YouTube as feedback.

There is not an original thought in what follows.

I often joke that YouTube is the real Pirate Bay, that only its size and Google’s stature keep it open for business. But it could be that what keeps it open — thriving — is its lawlessness. It’s the release valve for a system that has become stressed to the breaking point; namely, copyright.

We just finished watching the celebrated 70 minute critique of George Lucas’ The Phantom Menace. Apart from a few stupid, despicable moments, it’s brilliant and generous — and it would not have been as stinging or poignant a rebuke without YouTube.

¿What is the most effective response to a work intended for a mass audience if not one that is also intended for a mass audience? The sentence “George Lucas betrayed his younger self when he made a movie that undermines every achievement of his earlier films.” is provocative but it’s not as persuasive as a movie that expresses the same sentiment; a movie made almost entirely with scenes from Lucas’ early and later movies.

Not unlike the coevolution of modern democracy and the printing press, modern culture requires the mass adoption of filmmaking tools and techniques. (If the thesis is a movie, the anti-thesis must also be a movie.)

What made YouTube possible wasn’t just camcorders, broadband, computers with video capture cards or the adoption of a video codec. It wasn’t even the democratic culture of the web. It was nearly a century of moviemaking and several generations of moviegoers.

At its best, YouTube is not a rejection of commercial entertainment, it’s a response. It’s feedback.

ideas/people/work

Look it up.

A group of friends are talking about a faded movie star. No one can remember the name of her big hit. One of the friends reaches for a portable web browser and they lapse into a half-hearted debate about the etiquette of using the Internet in a conversation.

But what if this party were taking place inside an enchanted library with hundreds of thousands of ornately illustrated books pouring out of every wall and stacked in every corner. Would it be surprising to see the friends tossing a book around?

ideas

Warning, you’ve got mail.

My employer gave me a Blackberry a few years ago. It has a very bright light that flashes red whenever I receive an email. “Warning, you’ve got mail.” Email is a problem to be solved.

When I’ve read the email, the bright light flashes green. Problem solved. I’m not sure that’s right. But it’s certainly part of what makes the “crackberry” so addictive.

things/work

Drama is king.

From the leaked David Mamet memo making the rounds:

THE AUDIENCE WILL NOT TUNE IN TO WATCH INFORMATION. YOU WOULDN’T, I WOULDN’T. NO ONE WOULD OR WILL. THE AUDIENCE WILL ONLY TUNE IN AND STAY TUNED TO WATCH DRAMA.

I’d say this even applies to news.

ideas

Dan Ariely: “if you and I were getting paid $8 million a year to view mortgage-backed securities as good products, we could do it.”

Via The Browser, Dan Ariely:

In my view, most people who behave badly are not bad people. They’re just good people who are put in bad situations—where it’s tempting and easy to cheat a little bit. Look at the whole financial crisis, if you and I were getting paid $8 million a year to view mortgage-backed securities as good products, we could do it. It’s inhumane to put people in situations that have tremendous conflict of interest and expect them to be unswayed by it. Ideally, professions eliminate these problems by not making people face them.

Previously on incentives.

people

From the corner store to the void.

One of the most radical essays I’ve read recently is Raffi Khatchadourian’s The Taste Makers from the November 23, 2009 edition of The New Yorker. (Sadly, it’s not available online but a PDF is yours for the asking.)

When philosophers or artists point out the ways in which reality is constructed, the proof is mostly of interest to other philosophers and artists. Khatchadourian starts with a simple enough topic – the artificial flavors that define most of the food consumed in the United States, if not the world – and slowly walks the reader to a ledge overlooking the void. It’s a thrill.

ideas/things

Why many bad laws persist: they matter a great deal to a few people and not much to everyone else.

In his weekly column, James Surowiecki deftly explains why so many bad laws persist: they matter a great deal to a few people and not so much to everyone else.

