This is part of a series on ideas for today. There’s already an introduction and an article on artistic movements.

A market at its simplest is a place where two or more parties trade goods and/or services. Sometimes it’s not even a physical place – something that’s becoming much more common. Parties in a market trade one good for another good, usually in exchange for money.

Your life is made up of many, many markets. You’re even participating in a market when you discuss gossip or news about mutual friends with another person. With a market, you can make use of whatever wealth you have accumulated: monetary wealth, material good wealth, knowledge wealth, a wealth of trust, and so on.

A free market, one which is least burdened by regulations and restrictions, tends towards the most efficient trade possible. That’s how we can enjoy cheaper food, clothing, and other goods than previous generations – many of the things we consume are made in places where the raw materials needed are far less than if they were made in our own country (assuming you live in the United States or some other developed country).

But enough of the economics lesson.

We each individually have resources that can be exploited, to increase our wealth, that may not necessarily be obvious. There are our hobbies, our gained supply of knowledge, our learned skills, even our accumulated possessions – all can be exploited when needed to increase our wealth in other ways. The obvious is to exchange them for money – by giving our time and expertise to an employer, for example – but one can utilize less apparent means of exchange to free up more resources.

What I’m trying to say is that we can be more efficient with the things we have. Let’s build new markets to exploit our untapped or underutilized resources. A great example of this already in action is Etsy. By creating a central location for individuals to sell their handmade products, it lowers the barrier for consumers desiring such goods. In return, the creators receive a benefit for utilizing their skills – be it sewing, woodworking, glassblowing, or any of a number of other talents. Etsy has singlehandedly untapped a vast reserve of craft making, eliminating the old barriers of location and decentralization. This is on top of (slightly) older innovations of Ebay‘s auctions and Craigslist‘s ads for housing, jobs, and other local resources. Also consider knowledge markets like Yahoo! Answers or Mahalo.

These and the many other markets are only the beginning. I’m sure there are other tools waiting to be developed to unlock underutilized resources that individuals, small businesses, communities, large corporations, and governments have lying around. It’s the same concept behind what most people think of when they hear ‘recycling’ – giving your discarded cans, bottles, paper, etc. to a third party that turns them back into new goods again for you to repurchase.

Here’s a few ideas of new markets I just thought up in a few minutes:

• Underutilized office space rented out to startups and entrepreneurs
• Collect and distribute writings or art either online or in another medium. This is obviously what’s been done for hundreds of years by the publishing industry, but there needs to be a new model for distributing information and rewarding the creators. An example of this is And now it’s in print*, a project that’s collecting cool things found on the internet and publish them in a print magazine.
• Stuff lying around the house that would sell much easier by trade than in exchange for money

You may have even come up with your own untapped market that puts all of what I’ve suggested to shame. Now’s your chance to test your idea.

Aggressively pursuing more efficient markets might just help restore the economic growth that most people are searching for right now.

This is part of a series on ideas for today. I’ve already published an introduction.

The last decade, the one we are just emerging from, was the least culturally productive in America since the Fifties. In fact, I’d say the last decade was worse than the Fifties, which at least introduced new ideas that would come to fruition in the Sixties. Unlike that period, instead of being stiflingly conformist and Puritan most of the time (or I should say in public), we shared too much of ourselves. We became shameless for attention, and whithered as the Internet gave us too much exposure to every gross, banal thing on the planet. I’m not saying that we were too permissive; rather the permissiveness diluted our ability to limit our options and excel in narrowly-defined ways.

We have a new decade ahead of us and a new chance to forge ahead. We don’t necessarily need to invent anything new, but we should pursue the best of everything. More people are alive right now than any other point in human history. That is a massive opportunity, one we’ve only just begun to exploit – there are more smart and creative people alive now than ever.

But what do the makers of culture have to show for the last ten years? How much music made recently will still be listened to, played, and admired twenty or thirty years from now? I think little to none. Same goes for literature. We did make some great movies and television shows, but we can do so much better.

Before you rattle off a list of your favorite musicians, underrated authors, and other artists – or you invoke the “Great art isn’t usually discovered until long after it’s made”, I want you to understand that oftentimes long before that ‘great art’ is appreciated, there are a few other artists who see its value and are inspired to make derivative works. Enough of those can create a movement. And anyone who watches cultural currents closely should be able to notice a trend in the same way one can see fashion trends (actually art and fashion trends usually move in the same direction). If anything, I’ve seen more of a clearing of the board in the last several years, as if every creative person is unconsciously preparing for a series of new styles and trends. Take popular music – that area is ripe for experimentation and new sounds.

That clearing of the board doesn’t need to go on any further. Now is the time to plant new ideas. It is time to fuck shit up, throw out the rule book, drop out, and other overused clichés. Even if it seems like everyone is making up their own rules and doing their own thing, we’re all slaves to our environment, upbringing, and language in such a way that the way we ‘break the rules’ is the same way as everyone else. Instead, look to the real innovators, that tiny fraction of society that honestly doesn’t give a whit what anyone else thinks and does their own thing, but with integrity. I’m talking about the Jimi Hendrixes, the Allen Ginsbergs, the Philip K. Dicks – the ones who initially appear to come from another planet, but whose works later turn out to be exactly what we needed and love.

So what can we do?

Let’s make a style of popular music to replace rock, R&B, and hip-hop.

Let’s revive the written narrative and make it relevant to our lives today. That may mean a concentration on short stories, or some brand new form.

Let’s forge a new path in philosophy, even if it may be an admission that the teachings of The Buddha are precisely what we need.

Let’s take over the cheap rent of abandoned neighborhoods in cities across the country and start some old fashioned culture engines. If you care enough about art you’ll move.

Let’s make an subculture that has its own norms for personal relationships, fashion, even slang. Preferably one that everyone ridicules at first.

We can even join several of these enclaves together online.

Let’s sto praising mediocrity. Let’s ignore memes and start movements, people copying and modifying rules for creating art instead of copying punchlines. Let’s not use our stars and hearts and likes to give credit to unimportant things and save our praise for the truly great.

Let’s patronize people who have a good chance of creating great art. We all need to eat.

Let’s get some new clichés.

Let’s spread the word about the things we like, and keep our promotion limited to creativity and greatness and not the effort.

Let’s do all of these things and more but with integrity. It’s easy to be a dilettante when consciously changing the world.

We have a collective memory of past trends and movements that may make it hard to try something new. So let’s forget the past: raid the things past creatives succeeded with and make something new. If the pioneers of rock copied and then exceeded the blues performers of the past then we can do the same. See the paradox? We cannot for a moment forget what our ancestors have done, but we shouldn’t let the paths they followed guide us.

Okay. Go forth and make something exciting and new.

Or you can argue with me first in the comments.

Photo by bananacasts

My first thought was, oh come on. Over the last month my internet friends – and it feels like most everyone else with an iPhone – have become big fans of Hipstamatic, an app that adds a bunch of effects to make an iPhone image look like it was taken by a poorly-built camera. You know, hip.

About as hip as an advertisement from the Nineties.

Photo by lindstifa

The colors are washed out. Cute little over-exposed areas are added to an otherwise all-digital image. Each picture is lovingly framed with negative-film border, tape marks, or stylish matting.

At some point I even made a quip on Twitter that after Hipstamatic, the next trendy camera app will take pictures that look a crappy camera phone. This gratuitous degradation of image for a stylish and trendy effect comes in the age of affordable digital cameras that can often beat the detail of a traditional negative film camera; the age of relatively easy to use software (and powerful enough computers) to aid in processing images so they look as natural as reality.

Photo by sniffyjenkins*

Reality. For the people who can afford smartphones, powerful computers, and high-powered cameras, reality often consists of the real world sandwiched between time on the computer, looking at text or photos of things that exist in the real world. Photos are so abundant, easily accessible, and ubiquitous that for many people photos are preferable to the real thing. Not that this is a new phenomenon. A photo can be cropped and modified so that the subject has a greater impact on the viewer than when physically viewing the subject. It’s the high-speed internet, fast computers, and vast storage that magnifies this to a degree that someone with a subscription to Life magazine in the 1960s could never comprehend. I can go through thousands of pictures of Monument Valley, so many in fact that I’ll tire of the place without ever having visited.

