I am sovereign, I am the state.
I own who I am, I have the power that I have and I am responsible for the actions caused by my will. No one can take from me my identity, unless I choose to let them. No one can guide my actions unless I go along.
I can be a businessman, I can run for City Council, I can join Greenpeace, the Peace Corp, the ACLU, the KKK, The Freemasons, The Daughters of the American Revolution, Al Qaeda, The Minutemen, The Government, The Military, The CIA, The Church. I can live in New York, I can live in Wyoming, I can live in Tehran, I can live in Tokyo, I can live in the heart of the city, the sticks or the suburbs. I can kill a man, rape a woman or vice versa. I can have a child, I can raise a child, I can abort a child, I can help a child, I can teach a child.
I am not free and I never will be. Freedom is a crass fantasy that has lost all semblance of meaning. Freedom once referred to individual sovereignty. I have that, I am sovereign. No man owns me, but I am not free from my environment, I am not free from the state. I am sovereign, I am the state, and you are a shareholder in my life as I am in yours.
Money is not magical, it has not power, none at all. I have power, my will has power, my choices have power, and my perception has power. Without these money isn't even paper because no one ever bothered to print it. There is no they, only us. They is a label based on arbitrary separation created to sow the seeds of distrust. This does not mean that I do not recognize that there are people out there who have more power than I do. But here's the kicker, they alone do not necessarily have more power than I do, not unless they grow their own food or are a master of the martial arts, or have some kind of individual power that increases their sovereignty. Money does not do this. Money cannot do this. What money does is represent an avatar of power. We imbue it voluntarily with the ability to control and manipulate our actions. While it is the lifeblood of civilization, it is not a thing unto itself. It is a being of pure belief. If I stop believing in it, it will stop having power.
This is not to say that those who have money have no power over me. They have power over me only because money allows them to bind themselves collectively. Money can be used to purchase the will of others and devote it to my causes, just as I may sell my will to others and devote it to their causes. If I sell my will to another, I am active in that cause, I am complicit and I am responsible. I will be called to atone, though it is not certain that I will ever truly understand the means of my atonement. I judge and am judged, every moment of every day by every living being, based on criteria passed down through the generations from beings who have caused effects and been affected by other causes.
I am not a slave, I am sovereign. No one owns me, though I lease myself out from time to time. Sometimes I give charitably, but even in my charity, I am selfish, because I am sovereign. My means are devoted to my wants, and my wants are informed by my desires, so even the good I do, the help I do others springs from my own desire.
If I am ever disappointed it is because I had unrealistic expectations. I distorted my perception by my fantasies. This is nobodies fault but my own. I take full responsibility for this, I might as well, because I will suffer for it nonetheless whether I accept it or not.
What is God? God is the sum totality of all attendant will in existance, aware of itself existing through action. Because Consciousness exists at all, and consciousness is a collective process, God exists. Proof of God is Tautological, God proves itself. God is the result of all actions. Because consciousness exists at all, because I am aware, and because you are aware, and because by reading this we are aware as a greater entity sharing consciousness, God exists, period, the contrary opinion is not valid. We as consciousness, as awareness, as perception, as a piece of the universe are emergent properties of the universe, and therefore the universe is aware of itself, because we are aware of ourselves.
Claim what it is yours, take it, grasp it, own it, be it, and you will be no one's slave. No master may own you, unless you allow it. Another person can kill you, but they cannot make you do anything that you do not agree to participate in. You can be bound, you can be tortured and you can be killed, but you cannot be made a slave by the will of another. You have to break, you have to give in and you have to allow it for it to happen. If you would die before slavery, then you are free in the only meaningful sense of the word. You cannot escape your environment and its constraints, you cannot escape your society, you cannot escape your beliefs, so in that sense, you can never be totally free, but you can be sovereign.
Reality is Democratic. It is decided by the synergy of the aggregate will.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
A Crass New Way to Shill to the Mice that Be
Jeff Gomez asked me about Transmedia storytelling. He asked:
Transmedia storytelling is storytelling that involves multiple different formats. This differs from multi-media in one significant way. Multi-media refers to the same aspect of the same story being presented in multiple medias. The movie poster, the trailer, the web site, and the guerilla marketing campaign are all examples of multi-media. Transmedia is when the story is told through multiple media but the story intersects but doesn't duplicate that being offered in another medium. Examples of this are movies like 'The Matrix' or 'The Chronicles of Riddick' that spawned cartoons, comic books and video games that were all successful products for the franchise independently of the focus medium, the film.
My answer to Mr. Gomez would be that Transmedia storytelling is the most complete way to tell a story. When I seek out current events, I watch the news, read stories, comment on message boards and blogs and listen to radio broadcasts. The same story is told in many different mediums. As it is, corporate media has been using transmedia internally for longer than anyone who is reading this has been alive. There has always been a treatment, a script, a storyboard, set pieces, actors, a media campaign with promotional materials, a soundtrack, parties, and possible other mediums I am not even thinking of, but I could go on forever if I started listening jello sculptures and sky-writing.
Not a single film, video game or any other audio-visual medium has ever been produced that did not use multiple mediums to convey the story. Now, no single person has ever experienced every single piece of media related to film, with the possible exception of a film's director, but even then some things are produced by others that do not make it in, often even published without consulting the director if it's a project made by a different department. With transmedia the story behind the story is just as important. The making of, and the commentary are now cultural standards for films and video games. These are considered part of the overall franchise, though they don't necessarily tell the story that is portrayed on screen in the final product. We spend billions on magazines that tell us the trials and tribulations of the actors and actresses that we see on screen.
To reference our dearly and recently departed friend Paul Harvey, we desperately want to know, 'The Rest of the Story'. Paul Harvey made his career out of bringing trivia about famous people to the forefront of our knowledge. His storytelling style was one where he took the focal point of the story and hid it, while telling us the story. It was not until the end that he revealed who it was that he was talking about. Every film has a focus, a protagonist, an antagonist and supporting characters who we get to know over the course of the film. We know something of the actions and motivations of the first, second, third, and sometimes fourth tier characters in a film, but what about the 107th tier characters? If it's true that there are six degrees of separation between everyone on Earth, then even the extra smoking a joint in the nightclub behind the fighters in the scene has a story, and on occasion he might even have crafted a character that he played. That might have even been noticed by the Producers in the editing process. This is part of the story, both in the film as it is produced and the background of the relationships between the auteurs from the Director to the extra.
What Transmedia does is it makes the lesser known characters stories known. Who knew that Gaeta was bisexual and that his gay lover would rescue him from his fembot aggressor? Of course you wouldn't know that if you didn't watch the Battlestar Galactica webisodes. If you didn't watch the webisodes then Gaeta's entire motivation for the final season might have seemed out of place to you. If, however you watched the webisodes everything made sense, you understood why Gaeta did what he did, and you knew who replaced him as Communications officer.
By the same token, transmedia can be used to sell you Battlestar Galactica toothpaste. Crass consumerism is of course its own cause and its own effect. We are all consumers, and unless you are some sort of ascetic living and austere lifestyle as a ferry man like our dear Siddharta, you are likely a consumer, are driven by your consumption. Though, even if Siddharta was driven by consumption, his need to woo an expensive lady drove him to a life of success and excess. It is this success and excess upon which our society is founded. It both drives the engine of commerce that creates our media, as well as many of the storylines that they enable us to envision. Without it we'd have no way to tell our stories, and no stories to tell. It is after all our worst characteristics that drive our stories. So as we watch Battlestar Galactica a TV show about how human sin has almost caused human extinction, we feed people's families by buying Battlestar Galactica toothpaste.
