If I want someone to connect my Twitter feed to a toaster, with obligatory ratings system and RSS feed, then make a 15 minute presentation at an unconfernence likely called tOAst 20:10 NOW ‘defining the future or bread based social communication’ I’ll call in my black rimmed ‘tech’ buddies.

Um, bit of a faulty analogy. The calendar gag was popularized twenty years ago by the Women’s Institute. The criticism is not that it’s shocking, but that it’s a tawdry, overcooked cliche, full of self-conscious look-at-me wackiness. Not inventive, not subversive, just tedious in its neediness for pingbacks and RTs.

Admittedly, punk was full of brilliant self-publicists like Malcolm McLaren, who created a noisy press-grabbing “scene” out of not very much substance at all. Given the frankly feeble track records of most of these self-facilitating calendar nodes, perhaps the comparison’s not so bad. Small wonder London remains such an entrepreneurial backwater when lame stunts like this are seen as a substitute for the real graft of business-building.

I’ve posted this article to http://unistartups.slinkset.com/ – Hacker News for British students building startups.

But stop wasting our money investing in companies and funds.

Give tax and social security breaks to innovative companies and the people who back them. Make rules for issuing options simple and tax efficient. Give us the framework and the scientists. Give us the engineers and the felixibility to fail. Then let us get on with it.

I have to smile (gently) as the punk comparison. How many of us are willing to let go of the profitability and success ethos in true punk style ? How disruptive are we willing to be to our own preconceived ideas ? Can we challenge our own club and decide not to join it ?