With all of this power, this abundance, this opportunity for exactness – why take pictures of your kids with an program that distorts a perfectly fine image into something you might find in between the seats of a ’74 Lincoln Continental?

Photo by sniffyjenkins

The Hipstamatic app was inspired by a namesake physical camera made by two brothers in the 1980s. The pictures are similar style to ‘Lomography‘ – a well-marketed trend from the 1990s (remember my comment about ads from that decade) where the photographer would take near random images of objects and revel in their ‘found photo’ style. Nowadays ‘lomographic’ pictures are taken on powerful digital cameras, with distortions added in Photoshop. Hipstamatic takes advantage of the iPhone’s processing power and makes the effect instantaneous – and only reinforces the lomographic style, as evidenced by most pictures found online.

It takes a few pictures of families and friends taken with the Hipstamatic to see any motivation beyond the retro faddishness.

Photo by monkeyfrog**

The pictures…well, they look real. They look like memories; a little washed out, a little dramatic, and all heart. The brain is powerful enough to make up for the loss of clarity, and in so doing the image has an inescapable honesty. All because of errors and destructions added by a computer capable of fixing them. The messiness of a Hipstamatic photo mirrors the messiness of life, and by adding it the truth in the image comes out.

I’m not saying that clear images are bad. The best photojournalism combines the the sharpest possible copy of a sight that’s anything but sharp. A burning child running from her burning Vietnamese village, several Marines hoisting the American flag on a tiny speck of an island in the Pacific – these pictures are messy in different ways than one of your kids eating ice cream at their favorite restaurant or your teenage daughter trying mightily to distinguish her individuality at Disney World.

Photo by monkeyfrog

What’s happening is we’re reaching for inauthentic tools to make something authentic again. We distort the pictures of our lives to reclaim them from an inhuman sterility of the perfect picture.

Photo by bananacasts

—
Thanks to bananacasts, lindstifa, sniffyjenkins, and monkeyfrog for letting me use their images.

* sniffyjenkins’ first novel, Advice for Strays, has just been published in the UK. I’ve read it and it’s wonderful.

** monkeyfrog provides excellent health advice on both her personal site and on EmpoweHER.

Black History Month is a fucking joke.

I’m writing this four days after February, the month designated in America for recognition of the history of blacks. And it is not enough. Good lord is it not enough.

The history of blacks in America, their enslavement, freedom, oppression, freedom again, and the final hurdle of unconscious discrimination is the single most important part of the history of the United States and American culture, and what makes it unique and broadly misunderstood by people raised in other cultures.

It’s so important that we don’t need a single month remember this complex and sorrowful part of our collective past: it should be deeply investigated by grade level students. I’m not talking about merely watching Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech and recounting the tale of Rosa Parks and making face masks of famous blacks. I’m talking about reading the speeches of Frederick Douglass (especially his Independence Day speech, which today sounds like something that one would hear on The Daily Show); I’m talking about seeing a living history example of real life as a slave, and getting, if only a glimpse, of the deep, lifelong horror of being treated as property, oftentimes lower than that of a horse; I’m talking about lessons in discrimination, close to what Jane Elliott did with her class; I’m talking about music appreciation classes with an emphasis on the the black subculture’s* influence on American music; etc. The biggest hurdle is getting people to understand slavery and how it shaped everything that came afterward; I suspect modeling education on that used to teach about the Jewish Holocaust.

Why is this so important?

Take a look at your musical preferences – even if you aren’t directly persuaded by American culture. Chances are good that you can trace the influences of your favorite artists to the experiments of several black musicians from the early Twentieth Century. But this is superficial.

The history of blacks in America is deeply intertwined in what makes an American, and why people from other cultures look upon us with perplexion. Our ancestors talked of freedom and liberty – which kind of sounded like they were meant for everybody but really only meant white, landowning males. These same men who orated at length about the ‘American spirit’ themselves (or let their brethren) to treat other fellow humans as property. For two hundred years these downtrodden – ultimately only considered inferior because of the pigmentation of their skin – survived under brutal, soul-crushing conditions. A few paragraphs back I mentioned the Jewish Holocaust, another blight point in human history – but comparisons are deceitful: the Jews sent to their deaths once knew something like freedom in their lifetimes; blacks often (and especially after 1800, when importation of slaves was made illegal) were several generations into enslavement and torture. Imagine if the Holocaust were still running today, and you might be able to imagine the extensive suffering.

And yet! And yet, through brutal torture beyond justification, humanity endured. Slaves fought to keep their families together and kept alive through songs and even jokes. Here’s a firsthand account† about that peculiar attempt at joy:

They say that slaves are happy, because they laugh, and are merry. I myself and three or four others, have received two hundred lashes in the day, and had our feet in fetters; yet, at night, we would sing and dance, and make others laugh at the rattling of our chains. Happy men we must have been! We did it to keep down trouble, and to keep our hearts from being completely broken: that is as true as the gospel! Just look at it, – must not we have been very happy? Yet I have done it myself – I have cut capers in chains.‡

There are very few alive today – and especially in the United States – who has experience of being so consistently crushed in spirit from birth that they entertain themselves to keep from being overtaken by the hopelessness of their situation. But the experience of both sides, slave and master, remain a key to understanding the mindset of an American today.

We americans struggle with subtle racism even when when aren’t consciously aware of judging others by superficial traits. Here’s the rub about those superficial traits: sometimes they have more to do with the superficial traits of our ancestors. By being an oppressed minority they were afforded fewer opportunities which trickled down to current generations.

For those of you who haven’t spent much time in America, the racism espoused by blacks may be perplexing. For other Americans, you may have only unconsciously noticed the racism of minorities. It’s a strange concept to grasp. There has been a separation between white and black social groups for so long that they have progressed along parallel lines yet are intimately connected. This has fostered a subtle hostility between the two groups – note that this has to do with culture and upbringing and not race††.

This is our heritage. We can’t escape the racism of our ancestors because it has tinged the little things that contribute to our identities. Just as language can change how we think, the popular entertainments we enjoy carry on the prejudices of past. It sounds ludicrous today, but the direct ancestor of most of popular American entertainment comes from blackface minstrelsy, where a white actor puts on makeup and mimics the stereotype of the lazy, ignorant black of the nineteenth century. Minstrels were lowbrow variety shows which contributed to modern concepts of celebrity, shameless promotion, and American humor. As the shows became more popular, even black performers would put on “blackface” – dark makeup with exaggerated lip color and size – and perform.

Take Bert Williams. Bert was a successful, wealthy Broadway performer. He put on blackface and performed for white audiences. He was also black…think about that: to fit in as an entertainer he had to look like white performers trying to look like him. He would use the pidgin english of the black stereotype (think of how black actors in movies from the thirties sound), bumble around stage – and sing songs with lyrics like this:

When life seems full of clouds and rain,
And I am filled with naught but pain,
Who soothes my thumping, bumping brain?

Nobody.§§

The pathos a black performer must have felt to be both popular in blackface and daily treated as second-class is the heart of why it is important to study black history.

Or consider Birth Of A Nation. The racism in this silent epic movie is deeply offensive: the Klu Klux Klan comes off as knights of decency. But just about every element of modern film storytelling was invented for this movie. Roger Ebert needed two articles‡‡ to address this dissonance for his Great Films series.

Finally, you must listen to the song “Strange Fruit,” sung by Billie Holiday:

The intersection of suffering and beauty is where high art meets the human experience.

My point

Nearly four hundred years ago Europeans began settling along the coast of an undiscovered continent. In addition to destroying the lives and cultures of peoples who already lived there§, they also imported slaves by the thousands for a cheap source of energy. The generations of suffering, degradation, and shameful acts that went into making a country that’s so rich today that the poor can afford to pay a monthly fee for hundreds of television channels. It is by the miracle of the will of the enslaved that their ancestors are alive today. And though the law now protects the rights of all races equally, every little thing that makes someone an American carries the baggage of slavery. And when that brutal form of submission was made illegal our ancestors still treated the newly-free as inferiors – simultaneously exploiting them for entertainment and still-cheap-but-less-so labor. And very few thought this was entirely wrong.