Our entire identities are crafted from symbols. There is very little reason to buy a CK T-Shirt for $ 30 when one could buy a cheaper T-shirt for far less. We do so in order to engage with a symbol the idea of Calvin Klein. This is one of the worst excesses, an article of clothing that merely has a logo on it being sold as some sort of status piece. It is empty, it is devoid of meaning. It is the meaning that separates something of value from something without value, and sometimes that line is spread very thin.
So the simple answer to you Jeff, is that Transmedia when crafted because there is more story to tell, has an useful purpose, but when it is merely there to craft a new article for consumption to fulfill the unholy Madison Avenue OCD completionist urge, it is merely a crass new way to shill to the mice that be.
'In the future, I would appreciate your thoughts on how transmedia storytelling either helps or hinders the driving of the points you ponder to the target audience. Is transmedia a legitimate aesthetic that allows the visionary new ways to convey narrative to today's audience, or is it simply a crass new way to shill for the Mice that Be?'While I chose the title that I did because it just sounds great, I'm going to say that it's both.
Transmedia storytelling is storytelling that involves multiple different formats. This differs from multi-media in one significant way. Multi-media refers to the same aspect of the same story being presented in multiple medias. The movie poster, the trailer, the web site, and the guerilla marketing campaign are all examples of multi-media. Transmedia is when the story is told through multiple media but the story intersects but doesn't duplicate that being offered in another medium. Examples of this are movies like 'The Matrix' or 'The Chronicles of Riddick' that spawned cartoons, comic books and video games that were all successful products for the franchise independently of the focus medium, the film.
My answer to Mr. Gomez would be that Transmedia storytelling is the most complete way to tell a story. When I seek out current events, I watch the news, read stories, comment on message boards and blogs and listen to radio broadcasts. The same story is told in many different mediums. As it is, corporate media has been using transmedia internally for longer than anyone who is reading this has been alive. There has always been a treatment, a script, a storyboard, set pieces, actors, a media campaign with promotional materials, a soundtrack, parties, and possible other mediums I am not even thinking of, but I could go on forever if I started listening jello sculptures and sky-writing.
Not a single film, video game or any other audio-visual medium has ever been produced that did not use multiple mediums to convey the story. Now, no single person has ever experienced every single piece of media related to film, with the possible exception of a film's director, but even then some things are produced by others that do not make it in, often even published without consulting the director if it's a project made by a different department. With transmedia the story behind the story is just as important. The making of, and the commentary are now cultural standards for films and video games. These are considered part of the overall franchise, though they don't necessarily tell the story that is portrayed on screen in the final product. We spend billions on magazines that tell us the trials and tribulations of the actors and actresses that we see on screen.
To reference our dearly and recently departed friend Paul Harvey, we desperately want to know, 'The Rest of the Story'. Paul Harvey made his career out of bringing trivia about famous people to the forefront of our knowledge. His storytelling style was one where he took the focal point of the story and hid it, while telling us the story. It was not until the end that he revealed who it was that he was talking about. Every film has a focus, a protagonist, an antagonist and supporting characters who we get to know over the course of the film. We know something of the actions and motivations of the first, second, third, and sometimes fourth tier characters in a film, but what about the 107th tier characters? If it's true that there are six degrees of separation between everyone on Earth, then even the extra smoking a joint in the nightclub behind the fighters in the scene has a story, and on occasion he might even have crafted a character that he played. That might have even been noticed by the Producers in the editing process. This is part of the story, both in the film as it is produced and the background of the relationships between the auteurs from the Director to the extra.
What Transmedia does is it makes the lesser known characters stories known. Who knew that Gaeta was bisexual and that his gay lover would rescue him from his fembot aggressor? Of course you wouldn't know that if you didn't watch the Battlestar Galactica webisodes. If you didn't watch the webisodes then Gaeta's entire motivation for the final season might have seemed out of place to you. If, however you watched the webisodes everything made sense, you understood why Gaeta did what he did, and you knew who replaced him as Communications officer.
By the same token, transmedia can be used to sell you Battlestar Galactica toothpaste. Crass consumerism is of course its own cause and its own effect. We are all consumers, and unless you are some sort of ascetic living and austere lifestyle as a ferry man like our dear Siddharta, you are likely a consumer, are driven by your consumption. Though, even if Siddharta was driven by consumption, his need to woo an expensive lady drove him to a life of success and excess. It is this success and excess upon which our society is founded. It both drives the engine of commerce that creates our media, as well as many of the storylines that they enable us to envision. Without it we'd have no way to tell our stories, and no stories to tell. It is after all our worst characteristics that drive our stories. So as we watch Battlestar Galactica a TV show about how human sin has almost caused human extinction, we feed people's families by buying Battlestar Galactica toothpaste.
Our entire identities are crafted from symbols. There is very little reason to buy a CK T-Shirt for $ 30 when one could buy a cheaper T-shirt for far less. We do so in order to engage with a symbol the idea of Calvin Klein. This is one of the worst excesses, an article of clothing that merely has a logo on it being sold as some sort of status piece. It is empty, it is devoid of meaning. It is the meaning that separates something of value from something without value, and sometimes that line is spread very thin.
So the simple answer to you Jeff, is that Transmedia when crafted because there is more story to tell, has an useful purpose, but when it is merely there to craft a new article for consumption to fulfill the unholy Madison Avenue OCD completionist urge, it is merely a crass new way to shill to the mice that be.
Rush Limbaugh is wrecking the Right
John Derbyshire is a thoughtful conservative intellectual, the kind of voice that the country is benefitted greatly by. While Liberals might feel shouted down by Rush Limbaugh, it is actually a rational conservatism that is the least known today.
Limbaugh has recently made some notable Republicans kiss the ring after trying to distance themselves from him. In Michael Steele's case, he just over-reached and Rush called him on it, and in this case Rush was indeed right, but Rush being right all the time doesn't help the Republican party. I doubt the leader of the RNC will last very much longer.
Here is a great article from John Derbyshire about the problems with the GOP. My personal political leanings are generally pretty conservative, but the Rushpublican party does not represent my views at all. If the Republican party has put up a credible alternative to Obama I might not have voted for him. In the end I am pragmatic and my views can be summed up by this quote by Alexander Pope:
'Of forms of government let fools protest/Whatever is best administered is best'
I highly recommend the article by John Derbyshire, it represents everything the Republican party needs to be for the good of our Republic, but it also represents everything the GOP is not.
Limbaugh has recently made some notable Republicans kiss the ring after trying to distance themselves from him. In Michael Steele's case, he just over-reached and Rush called him on it, and in this case Rush was indeed right, but Rush being right all the time doesn't help the Republican party. I doubt the leader of the RNC will last very much longer.
Here is a great article from John Derbyshire about the problems with the GOP. My personal political leanings are generally pretty conservative, but the Rushpublican party does not represent my views at all. If the Republican party has put up a credible alternative to Obama I might not have voted for him. In the end I am pragmatic and my views can be summed up by this quote by Alexander Pope:
'Of forms of government let fools protest/Whatever is best administered is best'
I highly recommend the article by John Derbyshire, it represents everything the Republican party needs to be for the good of our Republic, but it also represents everything the GOP is not.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Espionage, Tournaments and Assassinations Eve Online politics
I play the MMO Eve Online. It is in my opinion the most fascinating of them all. I originally avoided it when I first heard of it because I knew I would get sucked in, and I have.
