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I don't like conference calls. Conference calls can be experienced three ways:

1. You're on top. That means you're either shitting on someone else's ideas and day, or you're feeding them propagandist bullshit about your latest quarterly reports. Being an ass, I prefer to shit on than be shit on, so this is the conference call I'm most likely to tolerate.

2. You're on bottom. Maybe you're a reporter for a mid-sized website and you're hearing about the exciting and fantastic new derivative World War II shooter sequels being made at publisher X, or some random hardware maker is trying to convince you how their $300m quarterly loss was only part of a restructuring program. I really don't like this and have successfully avoided these for three years.

3. The GroupThink. The most banal and depressing kind of conference call. This is what you get when you don't have strong leadership or the person in the natural position of leadership decides to do things by committee. As someone with an inclination for authoritarianism (either lead, follow, or get the fuck out of my way), this is my idea of a personal hell. Whatever I've done in my past lives, it must have been bad for me to continue involving myself in these, like some sort of self-inflicted Karma.

A GroupThink conference call that ends in a banal, bland, compromised conclusion is actually not that bad. The body and mind naturally rebel against this evil, there's a sick feeling in your stomach and you automatically wish to never associate yourself with it. It's like the natural fear of snakes: there's a deep and ancient racial memory, a subconscious understanding, an instinct if you will, which makes you afraid of snakes because there are primarily poisonous snakes where man evolved (suck it, Creationists). It is good to have that feeling, because it protects you.

Consequently, any human being on the planet in touch with his instincts and having a natural aversion to GroupThink conference calls should obey this instinct. GroupThink is unnatural. We have leaders, even in democratic societies, where we punish ourselves by listening to their speeches and campaign ads just to elect them. We're so desperate for leaders, Americans even voted George Bush into office. TWICE!

Leaders give us goals and directions and wrong or right, we'll follow them. Sometimes the difference between having the proper and improper goals is merely timing, being too early or too late by a few years. Committees result in limited goals, and decisions taken only so far as to not offend anyone on the committee. We know this to be true.

So the real evil of the GroupThink conference call isn't that you're afraid of it or that it's unnatural, it's that it convinces you that things are OK. In a GroupThink conference call, you can be sitting stranded in the desert, out of food and water, discussing that in fact food and water are gone for the better part of thirty minutes, before coming to the conclusion that you are quite stranded and might want to create some shade. And then, having "confronted" the issues at hand (starvation, dehydration, being lost, sunstroke, freezing at night), you feel so much better about it that you do fuck all in the end except the very few basic things that might have been agreed upon (like finding shade and maybe keeping a lookout for a rescuer).

There's the evil. It's like a drug, it soothes the mind, it's like being that German in Saving Private Ryan who is slowly driving his knife into one of the American's hearts after a one-on-one melee and saying "Shhh" as if to quiet a baby. It's going to be OK, just relax, let go of responsibility and simply accept death. You put up a good fight, you confronted the enemy, now it's OK to let go and die.

Fucking conference calls.