We can say we’re better then they were, and we are. We have finally relegated our racism to shame. Deep down every human has an unconscious aversion to strangers and people not like us, a holdover from the days of constantly fighting for survival on the African savannah. It’s easy to judge someone as different by their skin color or other physical attributes – but we can consciously change this urge and that is how one deals with racism.

However we may try we cannot escape our past. There are remnants of our horrible past everywhere we look and hear. The things we do to entertain ourselves have traces of past amusements that owe to the prolonged enslavement of Africans and their ancestors. Our laws have been modified and changed from blatant discrimination to inclusiveness of all with American citizenship. Our slang, our dialectal quirks, and the names we give ourselves have origins in the arbitrary division of whites and blacks.

I don’t see blacks as a minority, I don’t see them as a specific group of people. There are subcultures in America that more or less fall along a person’s race, but that is a holdover of our past. Their – our – black ancestors have stories that aren’t being told, stories that can help us know who we are and where we are going. Black history is a pattern language that is unique to American culture, and it is the duty of everyone who considers themselves a part of that collection of customs and ideas to be well-versed in the whole story of our people, not just that of the oppressive white males of the past.

—
* Hard to call this a subculture, because of its unique position: it exerts a powerful influence on mainstream culture shared by all races and creeds.
† This comes from A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, a survey of American history through the eyes of the downtrodden and persecuted.
‡ From John Little, a former slave.
†† The post-slavery cultural clashes between whites and blacks in America have nothing to do with biology – the truth is members of each group have been raised differently only because their ancestors where treated differently because of race. It is now almost entirely because humans are more perceptive to social differences. For example, I consider you inferior because you don’t think like an American, and vice versa.
**  I was a pushover and could not hold my ground when bullied. Luckily my coworkers were all good people and once they saw me standing up for myself regardless of the confrontation, they accepted me, weird white guy from the midwest that I was. They pushed me through taunts and insults.
‡‡ Well, at one time he had two articles about the movie. I can only find one now. I will update this if I receive a clarification.
§§ From the song “Nobody“.
§ The story of Native Americans is another neglected history, but not in the scope of this article.

When I wrote about culture engines, the Favrd Crowd was a different group. It was smaller, sure, but more importantly it was transitioning from one way of thinking about the group to something different. Mere days after posting, two large meetings of people within the group occurred which caused such a significant change in how people interacted with each other that a month later the Favrd Crowd was a different group.

This article is my attempt to make sense of the community that developed around Favrd, Twitter, and Tumblr four months after I first took a deeper look.

An informal structure of the community

Internet-based communities are inherently different than physical communities in ways that are still poorly understood. We know the tools and we can see the consequences of how members interact, but the structure and dynamic of what is still a biological desire to be social but through technology originally built for tabulation and content creation is a mystery.

The Favrd Crowd exists in three spheres of interaction: public, private, and in person. With few exceptions[1] everyone joins the community through the public sphere. This consists of Twitter and Tumblr. Members sign up with either one or both and learn the rules of competition for Favrd, Favstar, and Tumblr’s Tumblarity. How one comes to terms with the group depends on their disposition. Some get stuck on the competition of getting a high number of stars for their tweets or a high Tumblarity, others ignore as best they can and concentrate on developing relationships with other members. Most end up with a mixture of both.

Recently there has been open discussion regarding members who are obsessed with the competition. What’s interesting is that those who are most successful with getting high rankings are well versed in the tricks that can be employed to getting a high score, but they concentrate on the original intention of the ‘game’ – to create something witty enough, clever enough, funny enough, or original enough that many will see its true value. This is the safeguard against an encroachment of marketers and consultants that suck out any originality of a new tool for the sake of being more effective and thus creating a hollow core, not unlike a parasite. What the discussion of the competition misses is that the people gaming the system for high scores are people just like their critics – they may reform and turn out to be as funny or clever as the best. But because this game requires more wit and intelligence than other games (like first-person shooters, Facebook games like Farmville, etc.), members will either have to reform or leave.

But the game isn’t everything. Long-term members, used to the rules and competition and more aware of their strengths and weaknesses, typically begin to realize that there are real people in the group who have similar interests, senses of humor, and life experiences. This can result in creative outputs that make up the culture engine; but I’ve realized that this happens infrequently, when two or more creative people with similar dispositions serendipitously work together on something new. Most of the time what happens is a friendship – one that wouldn’t have occurred because both are physically in different locations.

The friendships are fascinating. The Favrd Crowd is very far-flung, with strong presences in every English-speaking country, and a smattering of other places by people who have a firm enough grasp of English as well as Anglo, American, and Australian cultures to understand the jokes and to make their own. Throw in the difference in tastes and social norms of the cultures of each country (and each region of the United States), and there’s a lot that group members must know and understand to successfully fit in. This creates a situation of self-selection where the members are a homogenous group of a sort – there are many interests, tastes, and so on – but there’s an undercurrent of similarly-ordered mental lives that brings everyone together. We accept members because they think like us, not because they like the exact same things we do (though we like a lot of the same things). That means that by joining the community one is getting access to people who are compatible with their interests and tastes, now no longer limited by geography. Some people are gaining friends where, without the Favrd Crowd, they’d be without.

But friendships only start in the public sphere. They flourish on the private sphere. This level started with Twitter’s direct messages, which can only be seen by the the sender and the recipient – essentially a text messaging system. From there dialogues expand to instant messages, then text messages, phone calls, video chat, and eventually the ‘in person’ sphere (more on that later). This is where most of the communication for the culture engine occurs, and where members of the Favrd Crowd learn just how similar they are to others.

There’s an impressive amount of highly personal, potentially offensive, and deeply-felt content published to the public sphere, but not everyone is comfortable sharing those things to everyone, and there are many things best left to private messages anyway (that’s why there’s a taboo against making public anything discussed in private messages without both parties consent).

I admit I love thinking about all the things said in private messages that one never sees influence public posts. All the hidden friendships, petty fighting, relationships, projects born in private, and connections made. There are jokes and comments that show up on Twitter and Tumblr that while amusing on their own, have a whole other context for the two or more that know the source.

Being humans, eventually good online friends will want to meet in person. Even if they may be different in the flesh, physical interaction is a desire for even those in the group who struggle with social anxiety (and there are many). Tweetups have existed for as long as people have used Twitter to find new people, but with one exception[2], get-togethers of only Favrd Crowd people are a recent phenomenon. In fact the first big meetups of the Favrd Crowd were days after I published my article on culture engines, one in New York City and the other in Boston. Both were unprecedented and both changed the dynamic of the group.

One reason was that one meetup was a private party of friends, and the other was open to anyone who wanted to come. The former party generated friction because it just so happened to include several of the most popular and envied members of the Favrd Crowd. The debate the erupted (and quickly subsided) almost tore the online community apart – but a curious thing happened: instead of splitting up into factions the group developed a deeper interconnectedness. The biggest change was the people felt compelled to share their feelings, express their love for members of the group, and open up in ways that was previously more guarded. This was brought on equally by the peacemakers in the group, but also because members realized they could get lots of stars and raise their Tumblarity by doing so – that’s why people who routinely post pictures of themselves and write about their daily lives on Tumblr have a higher Tumblarity score.

Before I continue, I want to point out that I think this development has severely retarded the Favrd Crowd’s ability to create new and interesting things and to develop further as a culture engine. So many people are wasting their public sphere efforts on trying to appear more human and emotive instead of creating the podcasts, comics, videos, music, literature, and other forms of expression that the group has great potential to generate. Some of the content related to this outpouring is genuine and heartfelt – and is a healthy part of the group dynamic – it’s the oversharing-for-the-sake-of-more-points content that is the real problem. Everyone struggles in life, and getting to share it with like-minded people who honestly care is one of the Favrd Crowd’s most amazing attributes (among these: marriages and relationships, new babies, health scares, cancer, caring for children who are sick and suffering, dealing with abusive or unhealthy relationships, and so on). But some people feed on the group sentiment only to play the game.

