could otherwise last all month.

5. Automate Bad News

Bad news travels slowlyâ€”or sometimes just sits in your stomachâ€”unless you pump reports straight out to the board, on revenues, traffic, customer service. Add spin if you like, but in a separate note so you don’t hold things up. This helps you avoid the-dog-ate-it board meetings.

6. (Just Ask to) Meet Your Peers

My natural tendency is to avoid meeting people outside of Redfin. I tend to measure my own work in keystrokes, and I begin to miss my computer after I’m away for 30 minutes. In hard times especially, it’s easy for a startup to become like a teenager’s basement bedroom: insular, stale, reeking of dude. Yet there are very few hours that have raised Redfin’s value as much as meetings with other entrepreneurs. A year before our cash-evaporation date, one CEO told me to start raising money. Another told us to get on the stick about our Google search rank. For someone wary of most consultants and experts, these meetings are one of my only sources of new information. And it’s important to gather new information: line managers have to focus on the jobs in front of them, but executives should be awake to what’s happening in the larger world. Anyone will meet you if you just ask for her help.

7. Create Simplicity

When Obama first heard the proposed slogan “yes we can,” his reaction was: “too simple.” But a leader’s job is to create simplicity. Over the past year, our real-estate executives slogged through ambiguous data on conversion rates, close rates, tour fulfillment. Decisive meetings felt like a math test where we ran out of time. Yet it never occurred to me to stop, step back and be precise and insistent about what we needed to know to make a decision. When something is hard to explain, you don’t understand it and you make mistakes. It’s a cliché to “keep it simple, stupid,” but the real challenge is to make it simple, mastering complexity instead of ignoring it. Entrepreneurs instinctively want to speed things up. What’s really hard is knowing when you have to slow them down.

8. Go on the Attack

Your competitors are hurting too. Be the aggressor, not the victim.

9. Be a Roman

What disgusted the ancient Romans about barbarians was their lack of discipline. Oxford Professor Peter Heather writes, “As far as a Roman was concerned, you could easily tell a barbarian by how he reacted to fortune. Give him one little stroke of luck, and he would think he had conquered the world. But, equally, the slightest setback would find him in deepest despair...” This is why, 2,000 miles from home, several hundred Romans could slaughter several thousand barbarians.

Startups are founded by barbarians. But to survive the ups and downs, you have to make yourself into a Roman. The most talented entrepreneur I know nearly self-destructs on the 18-month birthday of each of his ventures. By that point a startup isn’t brand-new anymore, and it isn’t Google either. The closer you get to becoming a real company, the less glamorous reality seems: you’re grimy from clawing for money and breathing hard now from exertion, which would be fine if you could convince yourself you’re not the only one struggling. Everyone struggles. Keep fighting.

10. The Journey is the Destination

Startups alternate between nostalgia for the garage and millennial longing for a lucrative exit. But what I always keep in mind is how disconnected and purposeless I felt before Redfin or my earlier startup, Plumtree. All I ever wanted was to get into a situation where I could win. Everybody has that dream. Even though you’re a second-string Little Leaguer, you dream that you’ll find a way into the World Series, that, with the game on the line, you’ll manage to hit just one major-league pitch. And if you do hit it, I promise you won’t be as happy as you were the moment before you swung. If you’re still playing, you can still win. And playing’s the thing. Enjoy it.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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