What originally drew me to Eve Online was the Guiding Hand Social Club Heist possibly the most famous MMO event in history. Surely to be eclipsed by the events of the last week. This last week has shown that Eve Online has its own culture, its own civilizations. For several years there has been a war between two major alliances. Band of Brothers (BoB) and Goonswarm. Goonswarm came to the game from the Something Awful Forums. BoB's goal in the game was to dominate it, and for a while it seemed like they were going to. They controlled vast amounts of space, but were an overextended empire, something that the Goons exploited. Goonswarm's agenda was to 'break' Eve. BoB eventually consolidated it's control over two very resource rich regions, Delve and Querious. Querious is behind Delve, and one must go through Delve to get there.
Now recently there was a heist, where Goonswarm was able to turn a BoB director over to their side. The defector was able to give the keys to La Mittani of Goonswarm, who in a flash of inspiration realized he could dissolve BoB, the most famous alliance in the game. So three hours later he did it. Here is the full story of how he did it. After dissolving the alliance Goons immediately snagged the copyright.
So in the world of Eve Online they brought low the greatest alliance by stealing it's copyright. The reason it worked is because of the Eve Sovereignty system. The Sovereignty system is tied into the alliance framework, and is based on the alliance's force projection. If you have more than three more Player Owned Stations (POS) than your nearest competitor, you own the system. This means you can rename it, you get benefits like the ability to build your own Jump Gates so you can jump from system to system. Being able to control a large territory gives you the ability to build massive industrial capacity, as well as giving you unfettered access to ore. A lot of the ore you can get in these systems is rare and very valuable. So controlling your own space has real tangible in-game benefits.
So when BoB's sovereignty went down, so did their jump gates, some of their factories and a lot of their protective systems. They were smart though, they had a backup alliance ready to reclaim the sovereignty and so they got back to sovereignty one in many systems quickly. However, this opened the floodgates and other alliances made a push into Delve. In the first couple of days hundreds of ships were destroyed, it might be thousands by the time I write this. Keep in mind that in Eve Online all the ships that fly in a fleet are flown by players, you cannot control an NPC fleet under you as a fleet commander, the closest you can get to that are drone ships and carriers with fighters that are as powerful as the midrange ships by themselves.
So as of this week the entire balance of power in Eve has shifted.
In other news in the game, the Sixth Eve Alliance Tournament was underway. Alliances field competitive fleets over the course of about a week or so. In one of the tournaments Issler Dainze of The Honda Accord alliance was assassinated by his own teammate, who held a grudge from another alliance. They went on to win anyway.
To understand all of this you have to understand that all of the player owned ships are built by players from ore mined by players, using manufacturing processes refined by players, in an economy driven by the players. The logistics required to control a region like Delve are pretty mind-boggling. There are so many things that go into it that I couldn't possibly explain it in this blog post.
This shows a new evolution in human storytelling, levels of human creation and understanding that go beyond anything we've had in our past, it's the creation of a whole other world, to which many people dedicate themselves for better or worse. It is a world where a McDonald's Manager can rule an empire. The skills required to pull these things off are the same skills that an executive of a real world corporation needs. Some of the talent will be dedicated entirely to the game and we will never see some of the world's tactical and logistical geniuses devote their skills toward building in the real world, but inevitably some of them will.
What originally drew me to Eve Online was the Guiding Hand Social Club Heist possibly the most famous MMO event in history. Surely to be eclipsed by the events of the last week. This last week has shown that Eve Online has its own culture, its own civilizations. For several years there has been a war between two major alliances. Band of Brothers (BoB) and Goonswarm. Goonswarm came to the game from the Something Awful Forums. BoB's goal in the game was to dominate it, and for a while it seemed like they were going to. They controlled vast amounts of space, but were an overextended empire, something that the Goons exploited. Goonswarm's agenda was to 'break' Eve. BoB eventually consolidated it's control over two very resource rich regions, Delve and Querious. Querious is behind Delve, and one must go through Delve to get there.
Now recently there was a heist, where Goonswarm was able to turn a BoB director over to their side. The defector was able to give the keys to La Mittani of Goonswarm, who in a flash of inspiration realized he could dissolve BoB, the most famous alliance in the game. So three hours later he did it. Here is the full story of how he did it. After dissolving the alliance Goons immediately snagged the copyright.
So in the world of Eve Online they brought low the greatest alliance by stealing it's copyright. The reason it worked is because of the Eve Sovereignty system. The Sovereignty system is tied into the alliance framework, and is based on the alliance's force projection. If you have more than three more Player Owned Stations (POS) than your nearest competitor, you own the system. This means you can rename it, you get benefits like the ability to build your own Jump Gates so you can jump from system to system. Being able to control a large territory gives you the ability to build massive industrial capacity, as well as giving you unfettered access to ore. A lot of the ore you can get in these systems is rare and very valuable. So controlling your own space has real tangible in-game benefits.
So when BoB's sovereignty went down, so did their jump gates, some of their factories and a lot of their protective systems. They were smart though, they had a backup alliance ready to reclaim the sovereignty and so they got back to sovereignty one in many systems quickly. However, this opened the floodgates and other alliances made a push into Delve. In the first couple of days hundreds of ships were destroyed, it might be thousands by the time I write this. Keep in mind that in Eve Online all the ships that fly in a fleet are flown by players, you cannot control an NPC fleet under you as a fleet commander, the closest you can get to that are drone ships and carriers with fighters that are as powerful as the midrange ships by themselves.
So as of this week the entire balance of power in Eve has shifted.
In other news in the game, the Sixth Eve Alliance Tournament was underway. Alliances field competitive fleets over the course of about a week or so. In one of the tournaments Issler Dainze of The Honda Accord alliance was assassinated by his own teammate, who held a grudge from another alliance. They went on to win anyway.
To understand all of this you have to understand that all of the player owned ships are built by players from ore mined by players, using manufacturing processes refined by players, in an economy driven by the players. The logistics required to control a region like Delve are pretty mind-boggling. There are so many things that go into it that I couldn't possibly explain it in this blog post.
This shows a new evolution in human storytelling, levels of human creation and understanding that go beyond anything we've had in our past, it's the creation of a whole other world, to which many people dedicate themselves for better or worse. It is a world where a McDonald's Manager can rule an empire. The skills required to pull these things off are the same skills that an executive of a real world corporation needs. Some of the talent will be dedicated entirely to the game and we will never see some of the world's tactical and logistical geniuses devote their skills toward building in the real world, but inevitably some of them will.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
The Omega Point, Singularity, Transhumanism and God http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Point
This is an aspect of cosmology that I find interesting as I am constantly confronted by this notion in literature that passes in front of me. The synthesis of de Chardin and Tipler eliminates the necessity of a luddite Christianity. It also points to a providential idea that true decline is actually impossible as time moves linearly toward the eschatonian singularity. The greater man has control over his environment the greater our computational capacity. The idea that at some point (already past in my view) it will be impossible for a single human or group of humans to perceive the greater sweep of humanity seems to be the heart of the modern malaise. We seem to be at a point where we have trouble reconciling ourselves with the shock to the ego that is the end of 'great men'. As humanity becomes more complex the ability of single humans to dominate space diminishes as the capacity of the species to do so increases, though it need not obliterate individuality as individuality is necessary for the progression of creativity. If Creativity is a higher goal than happiness however, it makes no promises to mitigate suffering along the way. I suspect however that there is an optimum threshold between happiness and suffering where creativity thrives the best. Too happy and we are complacent, and too much suffering and we are incapable of bettering our situation as our entire being is devoted to achieving homeostasis rather than toward making creative progress. IE, a cancerous coma victim isn't creating as much as a healthy adult who is driven by dissatisfaction. On the other hand happiness can be a measure of attainment of optimal creative drive. The better aligned toward the Omega Point, the happier we will become.