In about a month and a half another primarily-Favrd Crowd meetup will happen in San Francisco. By all accounts this will be the biggest one yet, combining people who went to either parties in August with new group members and on the further reaches of the social web of the group. So many online friends will get to meet for the first time, others will get another chance at face-to-face time, and in general the Favrd Crowd will get a glimpse of what might happen if everyone moved from all over the world to one place. That’s an implausible outcome – but an outcome which would be glorious and extremely beneficial to everyone in the group.[3]

In addition, people are meeting up all the time. Some are visiting online friends in the same region, others make a point of spending time with Favrd Crowd people in whatever city they’re visiting. Still others are even changing their vacation and travel plans to go out of their way to visit people only roughly nearby. These are people who come from vastly different backgrounds and with unique personal histories, but who have found a connection strong enough to compel them to spend time together. Meeting people online has a reputation for being a letdown, because the variables and unknowns of who a person is offline is so vast that sometimes people are nothing like their online personas. But the challenges of succeeding socially in the Favrd Crowd, and the similarities needed to fit in, mean that most people are pleasantly surprised upon first meeting another member (this is based on anecdotal evidence, but I’m guessing the number of times that a physical meeting of Favrd Crowd members was negative is so small to be inconsequential. People naturally chose those they feel comfortable with online, and that translates almost perfectly offline). Making offline connections is the most important next step after finding new interesting people in the Favrd Crowd.

The group dynamic

What drives the Favrd Crowd is friction. By friction, I mean the agitation of people with different ideas and different ways of expressing them. But then, every community is driven by friction – especially creative communities. There is a quote from The Third Man that sums this up in a way that Favrd Crowd members would appreciate:

…In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

It should be no surprise that the creator of Favrd, Dean Cameron Allen alludes to this on his personal site.

The frictions come from the core reason of the group’s existence: to make something that others appreciate. Here are a few of the sources:

• Those more concerned with crafting great things vs. those who want a high score
• Those more concerned with making things vs. those who are in it for the people
• Highbrow vs. lowbrow vs. hilobrow[4]
• Those who feel left out vs. those who don’t

These frictions are in reality imaginary. People perceive these as boundaries and try to play along because it’s simpler to adhere to a black-and-white understanding of things. But just as in the rest of existence, it’s mostly a gray area. For example, people work hard to make great things partly because they enjoy it but also because they want to make things that others enjoy.

It’s not hard to appreciate both a studied critique of a modern absurdity, and a well-crafted poop joke.

The us-versus-them mentality is common everywhere (it’s a source of wars, bigotry, racism, prejudice, etc.), and it works to drive the Favrd Crowd apart while simultaneously inspiring members to create great things.

However, the people involved in these frictions take on certain roles. The most egregious instigators are forced out of the group, shunned by being blocked or ignored or belittled. But there are active and accepted members of the group who regularly play up the frictions – they play a special role because they force others who are more timid to confront the realities of all of our bad traits. While this role usually makes the group (or any social group) stronger, in the case of the Favrd Crowd it also created a plague of feel-good posts that inhibits some members from realizing their full creative potential.

The human element

Sure, most content on the internet was made by real people. And most of what isn’t made by real people isn’t worth consuming anyway. Yet there is a distance between the creator and the consumer for most instances. An author will write an article – people will read it, but most of the time the author gets no feedback, response, or even knows how much of their work was read and how much was skimmed or skipped.

That dynamic is different within the Favrd Crowd. If a person likes what someone created, they can star or ‘like it’. If they really like it, a person could retweet, reblog, or (my personal favorite) contact the creator privately to commend the person. That feedback is invaluable to an author’s development and well-being. As much as we may try to downplay the importance of stars and hearts (likes on Tumblr look like hearts), it feels good to know that one’s peers appreciated their work. At the same time, finding that no one could be bothered to acknowledge a tweet or recording or anything else with something as easy to do as click an icon, that can hurt. We can feel bad, work harder on the next thing, or rationalize the disappointment to minimize the hurt – but it affects people in real ways. At the same time, one can feel slighted for petty things that may in reality have no meaning. For example, I once was convinced that a person in the group hated me simply because they never responded to my Twitter @ replies in any way. It turned out they simply didn’t read replies from people they didn’t follow (the only way to see @ replies from people a user doesn’t follow is to go to a separate page on the Twitter site).

The ease of finding like people online helps many people who are lonely and have the time and energy to convince themselves that every interaction in an online community has an equivalent to in-person interactions. Frictions often start because of this, and there is a steep learning curve involved to understanding that another person’s online life is only part of their existence. There are offline friends, family, work, play, and we are all doing other things in addition to being online, even if being online happens most of the time nowadays.

With the Favrd Crowd’s increasing use of the ‘in person’ sphere, this distinction blurs and it becomes harder to come to terms with the limitations of online interaction.

At the same time, this sphere is bringing people closer together. Despite being a generally cohesive group, there are sub-groups that exist. These are people brought even closer because of similarities: a love of comic books; a shared sense of humor; being gay, lesbian, or transgendered; a love of the same music, and so on. The old ways of finding these connections offline are very inefficient. Meeting though organizations like school (especially college), work, bar, clubs, etc. can help but all are limited by geography. Even other online communities are limited because they typically concentrate on a particular interest. The Favrd Crowd gelled because of humor, and humor doesn’t require direct experience by everyone for something to be funny. But a group that bonds by humor need to find the same things funny. As I discussed in my article about culture engines, this brings together people of similar mentality regardless of experience or interests, and creates workable melting pot. But the metaphor of a melting pot is a paradox: people who are really different don’t really get along (there’s evidence that neighborhoods with people of different ethnicities and beliefs are fractured and people stick to their own group).

The Favrd Crowd is becoming less a group of people trying to be funny, and more a group trying to live together. Despite my earlier mention of the implausibility of everyone moving to one place, there are already large clumps of people, and some are even moving to those areas partly because other members of the group already live there. The main locations are San Francisco, Chicago, and New York; smaller clumps exist in Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, Boston, and Pittsburgh (and many more I can’t think of). The willingness to move is hindered greatly by issues of family, making a living, and liking the location. For example, not everyone wants to live in the San Francisco Bay area, and some people think Chicago is full of very angry people and has awful weather. The problem is that once people meet in person, they realize how much more fun spending time in person is and would rather have it that way, but have too much else invested in where they live now. I’m not sure what will happen with the issue of geographical distance. There will always be people in an online community that are far flung. There is one instance of a couple meeting through the group and one is trying to emigrate to the US, but that kind of situation will likely remain a rarity.

Additional thoughts

The Favrd Crowd is an exciting community. That several very different technologies could bring like-minded people together and make something new that has no offline equivalent points to an exciting future in human social organization. Its unique blend of creativity, competition, and togetherness makes for a warm environment for a certain type of person who normally has to work hard to find others like them. I don’t think the group is for everyone. Some members may be no more than outsiders appreciating the groups artistic output. Others may try to fit in when they would be better suited for other online communities. I have a partiality to the Favrd Crowd because these are the kinds of people I actively seek out in offline life. They are technologically savvy, find similar things amusing, are well-read enough to get obscure references (and curious enough to search for what they don’t get), honest enough to point out faults and wrongdoings but compassionate enough to accept others for who they are, liberal where it counts and conservative where it counts – I could go on and on. But in addition to being the people that I like, they are also the class of people who propel culture and society forward. The intelligent outcasts who both enjoy and suffer through life, who know what’s worth keeping and what’s worth challenging. It’s those people who are worth studying.

As much as I want to study every aspect of the group, I have my limitations. I am not an archivist and have no interest in cataloguing all the output of the group – oftentimes what I see is deleted or changed. Also being a member of the group I have a greater interest in participating than analyzing and will limit my exposure so that I can still enjoy the fruits of my friends and favorite producers. I can’t possibly follow everyone in the group – or even everyone who has a large influence – and I will ignore people I find offensive or not funny or those who just rub me the wrong way. And I am partial to those who I feel a real connection with, and will give them a much larger piece of my attention. Which means this article has real biases and that my view isn’t the whole view, just as no journalist or historian is ever completely objective. By disposition I like many different kinds of people and I hope that allows me to make a more nuanced and general set of observations.

There is little physical evidence of the existence of the Favrd Crowd, save for some postcards, some drawings, and the occasional household or apartment where everyone is involved. Yet the group plays a large role in the lives of hundreds of people, oftentimes expanding into real friendships, even jobs. The Favrd Crowd has a bright future, and its past, though short, is fascinating.

