The Cannes International Advertising Festival awarded its Grand Prix in the media category Tuesday.

The winner: a postcard made of a candy bar.

I swear to God.

Writing a book is easy. Doing a start-up is hard.

To create TheChaosScenario.net, we have assembled a coalition of the willing called Team Chaos, each member heroically and selflessly donating expertise and resources to a) invent a new means of publishing, b) coalesce a community around all things Chaos. TCS is the shakedown cruise.

The process is incremental and rather complex. Each day we are dealing with 1.7 bazillion details. Of them 266,009 are done wrong at least twice. And our estimate of completion schedules has been simply pitiful.

Hard to know how much of this has to do with the complexity of the project itself, and how much has to do with the level of urgency a pro bono client tends to generate (my guess: mainly the first factor), but just for instance:

You may have noticed the odd, red/gray color scheme. This was a visual reference to one of the three separate book covers we’d intended to offer buyers of TCS.

But by the time the website finally launched — about 5 weeks later than originally expected — we had already been forced to ditch the choice-of-three-covers gimmick. (That’s because we underestimated the cost/complexity of printing and shipping assortments of covers, especially in bulk purchases.) So instead, we organized an online vote and selected the overwhelming favorite (80% of the votes!) as THE cover of TCS.

The cover is baby blue and white.

Which is not red and gray.

Oops.

On the other hand, color palette aside,this first phase of the site is now functioning just fine, just in time for the availability of TCS in the Kindle edition July 1. And, by Wednesday or so, people will actually be able to pre-order the book directly from this site.

Mind you, though we’d love to sell a book to every man, woman and child in this great country of ours (and inferior countries, too), the object of this exercise is not merely to flog books. Nor is our goal only to document the successes and failures of our publishing scheme. Mainly we hope to cultivate a real community and news hub to learn about, opine on, seek refuge from the revolution in progress.

If this items posts in five seconds or so when I press “publish,” that journey will have begun.

You are here because you understand. The yin and yang of mass media and mass marketing — so marvelously, mutually sustaining for 400 years — have decoupled. The digital universe that pried them apart is itself a marvel, shifting power from the few to the many and altering human behavior, not to mention economies, on a grand scale. The question for business – as well as government, religion, science, politics, academia and every other institution hitherto operated from the top down – is what to do now.
Which is precisely what this site is meant to figure out.

Obviously, I’m flogging a book here. I spent more than four years, and explored five continents, seeking the answers. Beginning in a Denmark cow pasture, I roamed from Estonia to Australia, Israel to England, Montenegro to Brazil, California to Conshohocken, Pa. trying to locate the pathways out of chaos. Along the way, I contrived what I call the art and science of Listenomics, a set of principles for taking advantage of the very power shifts that so threaten The Powers That Be. I’ve even engaged in an epic battle with one of those titanic Powers (and won!)

So, naturally, after all that journeying and battling and typing, I’d like you to buy a copy of The Chaos Scenario for yourself and everyone you’ve ever known.

But, incredibly enough, that’s only the secondary goal of TheChaosScenario.net. The primary goal is to coalesce of community of minds, victims of chaos and beneficiaries alike, to collaboratively forge a path to the future. Here you’ll find the tools, and Comrades in Chaos, to do so. What you see is the first stage, with more utility to follow. For now, once again, welcome. I haven’t been shy with my thoughts. I hope you won’t be, either.

–Bob Garfield