This also says to me that Eschaton if such a finite end point truly exists, is still billions of years away. It also speaks to the notion that I touch on infrequently of conflicting religions being reconciled as different revelations given appropriately to the different cultures in which they emerged. The hindrance often comes from the egoes involved, the necessity of human cultural groups to express the competitive drive by being the keepers of the dominant revelation. For instance Mohammed saying his was the final revelation, and the Catholic church claiming to be the direct representative of God on Earth. Obviously such ego restrictions placed on revelation serve an asabiyah function for the in-group/out-group dynamic, it creates a cohesive culture that is hermetically sealed as an incubator for the particular idea that is being nurtured by that culture.
Abrahamic ideas of eschaton seem to support this, Buddhist attainment is the personal seeking of that end point, the Gita with its destruction of false perceptions of self in favor of unity with Krsna-hood and the Zoroastrian conflict where Uhura Mazd defeats Ahriman while Mithras brings the revelation of the process to mankind.
Quote:
Five Attributes of the Omega Point
Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man states that the Omega Point must possess the following five attributes. It is:
* Already existing.
Only thus can the rise of the universe towards higher stages of consciousness be explained.
* Personal – an intellectual being and not an abstract idea.
The complexification of matter has not only led to higher forms of consciousness, but accordingly to more personalization, of which human beings are the highest attained form in the universe. They are completely individualized, free centers of operation. It is in this way that man is said to be made in the image of God, who is the highest form of personality. Teilhard expressly stated that in the Omega Point, when the universe becomes One, human persons will not be suppressed, but super-personalized. Personality will be infinitely enriched. This is because the Omega Point unites creation, and the more it unites, the more the universe complexifies and rises in consciousness. Thus, as God creates the universe evolves towards higher forms of complexity, consciousness, and finally with humans, personality, because God, who is drawing the universe towards Him, is a person.
* Transcendent.
The Omega Point cannot be the result of the universe's final complexification of itself on consciousness. Instead, the Omega Point must exist even before the universe's evolution, because the Omega Point is responsible for the rise of the universe towards more complexity, consciousness and personality. Which essentially means that the Omega Point is outside the framework in which the universe rises, because it is by the attraction of the Omega Point that the universe evolves towards Him.
* Autonomous – that is, free from the limitations of space (nonlocality) and time (atemporality).
Five Attributes of the Omega Point
Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man states that the Omega Point must possess the following five attributes. It is:
* Already existing.
Only thus can the rise of the universe towards higher stages of consciousness be explained.
* Personal – an intellectual being and not an abstract idea.
The complexification of matter has not only led to higher forms of consciousness, but accordingly to more personalization, of which human beings are the highest attained form in the universe. They are completely individualized, free centers of operation. It is in this way that man is said to be made in the image of God, who is the highest form of personality. Teilhard expressly stated that in the Omega Point, when the universe becomes One, human persons will not be suppressed, but super-personalized. Personality will be infinitely enriched. This is because the Omega Point unites creation, and the more it unites, the more the universe complexifies and rises in consciousness. Thus, as God creates the universe evolves towards higher forms of complexity, consciousness, and finally with humans, personality, because God, who is drawing the universe towards Him, is a person.
* Transcendent.
The Omega Point cannot be the result of the universe's final complexification of itself on consciousness. Instead, the Omega Point must exist even before the universe's evolution, because the Omega Point is responsible for the rise of the universe towards more complexity, consciousness and personality. Which essentially means that the Omega Point is outside the framework in which the universe rises, because it is by the attraction of the Omega Point that the universe evolves towards Him.
* Autonomous – that is, free from the limitations of space (nonlocality) and time (atemporality).
Quote:
Garcia and increasing creativity
Main article: Total creativity
In 1971, John David Garcia expanded on Teilhard's Omega Point idea. In particular, he stressed that even more than the increase of intelligence, the constant increase of ethics is essential for humankind to reach the Omega Point. He applied the term creativity to the combination of intelligence and ethics and announced that increasing creativity is the correct and proper goal of human life. He specifically rejected increasing happiness as a proper ultimate goal: when faced with a choice between increasing creativity and increasing happiness, a person ought to choose creativity, he wrote.
Quote:
Tipler's cosmological Omega Point
Main article: Omega Point (Tipler)
The Omega Point is Frank Tipler's term for what he maintains is the ultimate fate of the universe required by the laws of physics. Tipler has summarized his theory as follows:
* The universe has finite spatial size and the topology of a three-sphere;
* There are no event horizons, implying the future c-boundary is a point, called the Omega Point;
* Sentient life must eventually engulf the entire universe and control it;
* The amount of information processed between now and the Omega Point is infinite;
* The amount of information stored in the universe asymptotically goes to infinity as the Omega Point is approached.[1]
According to Tipler's Omega Point Theory, as the universe comes to an end in a specific kind of Big Crunch, the computational capacity of the universe will be accelerating exponentially faster than time runs out. In principle, a simulation run on this universal computer can thus continue forever in its own terms, even though the universal computer is embedded in a universe that will last only a finite time. The Omega Point Theory requires that the universe eventually contract, and that there be intelligent civilizations in existence at the appropriate time to exploit the computational capacity of such an environment.
Tipler identifies the final singularity of this asymptotically infinite information capacity with God. According to Tipler and David Deutsch, an implication of this theory is that this ultimate cosmic computer will be able to resurrect (via emulation) everyone who has ever lived, by simulating all possible quantum brain states within the master simulation. This will manifest itself as a simulated reality. From the perspective of its simulated inhabitants, the Omega Point is an infinite-duration afterlife, which could take any imaginable form due to its virtual nature.
Tipler's Omega Point Theory is predicated on an eventual Big Crunch, a scenario believed unlikely by some because of certain recent astronomical observations implying that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.[2] Tipler has recently amended his theory to accommodate an accelerating universe due to a positive cosmological constant. He proposes baryon annihilation (via the inverse of electroweak baryogenesis using electroweak quantum tunneling) as a means of propelling interstellar spacecraft. Tipler maintains that if all baryons in the universe were to be annihilated by this process, then this would force the Higgs field toward its absolute vacuum state, cancelling the positive cosmological constant, stopping the acceleration, and forcing the universe to collapse into the Omega Point.[3]
Tipler argues that his Omega Point theory is fully consistent with what God said to Moses in Exodus 3:14, whose Hebrew original Tipler translates into English as: "I shall be what I shall be." Tipler (2007) argues that his theory is consistent with orthodox Christianity.
Quote:
Technological singularity
Some transhumanists argue that the accelerating technological progress inherent in the Law of Accelerating Returns will, in the relatively near future, lead to what Vernor Vinge called a technological singularity or "prediction wall." This singularity is a state in which humans will be semi-aware components of a computerised social structure of such complexity that no one person or group of persons will be able to understand more than a tiny fraction of the whole. These transhumanists believe we will soon enter a time in which we must eventually make the transition to a "runaway positive feedback loop"[citation needed] in high-level autonomous machine computation. A result will be that our technological and computational tools eventually completely surpass human capacities.[1] While some transhumanist writings refer to this moment as the Omega Point, paying homage to Teilhard's prior use of the term, Teilhard did not describe his Omega Point as attainable by technological means. Other transhumanists, in particular Ray Kurzweil, refer to the technological singularity as simply "The Singularity."