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[1] Some people enter through a connection, most often because of a spouse or partner. Friends who join may have an advantage in knowing a member of the group offline, but they still have to work from the public sphere back for most connections.
[2] There may be others, but the only one I know of is quarterly meetup of Chicago Twitter users that is dominated by people in the Favrd Crowd.
[3] If only a third of my favorite people in the group were to move to one place, I’d drop everything and move without question.
[4] This is a modified explanation taken from my attempt to explain to a few people the reasoning behind my Twitter lists:

Highbrow and lowbrow should be easy to figure out. It doesn’t mean that high = good and low = bad. They’re both good – it’s just that some people write tweets that are based on high-level thinking (art, technology, high standards) and some are based on everyday functioning (the things we all do – e.g. bodily functions, sex, daily struggles).

Hilobrow is different.

If middlebrow even exists, I don’t even want to associate with it. It’s not like the Middle Way – it’s the schmaltzy appeal-to-everyone crap like Twilight books or fucking American Idol. Think of the stereotypical music that parents in the fifties and sixties listened to and you get the idea.

Back to hilobrow. Hilobrow embraces both the intellectual thinking and the daily reality that we all must struggle through constantly. Take Charles Bukowski – his writing is very specific and in the vein of Chaucer and Bocaccio but is mostly about drinking and fucking and going to the racetracks.

I learned about the hilobrow concept from hilobrow.com, which celebrates hilobrow artists. I found them when they came up with a much more accurate breakdown of the generations of the twentieth century (for example, that the generation that had the biggest influence on my taste are the Anti-Anti-Utopians).

Hilobrow isn’t better than highbrow or lowbrow, all have their place. Everyone has a preference. I just happen to like the whole spectrum.

I mean, everyone poops but we also struggle with our identity and place in the universe.

]]> http://budaeli.com/2009/12/behind-every-account-is-a-human-being/feed/ 5 http://budaeli.com/2009/08/the-price-of-my-content/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss http://budaeli.com/2009/08/the-price-of-my-content/#comments Wed, 26 Aug 2009 18:20:30 +0000 Chris Aucutt http://budaeli.com/?p=655

Budaeli used to have ads. There was a Google Adwords strip and a selection of products from Amazon.com along the side of every page. Then I read a rant by someone (who I doubt even knows I exist, let along been to this site) about personal blogs having ads. His argument was along the lines of “if you’re maintaining the site for your own enjoyment, and not for some business, don’t insult your visitors by showing them ads.” I don’t agree with the argument entirely: sometimes you need ads to help pay for maintaining the site (never mind that there are plenty of free hosting services available now that offer advanced features). But that was when I decided to pull ads off my site, without thinking about it much. I wasn’t making anywhere near enough from the ads to even warrant a payment from either Google or Amazon.com, so the loss in revenue wasn’t equal to the increase in aesthetics gained by their absence.

This means I’m giving away my content. For free. On top of that, I’m not too concerned about being compensated for what I’ve published. The copyright to my words is still mine, but I won’t be too alarmed if someone copies my work (with attribution, of course) or creates any derivative works (say they take my Culture Engines idea and make it into something else). Part of it is because I don’t want to spend the time enforcing a restrictive copyright, and part of it is because my thoughts are mostly derivative.

The reason I’m publishing my work online for free is because it would cost me too much to make readers pay.

What I mean by that is my audience would shrink to a statistical zero if I made people pay to read this site. Unless I reblog the content elsewhere, the cost to read is only visiting this site or reading the RSS feed.

I would love to be able to charge more for my content, because it would give me a greater incentive to write. As it stands now, I only write when I feel like it, and just accept that the value of my work is nothing more than the pieces of my thoughts that end up stuck in my reader’s thoughts. It’s an inefficiency that I hope someone solves soon. The current methods of incentives for writers have been made outdated by the web’s method of publishing, and there’s no guarantee that they will survive long enough for a replacement.

So, thanks for reading, whoever you may be.

(Inspired by “Please Excuse Our Inefficiently High-Quality Blogging”)

We’re entering a period of information upheaval. The methods of storing, retrieving, and managing information are finally catching up to the available technology. With our collective knowledge and literature available to anyone with an internet connection, there is bound to be a flowering of scientific and artistic thought.

But we’re collectively stumbling with transitioning the technology and user interface of books.

This is important because books have grown up with our civilization to become the foundation of our complex society and advanced technology. We are all trained from an early age to harness the power of the knowledge locked up in those bundles of paper. Books define the concept of information management to such an extant that it’s unconsciously shaped the semiotics of our modern web-based system of knowledge storage.

We’ve been able to ignore the outdated book-based management system until very recently. The Amazon Kindle became the first ebook reader that married the long-form book format to the advantages of the internet and cheap storage. Now you can download a book directly to your Kindle, and store a full library in about the same space as a typical topical nonfiction.

The adoption of ebook readers has been slowed by people who feel they prefer old fashioned books to their new digital brethren. Despite the arguments, I don’t think this has anything to do with the comparative advantages of a dead tree book (no need to recharge, self-referential interface, leafability) – rather it has to do with our primal urge to hoard and the symbol of the book for knowledge. We feel safer with a physical representation of the printed word than one which disappears when the electricity stops.

This fetishism may be a good thing.

The length of the content inside books is determined by the technology itself. Authors are driven to flesh out a work to fit a standard size rather than match the minimal length that the subject matter really requires. The best example of this are business and self-help books: most of these could be cut down to have or even a quarter of the length and still get the message across – but the economics of publishing encourages writers of these works to expand their writing to book length, thus diluting the knowledge. This is why websites covering the same topics are so popular: they aren’t restricted to expanding the verbiage for reasons not related to the content.

By delaying the movement to a stable economic model for publishing knowledge online because some people still prefer paper books, we could hasten a change to short-form knowledge that better suits the technology with the added incentive of being easier to understand. A stable economic model is important because content creators need an incentive other than personal fulfillment. Right now most content online is supported by ads, while paid content is shunned. Until we come up with a method to financially support content, the evolution of information technology will stall. To see how hard of a problem this is, check out the Xanadu project*.

The process of evolving fiction to a non-book format is harder because fiction elicits a deeper emotional feeling in the reader.  The novel, for example, developed because it was the perfect fit for the age of the printing press: works were book-length, and authors were keen to make their stories longer, deeper, and richer. Currently the interfaces for reading anything longer than, say, 12,000 words induce eye-strain or lead the reader to distraction. We still need the book metaphor for an enjoyable experience. Short stories are different because of their length.

Right now we’re collectively working out how to order our written knowledge to take advantage of the new forms of transmission and storage. The web and ebooks may not be the future; however the system of web metaphors has been successfully used and improved upon for the last 20 years, so this may be it. The great thing about this process is that it’s done unconsciously by readers and writers, in the same way that language evolves and works itself out (which is changing because of the new information technology too).

What I’m getting at is that how we store and retrieve our collective knowledge is changing, and the outcome depends on the technology, how we structure the information, and how we incentivize its creation and distribution. To put this in perspective of the last revolution in information technology: Gutenberg hasn’t invented the printing press yet**.

—

*The most fascinating part of the Xanadu story is that it partly inspired Tim Berners-Lee in creating the World Wide Web, but he wanted information to be free…and was pragmatic enough to create a technology that’s ‘good enough’ to use within months.

**Eurocentric, I know, but Western Civilization was better at harnessing the power of the printing press than the Chinese.

Behind every change in technology, social rules, and history are the same basic struggles that every human in the last 10,000 years has had to endure. And someone smarter than us saw that and wrote down the best way to make it through, by their own experiences and mistakes. They wanted, just like we want, for the children to have it easier.

In the company of the wise men and women were people who claimed to have that knowledge, or had ulterior motives, or just wanted to profit. It still happens today, and gives the self-help industry a bad name.

But because every new human goes through the same motions of life, collectively we catch on to when we’re being fed bad advice. And so we keep coming back to the books containing true wisdom. Smart publishers see this and keep those books in print. Silently, unconsciously, we weed out the filler.

If you need a written guide to life, read something that’s old and still has an audience.

