Category: history
Arriving at the parking lot of a theme park in Germany in-midst 8,000 sparkling middle class vehicles my daughter asks “Kings drive what kind of cars?”.
Cars are a product of industrial mass society that is incompatible with feudalism that supports Kings. One clearly came after the other.
Looking at the current situation we are somewhat like Kings with cars. Fossil fuels make energy dirt cheap so that we can clutter our material surroundings in the wildest ways. In the same time we already have access to information technology that is clearly evolving the mass culture of the 20th century into something new that has neither name nor definition yet.
The most expensive paintings were made during a brief period. Most of them in Paris. If you were an Artist in those days you better rent in and around the Montparnasse. Even though back in the day the money was not flowing their way, a handful of artists seem now to make up the quintessential olymp of the fine arts. A show of them will raw big crowds only matched by sports events.
Pop stars. Big freaking Madonna like box office hits.
All along during the times of mass society there was this big and scary void below the mega stars. Nobody would have want to be caught during the travels to fame. The rise of the Popstar needs to be instant, overnight. The uncanny valley between nobody and stardom had to be passed instantly. It was the nowhere land of mediocrity. Where those not so good artists dwelled. Who wants to buy a painting from a ‘not so good’ artist?
Mass media made those Pop stars by putting the massive firehose gush of its attention on specific individuals. It was and is a hit or miss game. Mass media as it developed in industrial societies means that few outlets serve to millions of minds.
Along came the internet. And the thing happened almost unnoticed that would fill the gap between unknown knitting grandma and Picasso. It is filled with content. Decent great content. Lot’s of it. The cost to publish it, allows for an revolutionary amount of diversity.
An example. While window shopping in Hamburgs ‘Stilwerk’, more or less an Ikea for the rich, I came across David Steets “Australia”. I liked it allot. Lumas has a shop in the former Coffee factory, and it seems to do well. Their concept is not to build and sell few popstars, they have maybe a hundred Photographer’s to pick from.
The actual framing is done very well. So well that I used Sander myself, and they have been great. Only complaint is that they don’t have an LA office. So my large prints will probably remain in Europe.
The Lumas concept works well. Based on technological break throughs it allows the content to broaden: Steets sells his images for a couple of hundred Euros. Both sides do well in this transaction. The digital prints make beautiful images. Thirty years ago the alternative would have been a mass produced poster or an original that was unaffordable.
The middle grounds between nobody and pop star artist is now filled with a range of great work that fits all tastes. Other examples of this new art economy could be Etsy but also Flickr qualifies. There is no ‘lower boarder’: Back in the day the Pop Stars clinging on to the
arts Olymp had to defend the few square feet in the spotlight. “That’s not art, that’s amateur stuff” used to be one of their pump guns to defend it. The middle range art market that is emerging does not share this problem. It allows for growth around demand.
Culture has survived things like this.
I would think it’s pretty much unkillable then.
Seth Godin asks what happens to Radio
Well, first of all, Radio has survived lots of new media. It has changed everytime. Radio plays did not survived radio’s struggle for survival though. Which is a real sad thing. I grew up with those little gems. No, I am not a million years old. Radio plays were a blessing of the german government funded radio stations: They just kept the same kind of program structure they always had. In the seventies we had at least three radio plays a week. Since nobody nobody listened, the authors could get away with allot of stuff. And my parents thought I would be safe if I listened to the radio. Better than TV, they thought. Little they knew.
But that is the past of Radio.
Another personal radio experience was moving to LA and therefor into the reach of KCRW in the mid ninetees. Ear opening, back then. Twelve years of radio in Munich had almost killed my interest in music before that.
KCRW however got supplanted by podcasts. It’s still a decent station, but podcasts fit what I want to hear much better. And, even if my podcast mix contains some NPR, I still prefer the leech from my shuffle: I pause as I like, resume where I left things off, and I mix my shows the way I like it.
So there is no more Radio in my life.
Somebody should start a podcast with Radio Plays though. I have an idea what to play on August 14
One more round for John Galt’s motor aka the perpetuum mobile. Didn’t Tesla invent something like that?
