We realized that the big problem was that AOL was taking some of the money.

[AOL and other ISPs] will naturally tend to go towards what brings them revenue. They can spend money to keep their regular spam filters up to date but they can make money by neglecting spam filters and pushing more senders to pay for guaranteed delivery.

Perversely, AOL's pay-to-send system would actually reward AOL financially for degrading free email for regular customers as they attempt to push people into paid-mail. AOL should be working to ensure its spam filters don't block legitimate mail, not charging protection money to bypass those filters and offering band-aids to allow some select nonprofits to bypass them as well.

The problem is, some of residents are coming back, going into homes, taking debris from inside houses and putting it back on street. It might not look like were doing our job, but were picking it up and its getting refilled.

For most people, geeks or not, modern life is just this incredibly complex problem amenable to no good obvious solution. But we can peck around the edges of it; we can make little shortcuts. And once you point out that everyone does that, once you coin the term, it's really easy to pile a whole lot of shared behaviors into one neat pile.

Out of nowhere, I became a fairly well-known director with a penchant for opera, which I did for 10 years. Then I realized I was taking myself out the theater channel, and so I re-focused on theater.