This is an aspect of cosmology that I find interesting as I am constantly confronted by this notion in literature that passes in front of me. The synthesis of de Chardin and Tipler eliminates the necessity of a luddite Christianity. It also points to a providential idea that true decline is actually impossible as time moves linearly toward the eschatonian singularity. The greater man has control over his environment the greater our computational capacity. The idea that at some point (already past in my view) it will be impossible for a single human or group of humans to perceive the greater sweep of humanity seems to be the heart of the modern malaise. We seem to be at a point where we have trouble reconciling ourselves with the shock to the ego that is the end of 'great men'. As humanity becomes more complex the ability of single humans to dominate space diminishes as the capacity of the species to do so increases, though it need not obliterate individuality as individuality is necessary for the progression of creativity. If Creativity is a higher goal than happiness however, it makes no promises to mitigate suffering along the way. I suspect however that there is an optimum threshold between happiness and suffering where creativity thrives the best. Too happy and we are complacent, and too much suffering and we are incapable of bettering our situation as our entire being is devoted to achieving homeostasis rather than toward making creative progress. IE, a cancerous coma victim isn't creating as much as a healthy adult who is driven by dissatisfaction. On the other hand happiness can be a measure of attainment of optimal creative drive. The better aligned toward the Omega Point, the happier we will become.
This also says to me that Eschaton if such a finite end point truly exists, is still billions of years away. It also speaks to the notion that I touch on infrequently of conflicting religions being reconciled as different revelations given appropriately to the different cultures in which they emerged. The hindrance often comes from the egoes involved, the necessity of human cultural groups to express the competitive drive by being the keepers of the dominant revelation. For instance Mohammed saying his was the final revelation, and the Catholic church claiming to be the direct representative of God on Earth. Obviously such ego restrictions placed on revelation serve an asabiyah function for the in-group/out-group dynamic, it creates a cohesive culture that is hermetically sealed as an incubator for the particular idea that is being nurtured by that culture.
Abrahamic ideas of eschaton seem to support this, Buddhist attainment is the personal seeking of that end point, the Gita with its destruction of false perceptions of self in favor of unity with Krsna-hood and the Zoroastrian conflict where Uhura Mazd defeats Ahriman while Mithras brings the revelation of the process to mankind.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Must female characters in children's properties be merely vehicles for an ethical lesson?
My wife works in the Transmedia industry. She has dealt with properties ranging from adult to teen to children to general marketing. For those who do not know, Transmedia refers to a larger storytelling medium that creates a world that transcends merely one medium. You can't just have a novel, a movie, and a video game, but you must have a contiguous narrative.
In preparation for a possible contract on a famous girl's property she began to read the book, "Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters from Marketers' Schemes" by Sharon Lamb and Lyn Mikel Brown. It was also inspired by the fact that we have a young daughter, and so does her boss. So in general because of career reasons, and family reasons it is a topic that has become near and dear to our hearts. There are few things more revolting than Bratz dolls. Unfortunately though, even as natural allies to the book's message, it has managed to turn us off to it's subject matter. In a stereotypically academic way, the authors are out of touch with mainstream society. I won't even go too deeply into their penchant for picking properties that never really found purchase, who people are largely unaware of, while missing out on perfect examples that would have resonated for a much greater audience, or their recommendation for documentaries that cost hundreds of dollars, ensuring that those documentaries bypass the concerned parent market almost completely.
The main thing that we have noticed, as we are very concerned with narrative, is the notion that characters should be reduced to mere objects for a moral lesson. In adult literature/film, it is considered a masterpiece if the characters touch on something deep within us. Yes, the ethical lesson is there, but it need not be there as a result of the characters exemplifying it. Many a great tragedy has touched our hearts with characters who are destroyed, never redeemed throughout the course of the entire film. In Darren Aronofsky's "Requiem for a Dream", none of the characters, not even Ellyn Bursten's innocent single widow is saved despite the warnings of her more worldly son played by Jared Leto. Everyone in the film ends tragically. Leto loses his arm to Gangrene from shooting up, Marlon Wayans goes to a southern prison, Jennifer Connolly cuddles with the heroin she earned by being part of a double anal penetration show, and Ellen Burstyn goes insane from a speed induced craze as prescribed by an inattentive doctor. No one in that movie ended up in a good spot. But it made it's point about the horrors of drug addiction, in a way that few films have before or since.
In "Packaging Girlhood", Lamb and Brown make various complaints about some really nitpicky details of some fictional girl's lives. They range from the extremely trivial, such as Peaches Tickle's 50s housewife style in 'Jojo's Circus' where they completely ignore the dynamism inherent in the character, who is an attentive Mother and wife, who is treated well by her husband, has lots of supportive friends who she is supportive of as well, and helps run the family business as clowns in the circus. Jojo Tickle, the main character an Peaches's daughter is a very happy well adjusted child who is the leader of her group of friends. It is one of the best and most uplifting shows that show girls in a positive light without presenting some sense of arbitrary opposition between men and women. The men are men and the women are women in the show, but there is no conflict between them and their identities. No one tells people what they can and cannot do because they are women. Jojo's parents perform stereotypical tasks, her Mom bakes and her Father fixes things, but in both cases they teach Jojo how to do what they are doing. In making a nitpick about Peaches's clothes, they diminish their point.
Another example, is speaking of the American Girls franchise. They make one good point about it in that the pretty white girl characters, the word pretty is used over and over, but in the book about the black slave's book, the word fancy is used over and over. That I believe is a legitimate complaint, but their other complaints about Addy the girl who escapes from slavery is that no one compliments her on her many accomplishments. They don't point out that she is a capable person. Ultimately she is congratulated on her ability to control her emotions to keep her opinions to herself. In a society where there was a very real danger for an 'uppity' black girl opening her mouth, this is an important lesson to learn. It's an important lesson for anyone to learn regardless of circumstances, controlling one's emotions is one of the highest arts and the core of self-discipline. The book itself is about her containing her rage at being a slave, so the lesson about restraint is the core message. There are, however, character considerations as to why it is especially important for THIS character. In their desire to make girls feel good about themselves, our academic critique would have us completely ignore the literary merit of the time and place in which Addy lives. They do not want her to be human, they want people to build her self-esteem like a clueless Boomer parent raised on 'The Power of Positive Thinking'. Is there anything telling us that a slave Mother might even consider thinking about making a production of raising her daughter's self-esteem? Would that even be in character for her? Why would it be something that she even values? Raising self-esteem for it's own sake is a very 20th century bourgeois conceit and not something I would expect from an early American culture. As is the idea that every accomplishment requires fanfare. She knows what she did, she knows she saved her Mother's life when she almost drowned, she knows she escaped from slavery, is pointing this out really necessary?
The authors would enslave characters to the notion of making girls feel empowered. Somehow this to me does not seem empowering. It is an idealization of what they want girls to be, and not a continuous tradition as to what girls historically have been. It also propagates the notion that girls still need to be pandered to to find their own power. The implicit assumption that girls ARE inferior and need to be built up until they no longer are. The idea that it is not ok for girls to resemble girls in the past is just as undercutting as many of the stereotypes they decry in their book.
No doubt Girls are underrepresented in children's properties. On the Disney channel, in both 'The Wiggles', and 'Imagination Movers', the female characters are tokens and completely subservient to the male characters in the show. This needs to change, but people within the industry such as my wife and her company are actively working to do so. As it is, a girl's property that she worked on has come out and they can see the fruits of their labor in how it is presented by the owner of the property, but it is not because they explicitly set out to empower girls by harping on the way they dress as much as it is that they portrayed girls with thoughts, feelings, aspirations and most importantly projects of their own.
In preparation for a possible contract on a famous girl's property she began to read the book, "Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters from Marketers' Schemes" by Sharon Lamb and Lyn Mikel Brown. It was also inspired by the fact that we have a young daughter, and so does her boss. So in general because of career reasons, and family reasons it is a topic that has become near and dear to our hearts. There are few things more revolting than Bratz dolls. Unfortunately though, even as natural allies to the book's message, it has managed to turn us off to it's subject matter. In a stereotypically academic way, the authors are out of touch with mainstream society. I won't even go too deeply into their penchant for picking properties that never really found purchase, who people are largely unaware of, while missing out on perfect examples that would have resonated for a much greater audience, or their recommendation for documentaries that cost hundreds of dollars, ensuring that those documentaries bypass the concerned parent market almost completely.