Since everything we have accomplished is based on energy, it seems not surprising that people continue to dream up scenarios where energy would become free.
Wouldn’t it be nice?
Well, then we would need to rewrite the Laws of Thermodynamics.
Boeing had a system for internet on a plane. Now they shut it down. I used it allot on board of transatlantic Lufthansa flights. It worked great. About the only time when I did not mind to pay (around 25 US$) for wifi.
Nobody really knew about this system. None of the US carriers picked it up, and Lufthansa did not do a good job to communicate that you could have internet over the Atlantic.
I wonder what will happen to this. I hope that google buys it. They can afford it. And it would be great PR.
Wifi to they sky!
Both democracy and capitalism work great. As long people make decissions based on reason. If you buy the best product you push efficiency into the system. Same with democracy. The world grew more complex. And I wonder if people kept up with that. Looking at the habbits of the average AOL user I have some serious doubts about that.
Of course there is no alternative to the current system. Still it is worth pointing out, that the current implementation is broken. More than it used to be: The average skill set and education level is declining. Everywhere. In the 80s I made an apprenticementship to become a Maschinenschlosser in Germany. In three and a half years you work and learn basically how to build machines. This was the kind of job most of the male population did aspire to. It’s demands however where non trivial. You not only learned how to build machines, but also knew backgrounds why they were designed in a certain way. If you got a drawing with an error you were able to go back to the construction people and come up with a better solution together. The percentage of people being able to work on this level has declined in the last years. When the housing bubble ‘makes’ you twice as much money as forty hours of labor, why should you try to improve your skills?
When things get made in China for penny’s why should you learn how to make something? Opening boxes and putting things on shelfs, that’s a skillset in demand.
Microsoft likes more people to develop games for their consoles. In their press release it sounds like a Windows XP machine is all you will need to develop games for their consoles.
The range of impact goes from ‘flash in the pan’ to ‘Sony is finished’. It all depends on the details of the implementation and capabilities. Nobody has ever opened game consoles to a wider development community. It might or might not take off. Trying it is a bold and innovative move.
Microsoft is a funny companies these days: Some of their divisions do all the right things, while others are as stupid as the Ottoman empire in 1907.
Trolltech makes a phone now. Trolltech got big with a toolkit for graphical user interfaces called “Qt”. I used it years ago, and it is not bad. Now they make a phone that runs embedded linux, and their user interface on top of it. In other words it is an open source phone.
From the pure aspect of technology these developments had to happen. The very interesting question is, what will come out of it. Content is a very tricky thing to predict. Hollywood survived despite constant failures in this area. As long the movie industry existed they tried to mechanize and control creativity and content creation, so that they can churn out products like a nuts and bolts manufacturer. And it never worked.
One the other side of the argument one could see Microsoft and Trolltech shipping typewriters to a million monkeys.
And, of course reality will fall somewhere in between. And once the revolution happened, it will be so clear why it did. Same in the other outcome.
Games could really use some injection of innovation. Roaming the show floor of what was the last E3 of it’s kind I was pretty surprised how alike most games looked. I don’t play. But I care about the technology and business side of this industry. There are racing games and first person shooters. Lot’s of those.
With production costs high new content development is tricky. That’s why I liked Rockstar’s Table Tennis.
Tetris was written by a russian programer when there was still a country called “Soviet Union”.
The situation with phones is similar. They don’t suck, but I never saw a phone that made just sense. Of course all Apple fan boys hope that Steve Jobs will come down Moses like with a phone on his arm. They hope so, since phones are ok, but definetely not as useful as we want them to be. And as they could be. If open software can fix this is to be seen.
Well, since it does not cost that much for Apple to try this, I doubt that it is a failure.
The press however will make a big ‘bruhar’ around this. They just love those simple “take one big thing, and add another big thing” stories. They always look like these sure winners. Like the extension of the cinematic experience by the sense of smell.
A short documentary directed by Matt Wisdom (the only person I know in New Orleans)