Any rule on how old is arbitrary, but if it helps I suggest reading books written earlier than 200 years ago. If you need further help, here are two books I suggest:

1. The Way to Wealth by Benjamin Franklin
2. The Art of Worldly Wisdom by Baltasar Gracián

One advantage of old books is that you can find them free online (like here and here).

I picked those two books because I place great value on brevity and because they keep religious matters to a minimum.

But book wisdom isn’t as useful as that passed on by a living breathing human with personal experience. That’s why I’m only telling you where you might find advice, as I am lacking the requisite experience and wisdom. Think of these books as catch-up, for those of us not lucky enough to have a mentor early in life*.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get a mentor now at whatever stage of life you’ve reached.

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*I was a lucky, though squandered it some. One of my role models growing up was a scoutmaster who got involved because of his son but stayed to help other boys learn how to free-thinking, motivated adults. He was a successful businessman who always carried himself with dignity and authenticity. The biggest lesson he taught was how he taught: he led his life the way he wanted us to lead our lives: with honesty, compassion for others, and an eye on the next foothold (it also helped that we had the Scout’s Law**). And this is where I mention that I’m an Eagle Scout, and damn proud of it.

**Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean, and Reverent.

Culture engines are measurable groups of people who share a common set of values, tastes, and slang that become nebulous in creation of art, entertainment, and other culture artifacts. There is no way to predict when a culture engine will pop up, but their biggest cause is a period of ‘cultural drought’ where little to no lasting creative artifacts are made. For example, the stifling conformity of 1950s America not only caused the creation of the Beat Poets and their followers, but paved the way for the inevitable outpouring of originality of the 1960s.

The myth that geniuses are made in a vacuum, that their talents and abilities formed on their own is quickly going out of fashion (See Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers article and book). The truth is that many, many people are needed to create a genius – the most important is the late-stage group of competitive peers who encourage and foster even greater skill. This often happens in college, but can come from any group. Most of the members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus met at Cambridge or Oxford (though not all at the same college or the same time) and their collective growth in those schools created a common sense of humor and style; whereas the Beatles formed by the stunning chance of growing up in the same city (Liverpool) and with the same music scene (Mersey Beat).

The internet takes away a culture engine’s necessity of geographical proximity and increases the chances of bright people finding each other to such a degree that our collective creative output is exploding so there is no way for one person to survey the entire cultural landscape of Western Civilization. Sites like YouTube, Flickr, 4chan, DeviantArt, and Tumblr make it easy for people to share their creations with other like-minded people no matter where they live, and spread other ideas as well. But these sites are limited by the type of creative media, whether it’s photography, video, or memes make it easy to spread and share, but a culture engine needs something more to facilitate a cohesive group.

One major component is community. Websites can only go so far in bringing people together. Nothing has yet fully replaced the usefulness of face-to-face meetings, and conversations need space to grow in private, with sub-groups, factions, and distinct cooperative groups to help develop more complex creations.

I believe I’m witnessing the formation of a very powerful and potentially influential culture engine that combines Twitter and Tumblr with good old fashioned face-to-face community.

A little over a year ago a website launched that kept track of users’ starred or favorited tweets on Twitter. The site, Favrd, ranked tweets by how many stars they received and introduced competition to Twitter, when most people only used the site for boring updates on what they were doing. It wasn’t the first, and because it was limited only to users who registered on the site, it was far from the biggest. But a funny thing happened: users of Favrd, created a community of funny, smart people who used the site’s competition to foster even more creativity.

In late December and early January of this year, large numbers of Favrd users started using Tumblr, which created interconnected blogs geared towards short updates and sharing of found images, audio, video, etc. Usage within this group picked up even more when a ranking system was added, thus adding a similar competitiveness to Twitter. Tumblr also made it easier to share the non-tweet creativity within the group and there are a few people more popular on Tumblr as a result.

This perfect storm of technology only needed people motivated enough to exploit the idea fermentation that’s possible with this set up. Turns out, the smarts needed to get noticed on Favrd accurately picked out people who aren’t afraid of ‘wasting’ time making funny or entertaining things for their friends*. What’s making this group succeed as a culture engine is the numerous ways people are finding to meet and create projects together. There are teams making things like podcasts and comics. Many have taken their public conversations on Twitter and Tumblr private, through Twitter’s direct messages, instant messages, and even phone calls. More importantly, those that can are meeting other people from the Favrd site in person, at what are called ‘tweetups’ but are really just friendly get togethers, as most of these people share a great deal of their life online (I know more about some of my Twitter friends than some of my real-life friends…which means they’re no different from friends normally met). These in-person meetings help  forge deeper friendships which only help in allowing a faster spread of ideas and greater cooperation.

This group, which I’ll call the Favrd Crowd, at its current state is an example of a developing culture engine. It’s sucking in talent and spewing out art and entertainment, but its impact on the outside culture is minimal. What I predict will happen is that a few people within the group, blessed with extraordinary talents, will break out and become popular to the outside world. Their style will be clearly imprinted with influence from the Favrd Crowd and will in turn influence the  larger society.

Predicting who in the Favrd Crowd will be the breakout talent is tough. It will very likely begin in two waves: the first, where someone already highly popular within the group will get the attention of outsiders and launch their career, with moderate success; a little later, one or more people in the group who are more on the fringes and not highly known will break out on their own and prove to have much greater talent and originality and bring more attention to the group, which will launch careers of others. This has happened many times before* in other culture engines, so it’s only likely that the Favrd Crowd will grow in the same way. I have a few theories on who will break out, but I have a personal policy of not publicly announcing my predictions**.

There is a chance that the Favrd Crowd won’t have the influence of other culture engines. There have been many groups of talented people in history who have failed to make an impression on the greater population. But I’ve seen what some of these people are capable of accomplishing, and in a few years I expect alumni of the Favrd Crowd  to become visible and influential members of the cultural elite. And they will take the poop jokes, nonsense phrases, mild offensiveness, and a certain practical philosophy to the larger population and make a lasting cultural impression.

A guide to the Favrd Crowd

The first place to start is Favrd. The main page shows the latest tweets with three or more stars from other Twitter users. The Leaderboard shows the most starred tweets of the day. Those who consistently rank at the top of the leaderboard can be considered the epicenter of the Favrd Crowd, and if you want to join in on the fun, I suggest starting by following those people, then look for friends of theirs or others on Favrd with similar tastes in humor or tweets as yours.

Tumblr‘s directory and ranking of their blogs includes far more people than are actually in the Favrd Crowd, so here are what I consider a few of the most important Tumblr blogs of the Favrd Crowd:

http://adamisacson.tumblr.com/

http://atsween.tumblr.com/

http://averyedison.com/

http://baileygenine.tumblr.com/

http://bliccy.tumblr.com/

http://blog.simoncrowley.net/

http://essdogg.tumblr.com/

http://everythinginthesky.com/

http://frageelaytwit.tumblr.com/

http://funsizebytes.com/

http://insooutso.tumblr.com/

http://inthefade.tumblr.com/

http://luckyshirt.tumblr.com/

http://milkglassmao.tumblr.com/

http://monkeyfrog.tumblr.com/

http://poeks.tumblr.com/

http://pomophobic.com/

http://sloganeerist.tumblr.com/

http://sniffyjenkins.tumblr.com/

http://tehawesome.tumblr.com/

http://texburgher.tumblr.com/

http://thememegeneration.tumblr.com/

http://toldorknown.com/

http://venomousporridge.com/

http://weselec.tumblr.com/

http://yowhatsthehaps.tumblr.com/

Some of these sites also show what Tumblr blogs they are following, so I suggest you explore those to find more people in the group that may be to your liking.

Keep in mind that the group is larger than the number of relationships a normal person can conceivably keep track of***, so don’t feel obligated to follow everyone in the Favrd Crowd.

A special note to Favrd Crowd members:

I love all of you! If I didn’t mention your Tumblr, don’t take it personally: the right people will find your site regardless of who links to it.

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*An often-heard comment about Twitter and Tumblr use by people who don’t spend much time with either tools is that those who are active on these sites are wasting their time making frivolous things. That’s unfortunate, because nearly all forms of entertainment and art are ‘frivolous’ and done in place of spending time on other ‘more important’ tasks.

