This looks like a great talk. I’d definitely love to see the whole thing, since this is clearly a core issue for every media creator, no matter where they are on the chain.

I think that ultimately even the major disruptive technologies we’re seeing today will naturally gravitate toward larger, centralized distribution over the long term

That said, I’d hate to think that corporate control means we’re going miss the kinds of great opportunities that come from the need to “till the soil” between methodologies of media creation, distribution, and access.

Much as it embarrasses me (slightly) to link to my own blog (it’ll get worse before it gets better), I think you should take a look at the video on this:

http://www.genomicon.com/2010/02/all-in-the-game/

And I think maybe you ought to re-think the whole “free” (or anti-free) angle that you’re exploring right now. I think you’re getting it wrong – there are too many assumptions that don’t hold water. I think you possibly ought to try to get hold of some actual measurable metrics as to whether file-sharing results in fewer sales… because I’ve never seen any… and in fact if there is any evidence, it seems to point in the opposite direction.

The amount of money that people are spending on entertainment isn’t going down. (is it?) Musicians and Film-makers (and by that, I mean the guard-economy that professes to represent them, rather than the actual people)…

… aren’t competing with Free… they’re competing with a whole raft of other types of entertainment… dollars that actually ARE being spent rather than those which only “might” have been spent.

These other types of entertainment (as described in the video), are massively more engaging, subtle and manipulative ability to get into people’s heads than the types of entertainment that dominated in the age-of-plastic.

Or paper. Sales of sheet music didn’t go away. Illuminated manuscripts… maybe? Do people still do that? I bet they do… but saying the culture is poorer because people moved on to some other way of sharing culture is kindof missing the point… of why people write. Or sing. Or whatever.

Personally I hate the idea of Guitar Hero. I’m a musician… but we never could make money out of it anyway. It’s not about money. Never was.

Precisely, Andrew. Corporates will go their centralising ways, we will “till the soil” or “liberate” people from the matrix. Our relations proliferate & organise, Corporate relations monopolise & destroy. Our work creates more work and opportunity. Corporate work is extraction of resources and wealth. The list is endless.

Nick. You and Doug both appear to take a non-polemical view. I appreciate that. Until “things,” or the work of returning to things being better, “get(s) better” both the corporate sphere and the rhizomatic sphere are going to suffer contraction.

I believe Douglas is absolutely correct in pointing out that our work is cut out for us. If one feels anxiety, that is an indication that we need to do some cutting before we can assemble Things again.

-mason

Mein Flügel ist zum Schwung bereit
ich kehrte gern zurück
denn blieb ich auch lebendige Zeit
ich hätte wenig Glück
Gerhard Scholem, Gruß vom Angelus

Greetings from the Angel

My wing readied & flight-bound
I would gladly turn askance
And stay this timeless Now
Had I the smallest chance

-my translation

WOuld definitely like to see the whole thing Doug. Media as a whole is a dying art form as far as I can see. We are now constructing our own realities. People are still making money out of it but its not the creators of content currently, its the ISPs, the data centres and the providers of what would have been the papyrus back in the day. Those who create the media in these new forms should get to grips with this and demand cash from these venerable institutions before there’s a revolution and we all go back to making money in the trad. ways.

A few things I’d like to touch upon…

Nick, actually, the music industry has seen upwards of 60% drop in sales across the board. It’s huge. Some have gone public with this info, some have not. It’s not great PR to do so, to be sure. Warner Brothers did a few years ago and it really hurt them.

I can say from experience that an entire sector of the music industry is simply gone now. There was a building on 54th and 10th Ave here in NYC where Sony had a major facility since the early 90′s. It served mulitple functions- recording studio (Michael Jackson, J Lo, Wynton Marsalis all worked there regularly) , TV and film stage and storage facility. (The Miles Davis archives, Springsteen, Dylan, master tapes all in cold storage.) It’s gone. Sony BMG could not justify it any longer. No sales means no money to maintain the structure to make the recordings. EMI is now thinking of selling Abbey Road Studios for the same reason. The numbers simply do not add up.