The main thing that we have noticed, as we are very concerned with narrative, is the notion that characters should be reduced to mere objects for a moral lesson. In adult literature/film, it is considered a masterpiece if the characters touch on something deep within us. Yes, the ethical lesson is there, but it need not be there as a result of the characters exemplifying it. Many a great tragedy has touched our hearts with characters who are destroyed, never redeemed throughout the course of the entire film. In Darren Aronofsky's "Requiem for a Dream", none of the characters, not even Ellyn Bursten's innocent single widow is saved despite the warnings of her more worldly son played by Jared Leto. Everyone in the film ends tragically. Leto loses his arm to Gangrene from shooting up, Marlon Wayans goes to a southern prison, Jennifer Connolly cuddles with the heroin she earned by being part of a double anal penetration show, and Ellen Burstyn goes insane from a speed induced craze as prescribed by an inattentive doctor. No one in that movie ended up in a good spot. But it made it's point about the horrors of drug addiction, in a way that few films have before or since.
In "Packaging Girlhood", Lamb and Brown make various complaints about some really nitpicky details of some fictional girl's lives. They range from the extremely trivial, such as Peaches Tickle's 50s housewife style in 'Jojo's Circus' where they completely ignore the dynamism inherent in the character, who is an attentive Mother and wife, who is treated well by her husband, has lots of supportive friends who she is supportive of as well, and helps run the family business as clowns in the circus. Jojo Tickle, the main character an Peaches's daughter is a very happy well adjusted child who is the leader of her group of friends. It is one of the best and most uplifting shows that show girls in a positive light without presenting some sense of arbitrary opposition between men and women. The men are men and the women are women in the show, but there is no conflict between them and their identities. No one tells people what they can and cannot do because they are women. Jojo's parents perform stereotypical tasks, her Mom bakes and her Father fixes things, but in both cases they teach Jojo how to do what they are doing. In making a nitpick about Peaches's clothes, they diminish their point.
Another example, is speaking of the American Girls franchise. They make one good point about it in that the pretty white girl characters, the word pretty is used over and over, but in the book about the black slave's book, the word fancy is used over and over. That I believe is a legitimate complaint, but their other complaints about Addy the girl who escapes from slavery is that no one compliments her on her many accomplishments. They don't point out that she is a capable person. Ultimately she is congratulated on her ability to control her emotions to keep her opinions to herself. In a society where there was a very real danger for an 'uppity' black girl opening her mouth, this is an important lesson to learn. It's an important lesson for anyone to learn regardless of circumstances, controlling one's emotions is one of the highest arts and the core of self-discipline. The book itself is about her containing her rage at being a slave, so the lesson about restraint is the core message. There are, however, character considerations as to why it is especially important for THIS character. In their desire to make girls feel good about themselves, our academic critique would have us completely ignore the literary merit of the time and place in which Addy lives. They do not want her to be human, they want people to build her self-esteem like a clueless Boomer parent raised on 'The Power of Positive Thinking'. Is there anything telling us that a slave Mother might even consider thinking about making a production of raising her daughter's self-esteem? Would that even be in character for her? Why would it be something that she even values? Raising self-esteem for it's own sake is a very 20th century bourgeois conceit and not something I would expect from an early American culture. As is the idea that every accomplishment requires fanfare. She knows what she did, she knows she saved her Mother's life when she almost drowned, she knows she escaped from slavery, is pointing this out really necessary?
The authors would enslave characters to the notion of making girls feel empowered. Somehow this to me does not seem empowering. It is an idealization of what they want girls to be, and not a continuous tradition as to what girls historically have been. It also propagates the notion that girls still need to be pandered to to find their own power. The implicit assumption that girls ARE inferior and need to be built up until they no longer are. The idea that it is not ok for girls to resemble girls in the past is just as undercutting as many of the stereotypes they decry in their book.
No doubt Girls are underrepresented in children's properties. On the Disney channel, in both 'The Wiggles', and 'Imagination Movers', the female characters are tokens and completely subservient to the male characters in the show. This needs to change, but people within the industry such as my wife and her company are actively working to do so. As it is, a girl's property that she worked on has come out and they can see the fruits of their labor in how it is presented by the owner of the property, but it is not because they explicitly set out to empower girls by harping on the way they dress as much as it is that they portrayed girls with thoughts, feelings, aspirations and most importantly projects of their own.
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Hollywood's Technological Rot
So here we are, it's about an hour past dawn of the information age, and I find myself incredulous. Those best positioned to benefit from such an achievement are unable to get over their old business models.
Television has been the standard mode of communicating fictional properties for the last half of the twentieth century. The audio/visual medium has been refined to an enduring artform. It has revolutionized the way we do business and facilitated the rise of an unprecedented technological culture. It's biggest drawback? It only communicates one way.
Big businesses have relied on TV commercials ever since we saw the successes of Betty Crocker and Lucky Strike Cigarettes in the 50s. If it were not for television it might have taken a bit longer to put a washer and dryer in every home. You wouldn't have a dishwasher let alone Cascade dishwasher detergent. You can positively forget about a Microwave, and your George Foreman grill would be who is George and why do I want his grill?
Now, all of this has been measured through statistical means. If you have a commercial running in a locality you can measure whether orders for your product are up there or not. But what if you are already a common brand? How can you tell if your commercials are reaching their target audience once you are no longer trying to teach consumers that your brand exists? How should Coca Cola know that it's advertising investment is reaching the maximum number of eyeballs per dollar? Well, as far as I can tell, they rely on Nielsen ratings. Nielsen ratings rely on people keeping a diary of their viewing appetites. Knowing how well people maintain their diet diaries should tell you something about how effective this all is. I participated in a study related to a heart condition I have, and I didn't even fill out all the paperwork properly to study a condition that I have which is potentially life threatening. While I am not the most dilligent when it comes to things of this nature, I imagine that I am probably not an isolated demographic.
This brings us to where we are today. A world with DVR and On-Demand, stop-gap measures intended to satisfy the needs of a vestigial TV organ located somewhere in the Frontal Cortex. These are intended for those of us who simply cannot accept the reality of where we are today. Proprietary delivery networks are a thing of the past. They are obsolete. They are not yet extinct but they are outmoded, and unecessary.
They are also the entirety of what makes Hollywood. Hollywood is a distribution system, a brokerage, and little more. It has been one of the most multinational institutions in the world for quite some time now. It has outsourced its filming every chance it got. The greatest example of this are the Mountains behind the Bronx in, "Rumble in the Bronx.", I know, I know that's not really a Hollywood film, but that's a part of my point, the distinction of 'Hollywood' really only matters in terms of the distribution. Where it is filmed is likely not Hollywood, where the actors are from or even live currently is likely not Hollywood. What makes something 'Hollywood' is if the bigwigs behind the scenes decide whether or not to give it access to its distribution networks. Now that's Hollywood. The second thing that it is, is a brokerage. People go there to get funding for a film. It is less necessary to kowtow to Hollywood as a Brokerage than as a distribution system however. Hollywood as a Brokerage will remain more relevant than Hollywood as a distribution system in the long run.