**Contact me privately if you want to know my predictions.

***The number of relationships that a single person can keep track of is around 150. This is called Dunbar’s Number. You can keep track of more people – and technology can help extend that even further, but most people will be able to have meaningful relationships with about 150 people at a time.

(Edited to add http://poeks.tumblr.com/ to list of Tumblr blogs because it’s an excellent example of someone in the Favrd Crowd making great things and I wanted to include it in the original. Also removed second instance of http://averyedison.com/.)

I’m standing on a piece of land with a lake on one side and a river on the other. If I put my foot in the lake, the water only moves to displace my new presence. But when I put my foot in the river, there’s new water every instant replacing what was there when I first entered. Life, the universe, and everything is like the river. Even the lake.

Impermanence is about the only thing anyone can count on from birth to death. It’s the source of most of our pain, both physical and mental. It can force people to relive the past, dream about the future, or exist in the present, but it’s the latter that we’re all doing anyway. The river is rushing by us without stop and we have two options: we can move to the shoulder of the river that’s calm and slow moving, or we can let the current take us down stream. We can try and go upstream – but in this river, there are no boats, flappers, or anything to help us but ourselves and the water. Eventually we’ll tire of trying to fight the current and go along with everything else.

As with any analogy, life is more complicated than being a giant river. There are choices, opportunities, and the incessant messiness of being alive. And unlike a river, nothing is predestined – there is no single direction or destination, save for death. There’s a scene in the movie Synecdoche, New York where an actor playing a priest at a funeral gives a speech that explains this better than I can (I’m including the passage in its entirety because the entire message is important):

Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won’t know for twenty years. And you’ll never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there is no fate, but there is: it’s what you create. Even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but doesn’t really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope for something good to come along. Something to make you feel connected, to make you feel whole, to make you feel loved. And the truth is I’m so angry and the truth is I’m so fucking sad, and the truth is I’ve been so fucking hurt for so fucking long and for just as long have been pretending I’m OK, just to get along, just for, I don’t know why, maybe because no one wants to hear about my misery, because they have their own, and their own is too overwhelming to allow them to listen to or care about mine. Well, fuck everybody. Amen. 

That’s life, well aspects of it. The only thing I can add is that the negativity and sadness of life as embraced in that passage can be countered with a special kind of happiness. This is the happiness that comes from being alive and being conscious enough to get to experience the whole thing. You may be suffering; hell, we’re all suffering for one reason or another, but being able to feel the suffering and still be alive is better than to not exist.

I’ve always understood impermanence as an intellectual concept, but only felt its realness in short bursts. However I can see a vast difference from the person I was two months ago (about when I lost my job) who I am right now writing this post. The change is even clearer when reading this blog and my two finished short stories.* My understanding of Twitter is not the same as when I last wrote about it. I no longer think Bloc Party’s album Intimacy is as good anymore. I’m not the same person who wrote those. A piece of him is still here guiding my understanding of all the new things happening to me. But as of this moment I am something new, and by the time you read this I’ll be someone else, riding the river’s current just happy that I get to go along for the ride.

—

*Trust me, I know those stories are bad. I’d tell you about my struggle to finish the next story, but it’d be better to just finish the next damn story.**

**And working on a better footnote system.

It’s not about the music. It’s not about the clothes.

It’s all about the bridge.

Saturday Night Fever should have been a throwaway movie about a fad. Instead it uses the disco scene as a backdrop to the universal story of someone trying to escape to something better. Tony Manero is stuck in a place where his parents have one vision of what he should be (like his older brother, a priest who ends up leaving the clergy, well on his own path) while finding happiness only when he’s dancing and no way to translate his drive for that into other parts of his life. He has friends who are racist, misogynist, and homophobic – though I suspect that comes from their frustration of being locked in by a perceived lack of opportunities. That’s certainly the case for Tony – he wants something more than a job at a paint store and living with his parents. Enter the bridge.

Tales of yearning play a major role in American culture. Ever since the days when someone actually had the ability to move out West and start over with a clean slate and make something of themselves, we’ve been raised that everyone has the opportunity to be successful. To Americans, there will always be an open West waiting for those with the determination to exploit its riches.

In Saturday Night Fever, the West is Manhattan and the journey is the bridges crossing the East River. Tony understands this almost before he is consciously aware of it. There is a scene where he effortlessly recites trivia about the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge* as if he’s been quietly saving up whatever knowledge might be needed for the day he crosses a bridge and moves onto a new life. He knows he has to leave, and it takes a certain tiredness, and a girl, for him to go.

My life doesn’t even come close to paralleling that of anything represented in Saturday Night Fever, except for the urge to leave home. Even if I can’t say I’ve accomplished anything significant yet, the act of leaving Iowa and coming to Boston was one of the most important events in my life and was necessary for my own personal journey.

I had to cross the bridge.

There are plenty of other interesting things about the movie, and I suggest you read Roger Ebert’s original review and his revisit for the addition to his Great Movies list.

Other interesting things to note:

• This film came out in 1977, a crazy year for New York City. A heat wave, a crime wave, Son of Sam, a blackout, and a World Series. For a first-hand account, I highly recommend Michele’s (aka @abigvictory) tale of her experience that summer. She also has a great story about being on the rock side of the Disco wars.
• The much-parodied opening sequence of Tony walking down the street is exactly how you introduce a character like Tony in a movie- we learn that he’s always showing off his good looks and style, is really trying to use the moves to pick up women, yet he works at a paint store.
• Also, we’ve all done that walk. Feel free to use any music, but “Stayin’ Alive” is always the best choice for strutting down the street.

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*This is a bridge that goes to Staten Island and not Manhattan, which makes no sense in the context of the movie. The only reason I can think that it was used for the shot was because it’s a nice shot and is the same bridge used in several other scenes.

There really is a gaydar. The mistake that everyone makes though is that clues to a person’s sexuality can be gleaned from the way a person walks or talks or what clothes they wear.* Using those visual cues works only for those who are a part of the gay subculture. The home of musicals, dance music, and fashion consciousness infused with effiminancy and a non-sexual love of women. It was a place where gays could belong without being as harshly judged by bigots, and as a identity with which to find other gays. That culture is slowly going away as a distinct group, and that’s a good thing.

A distinct gay culture is an anachronism today. We’re living in the beginning of an age of marriage equality, where government accepts and provides support for one of the most common social constructs among humans, long-term monogamous relationships. There have always been heterosexuals who never had a problem with their gay brothers and sisters, but it’s increasingly becoming more acceptable to be openly and vocally supportive for their rights.

Some will lament this subculture’s passing, especially those who grew up to identify closely with it. However groups like this should be based around common interests and beliefs, not sexual orientation. If this subculture morphs into something that less aligned with a perceived gay lifestyle, it has a more legitimate reason to exist. This is already happening, with the unintended consequence of straight people having their sexuality questioned just because they like musicals or dance music or have a flair for design.

What this really means is that gays are becoming a more tolerated and even celebrated part of the greater society. The voices of hatred for those who are different is being drowned out by reason and tolerance. The most visible representation of this change is the counter-protests to the Westboro Baptist Church.

There still needs to be support systems for people coming to terms with their sexuality, but the need to belong to a specific social group is no longer necessary. It’s a good time to be gay and not want to fit any old-fashioned stereotypes.

And now for some random pieces of gay cultural history I’m itching to share (and they provide some extra perspective):

Judy Garland had a large gay following not just because she was a great singer, but the pain that she felt could be heard in her singing and she was a voice for the unhappiness most repressed gays felt.** Most of the effiminacy of gays from the 40s through the 60s can be attributed to gay portrayals in movies*** – gays could only appear as comedic elements or heavily coded to pass the censors. For a boy growing up in a small town with few visible role models, the movies were often the only way for many to find their identity.

Twentieth century gay subculture was defined by several important events: the Pansy Craze of the late 20s and 30s, World War II (it was the first time many gays discovered there were others like them, and the subsequent conservatism following the war brought invigorated repression), the political activism of the 60s and 70s, and the AIDS epidemic of the 80s. A set of slang, symbols, and philosophy of life developed that created a unified gay identity. This was crucial because of the cruel way American society treated gays and lesbians during the period; by having such a group to belong, it created a tremendous support system for a group of people trying to shake off the commonly-held belief that their sexuality meant there was something wrong with them. It was also an identity to align with, one that accepted people openly and judged more on their actions than expectations.