I’m of the opinion that since the US economy was so reliant upon entertainment dollars exported, which now don’t exist, that it had a hand in the economic downfall.

Doug, would love to see the entire video. Sans funky porn-like soundtrack!

Just found the full talk posted in three parts. Here’s Part 1—http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Om7oKP6oQZA. I’m only halfway through it, but I’m with ya Doug:)

@Doug: Your point about the nowness of things is especially eerie, considering that it takes a notion that has always, to “crunchy” types, been perceived as an unquestioned good (“living in the here and now”), and turns it on its head–or at least recalibrates it. (Maybe a distinction needs to be made along these lines between the personal now and the social now.)

holy s*!t,

Just getting through part two. Must post now what i tried to post days ago at PBS.ext (extract) .con (control) etc:

First they came for the Artists. Then they came after the Public Intellectuals. Then they came for the Craftsmen. Then they came for the Farmers. Then they came after the Working Class. Then they came for the Journalists. Then they came after the Lawyers Then the Academics became anxious. And they came after the Educators & the Text Books. Then they came after the Professionals. And then the politicians were no longer needed. And then they came for the Technicians. And they increased the burdens on the Service People who hardly noticed a thing.

The net is in there somewhere, so long as it sits on it’s duff who cares what happens to it’s elite and ranks? Get with a corporate. Avoid the rush

http://www.lala.com/song/576742244706637325

It’s “Sentimental Fool” by Mose Allison if the link doesn’t work.
The Lp is titled “My Backyard”

Good luck
-mason

Well, that was my lament at PBS forum.

Like you said, who’s gonna deconstruct what’s happening. Who is going to sieve out the bull s*!t from the official productions. Who is going to start up a collective on the web that filters out the noise from the aggregate mediastorm? Who is going to support such an effort and how?

I would tend to agree that for the masses we are beginning to see The End of History. Teaparty, Texas Textbooks, Healthcare Legislation that takes more than a year…
cheese and crackers! (him too) We barely remember what Healthcare could easily have been! Except, of course, for the fact that we are being conditioned to forget, misunderstand the whole project by the very people who make the big productions, loans and bribes [political contributions].

If a person is lucky enough to actually “live in the now” these days, it’s no great boon to be working with people crucified on some tawdry version of the now. So i have to kinda disagree with brettrobbins.

It’s like light from an image going through lens after lens. How close are the lenses to each other? What is the time frame to juxtaposed images? Who is narrating? What form does the narrative take? When it comes to the hardworking distracted multitasking kid and her parents is the image upside down or right side up? Is it the same for each of them, their neighbors? Or were they eating dinner and/or watching another “Narrative Venue?”

Bertelsplex. AutomaticBertlesplex.

LOL!

Reminds me of a Zippy the pinhead comic. Zippy standing beside a “housing start” (the builder in me faarks the metaphor) repeating Tyvek Tyvek Tyvek over and over!

BTW. Passionate and impassioned performance. Truthful, warm and compassionate. Love the threads too. All you need in “The People’s Republic of Arcata” is the hoodie! That’s what they call the north end of the Bay , the PRA! And when the natives come down from the hills – - – well some go south to franchiseville and others to the PRA. For a giant state, the NoCal region is sparsely populated. There’s room for all sorts of structural experiments.

Best, mason

I found the rest:

This presentation was a part of mediabistro.com‘s 2009 eBook Summit [link to: http://www.mediabistro.com/events/ in New York. For more mediabistro video content, see mediabistro.com [link to: http://www.mediabistro.com/ondemandvideos.html.

Part 1
URL:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Om7oKP6oQZA
Code:

Part 2
URL:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pV-AH0ZzhAA
Code:

Part 3
URL:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGOlyIqfVbY
Code:

“The Fog of Money”

Hi Douglas,

The last days i’ve been me(s)merized and watching a lot of your videos. That’s why i find it disconcerting that you have discovered that centralized money is not scarce but you still think that a great writer needs to go hungry, or have a “mundane” job or somehow suffer to get his/her novel… – actually a writer needs to be a person and know people. so: do whatever it takes to be a person

I’m not a media professional in any way (i studied physics and programmed distributed computers), so i can not tell you this in any other way… so there it goes:

-> technology to get us energy, water, food, clothes, housing, computers, etc. etc. is not scarce either.