Now Proto-OnDemand video as you see from your cable television will eventually yield to actual On Demand video. Why no major studio is on top of this yet, I do not know. They content themselves to be delivered online by Netflix and iTunes. This makes no sense at all. The reason for this though? They don't know how to 'account' for non-traditional mediums. This is patently ludicrous. There is nothing that allows you to more accurately track your viewership and it's habits, than a website. The amount of data one can glean from the usage statistics available in your standard web server package is far and away more comprehensive than that of a television. We're talking Ox Cart vs Mercedes C-Class here.
Certainly, Hollywood should continue to milk its DVD/Blue Ray distribution system, no reason not to, but it needs to recognize the necessity for it to make every effort to put a bullet in that model as soon as possible. The big studios should be working to own their own distribution networks via the interweb. As it is, the difference between On Demand cable, and internet is a polite fiction. It's about proprietary networks, but the underlying technology is essentially the same. The only advantage that cable companies have is dedicated hardware.
I'll now present you with BBB. The three B's are:
1) Brand
2) Bandwidth
3) Back End
1) Brand
This is the most important aspect of your product. It is the overall view of your product, how do people feel about your product? What does your product do? Does it do it well?
2) Bandwidth
This is currently the second greatest hurdle after the lack of imagination at media conglomerates. This is where you are going to incur the bulk of your fixed costs.
3) Back End
This simply refers to the quality of your web presence. The nuts and bolts that keeps your delivery system up and running.
If you have a solid brand, like Warner Bros, Fox, or Legendary, people will come to you to seek your films. Right now you likely have videos that almost no one is watching. How many sales are you receiving on Gallipoli right about now? Your brand will drive people to your site. There is no good reason why someone should go to the site of a major studio and not be able to have instant access to their entire canon right then and there. Don't withhold parts of your canon, keep the entire canon up for download at any given time. Indulge the whims of your audience. Bring them in with the summer blockbuster, and upsell them on the older film of the same genre.
I'll skip the bandwidth issue as it's being properly addressed and I have no good advice for it. Instead we'll go straight to back end, which will touch on some of the bandwidth issues. Something you need is the ability to have a community on your website, and also to connect to other people's networks. You need to be able to embed your videos on Facebook, MySpace or Blogspot. In fact people should be able to set up to X amount of time of your video, keyframed anywhere they want to display on their blog. Sampling of this nature should be encouraged. It's viral advertising, and will drive traffic to your site, totally free of charge. You should develop a method similar to bittorrent where the content is downloaded from other users who are currently connected to the download seed. This will drastically reduce your needed bandwidth while the users download Act 1 Scene 1 from you, but everything else from the other users who are currently watching the video.
As a quick addendum to back end. You need a warez hacker department. Don't spend so much money on your legal team that goes after piracy. Spend money on your team of College undergraduates who will while away their days for $ 15 an hour seeking ways to foil torrent streams. If 9 out of 10 copies of your video up online illicitly are actually a boring infomercial or scat porn, people will give up and associate piracy with poor quality. If you combine this with a cheap model, they'll come to you first. Take the incentive for piracy out by making it less work to pay for your film than it is to find a decent pirated copy. This cannot be done at a rate of $ 20 per DVD. There is too much incentive for piracy at that price.
Let us return to Brokerage for a moment. Not the kind I was speaking of before, but a new kind. Venues like iTunes and Netflix can be brokerage services. They sell your video for a cut of the profit. This should also apply to your users. Your users should have API access to allow them to earn rewards based on traffic that drives new business to your site. So not only do you not seek to stop them from using your IP on their website, you encourage it, so long as it's not the entire finished product. If you need to understand more about APIs and how they work, consult the models used by Amazon and CCP. CCP is the maker of Eve Online, they have a model that allows you to access personal game data in web applications.
Now this part is to Jesse Alexander and Jeff Gomez, with whom I've had conversations about this sort of thing before.
Don't accept gripes concerning old business models to be equally valid. They are not, and they should not be considered as such. The newer models are not only inevitable, meaning non-negotiable, they are also superior in every way. Nielsen ratings are archaic and primitive compared to the most basic webstat programs. There is no reason you shouldn't be able to get data up to the minute, or even up to the second regarding who is watching what.
If you build a new distribution model, make sure that it's cheap. Don't charge $ 4 a rental for new releases. Charge $ 2 a rental. Make it so cheap that people will think nothing of paying to watch it ten times. Also, have an advertising revenue model. Give people a cheaper account upon which they can watch advertisements rather than pay for the account. Give your back catalogue to people for a monthly subscription cost. $ 20 a month gets you up to 40 movie views. The people that will max out that number are few and far between. It's likely a certain number of your accounts won't even watch one movie some months, and it will all balance out. Make sure you or whoever you represent maintains control over the content delivery. Stop farming it out to distribution systems. After the cost of maintaining the website and the servers, all of the profit stays in house. Don't draw a distinction between hi-def and lo-def in your pricing model. Just give it all for a low price. The distinctions of picture resolution are going to matter less and less to your audience.
The key here is high volume low margin. The cheaper it is, the more often people will utilize these services, aka, the higher your ratings will be. The more control you have over your own distribution, the more nimbly you can respond to market shifts.
When you show your film/show on TNT, TNT controls the delivery brand. Put TNT out of business. If you must outsource don't outsource the brand, outsource the labor. Your site can be maintained by a third party and marketing can be handled by a third party, but don't send people to TNT to watch your video, send people to 'My Film Studio'. That is how you can ensure that you know every last little minute detail about who is watching what, and their habits when doing so. When approaching potential ad buyers, giving them them the data, will be a simple matter of cut and paste.
A TV and a Computer are the same thing. Just repeat this mantra to anyone who doesn't understand. A TV and a Computer are the same thing. Don't allow them to think otherwise, it's not good for them and it's not good for you. There is only one network, the internet, period.
One day, and one day soon, you will be able to map hyperlinks to what is going on on the screen. Imagine being able to click on Vick Mackey's Dodge Charger while it's on screen. This is the future of Quicktime and Flash video they can already do this today. These tools are not being utilized effectively, because the people who control the content cannot conceive of why they might be useful.
We have gone from the release of "I am Legend" dominating the ad space in 'Rainbow Six: Vegas' because they didn't get enough ad buyers, to Barack Obama buying ad space in a dozen video games on the cheap in a short period of time.
All digital delivery mediums are rigorously logged. There is no excuse for not comprehending how to know who is watching your videos.
Television has been the standard mode of communicating fictional properties for the last half of the twentieth century. The audio/visual medium has been refined to an enduring artform. It has revolutionized the way we do business and facilitated the rise of an unprecedented technological culture. It's biggest drawback? It only communicates one way.
Big businesses have relied on TV commercials ever since we saw the successes of Betty Crocker and Lucky Strike Cigarettes in the 50s. If it were not for television it might have taken a bit longer to put a washer and dryer in every home. You wouldn't have a dishwasher let alone Cascade dishwasher detergent. You can positively forget about a Microwave, and your George Foreman grill would be who is George and why do I want his grill?
Now, all of this has been measured through statistical means. If you have a commercial running in a locality you can measure whether orders for your product are up there or not. But what if you are already a common brand? How can you tell if your commercials are reaching their target audience once you are no longer trying to teach consumers that your brand exists? How should Coca Cola know that it's advertising investment is reaching the maximum number of eyeballs per dollar? Well, as far as I can tell, they rely on Nielsen ratings. Nielsen ratings rely on people keeping a diary of their viewing appetites. Knowing how well people maintain their diet diaries should tell you something about how effective this all is. I participated in a study related to a heart condition I have, and I didn't even fill out all the paperwork properly to study a condition that I have which is potentially life threatening. While I am not the most dilligent when it comes to things of this nature, I imagine that I am probably not an isolated demographic.