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*So how does the gaydar really work? It comes down to non-verbal cues like where someone’s wandering eyes follow or facial expressions in relation to certain topics discussed, as well as verbal cues – the most obvious is the ‘pronoun game’ but there are others like an absence of certain topics (like chasing girls). Of course the easiest way to tell if someone is gay is to ask them and they give a straight answer (no pun intended) or you see them having sex with someone of the same sex, like yourself.

**If you haven’t heard any of Judy Garland’s later recordings, I suggest you check out Judy at Carnegie Hall or any of her later recordings of “Over the Rainbow” – the heartbreak is so strong it never fails to get me teary-eyed.

***For an overview of portrayal of gays and lesbians in movies, check out the great documentary Celluloid Closet.

There is something about remembering a joke or telling a carefully crafted tale, that my mind mangles and the result is either I am perceived as a bad storyteller, or I wind up with a new creation only vaguely related to the original concept. On occasion, I’ll recite a poorly-remembered quote or joke or song or whatever I felt worth committing to memory for the purpose sharing: the result is better than the original. The more common result is a joke with no punchline, a story with no outcome or piece of interest to the listener, or singing that has little resemblance to anything recognizable to anyone else but my own.

What I suspect is happening: whatever thought is committed to memory is only added in fragments, often only the most interesting or most unique bits. When retold, my mind fills in the blanks the same way it might take care of a blind spot on the eye. Then it just comes out of my mouth (if I write the thought down I have more time to better fill in the holes or do the research necessary). 

I have tried to either fix this malfunction or find a way to use it to my advantage. One major hindrance is the tangled methods my memory associates things. Tangents come easy to me because I link memories in an arbitrary fashion. The way the sunlight looks through a window may remind me of a song I heard that was tinged with melancholy, or the way someone talks about a movie triggers some story I want to tell about some crazy person I saw on the street. Neither of which has an obvious connection to the trigger.

Also, I lack the skill of attribution. Unless the source is built into the thought or is from someone or something which I consciously try to remember (such as a friend or favorite artist), there’s little hope that any of that information will be remembered.

To change how I think is nearly impossible and filled with unforeseen consequences. I accept who I have become and think that any attempt to consciously change who you are, especially when it’s a skill or trait that runs deep, is always the worse choice. This is the biggest flaw of any self-help advice on living one’s life.*

Which leaves making an inability to re-tell stories an advantage. One way is to write fiction. I’m finishing and posting stories that are built from the half-remembered ideas that clog my memories. But that project is hindered by another of my hang-ups: self-doubt. But self-doubt is often disarmed when met with action. My first reaction to an upcoming new experience is fear, which usually goes away immediately after the event has begun.

Perhaps self-doubt is what this post is really about.

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*My rule for any self-help books is that if it’s younger than 100 years then it’s not worth reading. A good judge of great work is time, and when it comes to advice on how to live one’s life, the longevity of an idea is very important. I may talk about this in a later post.

Awhile back I sorted through my YouTube descriptions and found a user that made unique and moderately-disturbing-but-in-a-good-way videos had recently uploaded two new videos.

The artist has really grown in skill since his earliest creations. Both videos were amazing in that they both had great video concepts and appealing music – but terrible lyrics. Bad enough that I won’t share the artist’s identity.

One track in particular sounded like a hit record complete with hooks and well-composed music, and the video had interesting special effects and a music video quality story line (quite an accomplishment for being entirely filmed in a finished basement). But the song: the song had a commendable subject, but the vocabulary of a fourteen year old boy (I’m not talking about swear words, but the word choices were limited). The artist is eighteen.

The extreme unevenness of the artist’s work presents a confusing situation for me. I enjoy finding new things and promoting them to others – it’s important to pass along new and interesting works of art because why carry the burden of not having given an idea or an artist the chance to flourish? The artist has huge potential – I can see him pulling off a full act of music, style, and vision in the same tradition as David Bowie, Madonna, and others who carefully constructed an iconic personality and style.

However the artist still needs time to develop. He needs to make more music and videos and work on his lyrics and his presentation. With a few years of work he could be as big of a cultural force as Lady GaGa currently commands.

Yet he’s out there on YouTube and MySpace (and even Twitter) distributing his work to others. Hundreds of thousands of people have been exposed to his half-baked work – when even ten years ago the exposure would be limited to small audiences at local establishments, limiting the impact of the poor work upon whatever he may create later in his career. The localized nature of the exposure limited the impact of any bad work, and it kept a larger audience from reacting negatively to works produced during the developmental phase of an artist’s development.

Perhaps this isn’t an issue at all.

History tends to remember the victors and forget the rest. When it comes to art and entertainment, this trend is reinforced by the relative high cost of production and distribution of works. A writer needed to get published by someone who has invested in a printing press and distribution methods to get any amount of exposure. Musicians needed a business to make, promote, and sell records; filmmakers still need financial backers and distributors to get their works seen. This is no longer a problem. With the internet, the barrier to entry is so low that anyone can publish their works online – this blog stands as an example.

Maybe it’s not too terrible to expose mediocre works to large audiences. The larger the feedback group, the greater chance to improve and become better. And if the artist starts out mediocre but develops into something worth keeping, the only audience for the lesser works would be hardcore fans and archivists.

This means that I can justify sharing with you the artist in question…but I won’t; if he gets better and no one still isn’t noticing, I may become his manager and profit off of my discovery! The real reason is that my tolerance for quality is not shared by many others, and my preference is to back a recommendation that I enjoy much more than the best work of this artist.

Here’s what I’ll do: if my ‘discovery’ makes something that doesn’t have any glaring deficiencies, he’ll get lots of free promotion from me. Persons who have the potential to create something great need just as much promotion as established artists – we aren’t starving for content, but there is a lack of substantial quality in today’s art and entertainment*.

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*This is worth a separate post.

When I began Budaeli a little over three years ago, the original plan was to use the site as a vehicle for my fiction writing. Today, over at fiction.budaeli.com – I’m finally opening up my stories to everyone. The first story is up and while I make no claims to the quality, now anyone can read my work.

How Budaeli Fiction works

Comments are enabled on every new story for discussion and constructive criticism. Comments will be moderated for relevancy, but I want to leave an opening for readers to tell me what they like and don’t like about the works, or to discuss aspects of the stories and writing. Over time stories may be revised and if they reach a state where I don’t want to work on them any more, they’ll be retired to a permanent page on the site. All works will be published with a liberal copyright adapted from a Creative Commons license because I don’t want to artificially limit the distribution of any of my ideas because they could be improved upon by more creative people.

Oh right. The title of this post needs an explanation.

Over the years that I’ve been writing, I’ve only shown one or two pieces to other people. And for a long time I never bothered to finish anything I started (this was a problem for a lot of other projects, and is a recurring theme in my life). About a month ago I was laid off and suddenly had lots of free time, so I devoted part of that time to getting back into writing and launching a site specifically for my fiction.

This time the problem wasn’t procrastination so much as a fear of failure and a perfection complex. Over the last several weeks I’ve accrued about a dozen great starts and no completed stories. But today I stopped worrying about whether my writing was good or not or whether the story was interesting or not and just wrote out a vignette published it. I finished the site design and layout for Budaeli Fiction weeks ago but it was useless without content.

By ‘not giving a fuck’ I’m settling with a state of my writing that is complete enough to be presentable. I may not be a good writer, I’m probably a terrible writer at fiction – but I won’t let my misgivings hold back any work from being published. However, I accept responsibility for anything published with my name, meaning it will be authentic and adherent to my personality and beliefs.

There is a chance that I’m a terrible writer of fiction. If, after a decent attempt at writing fiction, the stories are as horrible as they are right now, Budaeli Fiction will shut down and I’ll find something else with which to spend my time.

The first story is a vignette, “Only Once”. Let me know what you think in the comments or contact me at correspondence at budaeli dot com.

Note: since Budaeli Fiction has been shut down, links to the short story and the copyright page have been changed to the current versions on this site.