In fact the last centuries just prove how much we have and how we overshoot and trash everything: fossil fuels, population, pollution, wars, etc. There is a big disconnect between what technology can give us and the use we make of it: this is probably so because most of our recent developments happened under a very specific mind set, that you Douglas alert us to. And don’t think science and technology are independent from the rule of money. Most is constrained and grows only where money allows it. That why war technology gives us such revolutionary stuff (like the internet): because this technology is not directed by money needs.

We are just not distributing and allocating our resources and knowledge well enough. I don’t mean, of course, that we can all live like kings or spend vacations in space (yet )
The distribution/publishing of these resources is not working because our human history and experience only tells us to be afraid of other fellow human brothers and sisters…

So Douglas, I remind you of what you said in this beautiful intervention: (http://rushkoff.com/videoaudio/diy-days/)
You have said it yourself Douglas: “… eventually (…) everyone will be an artist. When everybody is an artist, when everybody is in that sacred space that actually becomes the realm of human interaction then we won’t be needing money anyway. That’s not how we’re going to transact. We won’t need little chips: (…) we won’t need to keep track with little numbers – How much stuff each person got. Because we will be celebrating in a play space.”

I think perhaps you are conflicting with yourself in here…: BOOK / BUSINESS ??

PLEASE Douglas: don’t forget what you envisioned about money: we don’t need any form of it when we get a new encompassing, abundance, feminine based narrative and myths to live our lives!

SO: the barrier for next great creative minds: good ideas and the ability to express them

(don’t get me wrong: right now we still need the damned paper or plastic money thingy – its just difficult to see ahead with all the fog of money)

and who is going to recognize this creative minds? well, to start with: it takes one to know one and from my own experience most people aren’t dumb, just uninformed… the more the fog clears, the more sun shines.

To all of my dear media/art/content/life/whatever creaters: don’t make yourselves scarce too! Let’s “program” our societies with better stories and myths. Lets get rid of centralized power. That’s the message of the internet media…
or is it?… )

PS: I don’t know if i make sense… why do i think this way? i was born less well-off and television didn’t help me so much. Then the internet came. After a lot of years filtering the internet, i feel that people from different places are converging. hmm… or maybe i’ve been watching too much Daily Show and i’m spinning in the internet like a hamster! or its just a “financial” crisis byproduct.

Anyway, besides Douglas “Life Inc.” i really like this:

- Money as Debt II: Promises Unleashed
- Lets Make Money
- Capitalism: A Love Story
- In Debt We Trust
- Zeitgeist Addendum

They kind of shed light from different viewpoints on the same story… Don’t wait for them in a theater near you. Pirate (i mean download ) them now!

PS2:
One thought about centralized money:
In the limit of “business as usual”: there will be one “company” that “makes” everything. You have to earn money from that “company” and give that money back to the “company” in return for things the “company” “makes”.
But in effect the “company” is a Bank that only makes “money”. In reality it is people who are making things, not the “company”. People are not free. The Bank controls them.

But there is no need to go to this limit to realize this is happening already.

There is no freedom with money, because the concept of money represents scarcity itself.
And we don’t need scarce things: we don’t need to eat because there is little to eat. We don’t like gold because it’s rare: its scarcity exaggerates our attention on it. Everybody wants that toy instead of some other thing…

The more money we have the more we spend. If we have unlimited amounts of money we build a new world to protect us from the rest of the world. We will have no freedom: we will have build a prison around ourselves. And that prison will be so big that everybody will be imprisoned: eventually no one will be able to tell in which side of the prison they will be – this sounds improbable and difficult to see in our first world / third world mind setting (the first world is the “fortress”, right?), but certainly is already true in our houses, in our cities, and our countries.