This brings us to where we are today. A world with DVR and On-Demand, stop-gap measures intended to satisfy the needs of a vestigial TV organ located somewhere in the Frontal Cortex. These are intended for those of us who simply cannot accept the reality of where we are today. Proprietary delivery networks are a thing of the past. They are obsolete. They are not yet extinct but they are outmoded, and unecessary.
They are also the entirety of what makes Hollywood. Hollywood is a distribution system, a brokerage, and little more. It has been one of the most multinational institutions in the world for quite some time now. It has outsourced its filming every chance it got. The greatest example of this are the Mountains behind the Bronx in, "Rumble in the Bronx.", I know, I know that's not really a Hollywood film, but that's a part of my point, the distinction of 'Hollywood' really only matters in terms of the distribution. Where it is filmed is likely not Hollywood, where the actors are from or even live currently is likely not Hollywood. What makes something 'Hollywood' is if the bigwigs behind the scenes decide whether or not to give it access to its distribution networks. Now that's Hollywood. The second thing that it is, is a brokerage. People go there to get funding for a film. It is less necessary to kowtow to Hollywood as a Brokerage than as a distribution system however. Hollywood as a Brokerage will remain more relevant than Hollywood as a distribution system in the long run.
Now Proto-OnDemand video as you see from your cable television will eventually yield to actual On Demand video. Why no major studio is on top of this yet, I do not know. They content themselves to be delivered online by Netflix and iTunes. This makes no sense at all. The reason for this though? They don't know how to 'account' for non-traditional mediums. This is patently ludicrous. There is nothing that allows you to more accurately track your viewership and it's habits, than a website. The amount of data one can glean from the usage statistics available in your standard web server package is far and away more comprehensive than that of a television. We're talking Ox Cart vs Mercedes C-Class here.
Certainly, Hollywood should continue to milk its DVD/Blue Ray distribution system, no reason not to, but it needs to recognize the necessity for it to make every effort to put a bullet in that model as soon as possible. The big studios should be working to own their own distribution networks via the interweb. As it is, the difference between On Demand cable, and internet is a polite fiction. It's about proprietary networks, but the underlying technology is essentially the same. The only advantage that cable companies have is dedicated hardware.
I'll now present you with BBB. The three B's are:
1) Brand
2) Bandwidth
3) Back End
1) Brand
This is the most important aspect of your product. It is the overall view of your product, how do people feel about your product? What does your product do? Does it do it well?
2) Bandwidth
This is currently the second greatest hurdle after the lack of imagination at media conglomerates. This is where you are going to incur the bulk of your fixed costs.
3) Back End
This simply refers to the quality of your web presence. The nuts and bolts that keeps your delivery system up and running.
If you have a solid brand, like Warner Bros, Fox, or Legendary, people will come to you to seek your films. Right now you likely have videos that almost no one is watching. How many sales are you receiving on Gallipoli right about now? Your brand will drive people to your site. There is no good reason why someone should go to the site of a major studio and not be able to have instant access to their entire canon right then and there. Don't withhold parts of your canon, keep the entire canon up for download at any given time. Indulge the whims of your audience. Bring them in with the summer blockbuster, and upsell them on the older film of the same genre.
I'll skip the bandwidth issue as it's being properly addressed and I have no good advice for it. Instead we'll go straight to back end, which will touch on some of the bandwidth issues. Something you need is the ability to have a community on your website, and also to connect to other people's networks. You need to be able to embed your videos on Facebook, MySpace or Blogspot. In fact people should be able to set up to X amount of time of your video, keyframed anywhere they want to display on their blog. Sampling of this nature should be encouraged. It's viral advertising, and will drive traffic to your site, totally free of charge. You should develop a method similar to bittorrent where the content is downloaded from other users who are currently connected to the download seed. This will drastically reduce your needed bandwidth while the users download Act 1 Scene 1 from you, but everything else from the other users who are currently watching the video.
As a quick addendum to back end. You need a warez hacker department. Don't spend so much money on your legal team that goes after piracy. Spend money on your team of College undergraduates who will while away their days for $ 15 an hour seeking ways to foil torrent streams. If 9 out of 10 copies of your video up online illicitly are actually a boring infomercial or scat porn, people will give up and associate piracy with poor quality. If you combine this with a cheap model, they'll come to you first. Take the incentive for piracy out by making it less work to pay for your film than it is to find a decent pirated copy. This cannot be done at a rate of $ 20 per DVD. There is too much incentive for piracy at that price.
Let us return to Brokerage for a moment. Not the kind I was speaking of before, but a new kind. Venues like iTunes and Netflix can be brokerage services. They sell your video for a cut of the profit. This should also apply to your users. Your users should have API access to allow them to earn rewards based on traffic that drives new business to your site. So not only do you not seek to stop them from using your IP on their website, you encourage it, so long as it's not the entire finished product. If you need to understand more about APIs and how they work, consult the models used by Amazon and CCP. CCP is the maker of Eve Online, they have a model that allows you to access personal game data in web applications.
Now this part is to Jesse Alexander and Jeff Gomez, with whom I've had conversations about this sort of thing before.
Don't accept gripes concerning old business models to be equally valid. They are not, and they should not be considered as such. The newer models are not only inevitable, meaning non-negotiable, they are also superior in every way. Nielsen ratings are archaic and primitive compared to the most basic webstat programs. There is no reason you shouldn't be able to get data up to the minute, or even up to the second regarding who is watching what.
If you build a new distribution model, make sure that it's cheap. Don't charge $ 4 a rental for new releases. Charge $ 2 a rental. Make it so cheap that people will think nothing of paying to watch it ten times. Also, have an advertising revenue model. Give people a cheaper account upon which they can watch advertisements rather than pay for the account. Give your back catalogue to people for a monthly subscription cost. $ 20 a month gets you up to 40 movie views. The people that will max out that number are few and far between. It's likely a certain number of your accounts won't even watch one movie some months, and it will all balance out. Make sure you or whoever you represent maintains control over the content delivery. Stop farming it out to distribution systems. After the cost of maintaining the website and the servers, all of the profit stays in house. Don't draw a distinction between hi-def and lo-def in your pricing model. Just give it all for a low price. The distinctions of picture resolution are going to matter less and less to your audience.
The key here is high volume low margin. The cheaper it is, the more often people will utilize these services, aka, the higher your ratings will be. The more control you have over your own distribution, the more nimbly you can respond to market shifts.
When you show your film/show on TNT, TNT controls the delivery brand. Put TNT out of business. If you must outsource don't outsource the brand, outsource the labor. Your site can be maintained by a third party and marketing can be handled by a third party, but don't send people to TNT to watch your video, send people to 'My Film Studio'. That is how you can ensure that you know every last little minute detail about who is watching what, and their habits when doing so. When approaching potential ad buyers, giving them them the data, will be a simple matter of cut and paste.
A TV and a Computer are the same thing. Just repeat this mantra to anyone who doesn't understand. A TV and a Computer are the same thing. Don't allow them to think otherwise, it's not good for them and it's not good for you. There is only one network, the internet, period.
One day, and one day soon, you will be able to map hyperlinks to what is going on on the screen. Imagine being able to click on Vick Mackey's Dodge Charger while it's on screen. This is the future of Quicktime and Flash video they can already do this today. These tools are not being utilized effectively, because the people who control the content cannot conceive of why they might be useful.
We have gone from the release of "I am Legend" dominating the ad space in 'Rainbow Six: Vegas' because they didn't get enough ad buyers, to Barack Obama buying ad space in a dozen video games on the cheap in a short period of time.
All digital delivery mediums are rigorously logged. There is no excuse for not comprehending how to know who is watching your videos.
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