If we were starting from scratch, after all, it seems unlikely that the Senate would choose this particular moment to pass a bill subsidizing money managers to the tune of billions of dollars a year. But, because the tax break already exists, it exerts a kind of gravitational pull that makes it hard to get rid of. In part, that’s simple economics—those who benefit from the tax break have more money to lobby for it to be kept in place. Furthermore, while the cost of subsidies is spread out among all taxpayers, the benefits are highly concentrated, so, naturally, opposition is generally diluted and diffuse while support is intense. If you work in private equity, it’s possible that nothing the government does matters more than keeping this tax break intact. And this pattern is true not just of subsidies but of government programs in general: every government action creates a constituency with an interest in keeping that action going.

people

Send in the clowns!

I usually cheer for Stephen Colbert’s guests to one-up him as it means a better repartee for the audience to enjoy. But I was very impressed when Stephen essentially shut down Mary Matalin. It’s a thing of beauty.

Republican party spokespeople have long enjoyed a rhetorical advantage on television because they changed their game while their interlocutors didn’t. (Imagine a rugby team playing against a touch football squad.)

Stephen Colbert plays the same game as these propagandists. And he’s better at it. The same can often be said for Jon Stewart.

It’s a great opportunity: send out comedians as your defensive line while attempting to score with reasonable policy. It might just work.

people

The Ghost Writer needs more ghost or more writer. Or both.

The Ghost Writer is a wispy, foamy thing. A political thriller with few thrills and the political insights of a tabloid headline (Blair was Bush’s Lapdog.). Even the plot is trite. Spoiler: the CIA did it. (The butler had the night off.)

The titular character – a dead writer who communicates with his living proxy, Ewan McGregor, via an acrostic, two dates neatly circled in red and the programmed GPS route of an SUV – is little more than a contrivance; a pretext. Who was he? Who cares! Instead, we’re left with a bumbling protagonist who must be told where to go and what to think at every turn.

Having just watched The Others earlier this week, I guess I wasn’t in the mood for a half-assed ghost story. Having watched The Parallax View more than a few times, nor was I in the mood for a half-assed political thriller.

things

Priests and child abuse: not a lack of freedom but an excess of power?

Overheard on the BBC: the reason why so many priests abused so many children isn’t that priests aren’t allowed to marry it’s that priests have too much power.

(In retrospect, the alleged link between celibacy and pedophilia is a nice piece of prejudice. “If only priests could live as normal heterosexuals they wouldn’t exploit children.” Because married heterosexuals never abuse positions of power.)

people

The web is coming.

Four years ago, I was one of the many who thought RSS feeds were going to transform the web. I believed in a future where few users would venture past their personalized home pages. Web sites would visit users, not vice versa.

I was half right. It wasn’t the RSS feed, though, it was the activity feed and that personalized home page millions never leave is Facebook, not iGoogle. My lesson: the information that matters most to most users is other people.

While Facebook is an immensely popular walled garden, it’s built on the ruins of similar services like Friendster and MySpace. The same architecture that makes it easy for a user to pass on a link to a few hundred friends (and so forth) can make a mass migration to a new service relatively painless.

The free flow of information has always been the promise of the web. No matter where you are in the world or what kind of computer you’re using, as a web user you have almost identical access to the same data. eBay is eBay from Poughkeepsie to Peking. So is Wikipedia.

The logical extension of that access to information is being able to do things with it.

Television audiences are breaking networks apart with cheap and easy-to-use hard drives, hammering away at prime time and brand loyalty one time-shifted show at a time. Newspaper readers have brought newspapers to the brink of collapse with RSS readers and search engines. We all know what happened to the music industry when songs became portable thanks to the mp3 format.

And all of this may have been a warm-up.

For the last 16 years, the world wide web of computers has promised to be everywhere, but in reality, it’s been restricted primarily to offices, coffee shops and bedrooms. The mobile web is finally delivering on that promise.

The creative forces that have been tearing apart media companies are now beginning to restructure the rest of the world; from restaurants to retail, from nightclubs to sports arena. No place within signal range will escape digitization. After years of the world coming to the web, the web is now coming to the world.

ideas