In July, I blogged here about the "crowdfunding exemption" petition, File No. 4-605, which the SEC had just posted to their website. The petition seeks to allow people to solicit investment of up to $100,000 in amounts capped at $100 without having to register with either the SEC or their state's department of corporations (a process which can cost $50,000 and up). Many people, myself included, believe that this simple exemption, which the SEC has the authority to allow, presents minimal risk to investors and would have many positive effects on innovation, culture, opportunity, the economy, etc.

The fun news is, the proposal seems to be gaining traction! It turns out that others have been advocating similar exemptions, including Michael Shuman, author of Going Local and The Small-Mart Revolution. And now, the American Sustainable Business Council, a lobbying and advocacy group with many right-on members, has decided to support SEC rulemaking petition 4-605 as part of a new "Sustainable Economic Development" campaign, which will also encourage the SBA (Small Business Administration) to promote "TBL" accounting (Triple Bottom Line: financial, labor, and environmental). But note that the ASBC's new campaign will be on their back burner (and won't appear on their website) until January or so, because they're currently focused on other efforts, which require the current Congress during its remaining time in session.

Meanwhile, Jenny Kassan of the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC), who authored 4-605, did a great radio interview about the petition on Oct 29 on "U Need 2 Know" with Frank Knapp (tagline: Talk Radio for the Brain), on WOIC 1230 AM, Columbia, SC. Knapp starts out by saying he's "fascinated" by our proposal. The interview is about 12 minutes long-- check it out!

Members of the public are invited to comment on the proposal by emailing rule-comments@sec.gov with "File No. 4-605" in the Subject line. All comments are posted to the SEC's website here, and a nice variety of people have sent in original and thoughtful comments, including Michael Sauvante, Mark White, James J. Angel, Danae Ringelmann, Eric Saint-Andre, Andres La Saga, Peter J. Chepucavage, and myself.

Also, CREDO Action member Mimi Plevin-Foust has posted a petition on Change.org that does a terrific job of summarizing the issue and lets you submit a comment to the SEC by clicking a "Sign" button. Mimi's original goal of 100 signers was quickly met, so she raised it to 200, and then 500. Note that the letters generated by the CREDO/Change.org petition are sent to the office of SEC Chair Mary Schapiro, not rule-comments@sec.gov, so they will not appear on the SEC's website. (Even if they did, they would not be listed individually; the SEC handles robo-letters by tallying them anonymously as "Letter Type A", as you can see in the comments submitted for this previous petition: 2195 unnamed / undated robo-signatures tallied at the top of the page, and about 25 original letters listed by date and author.)

Someone from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the same office that likes Maker Faire, MAKE, and Mythbusters, contacted me to recommend that I attend the SEC Government-Business Forum on Small Business Capital Formation (a.k.a. Small Business Forum) next Thursday, November 18th. He said that OSTP is looking at crowdfunding as a possible way of promoting entrepreneurship and high-growth startups. Great! This was very encouraging, and others who also know Washington have made the same suggestion. So I'm going, along with representatives from the SELC, who drafted File No. 4-605, the ASBC, and many others. Almost every day over the past week, I've learned about someone else from some other interesting-sounding organization or company who will be joining our crew at the all-day forum. It's open to the public, so come on down! You can register to attend in person or remotely.

A bunch of us are also gathering the night before the forum, Nov 17th, at CommonWealth Gastropub starting at around 7:30, to meet in person, hang out, and scheme. All are welcome-- it should be interesting and fun!

As for the SEC Forum itself, the stated purpose of which is for the SEC to listen to the needs of small business, the official agenda indicates that it's all presentations and discussion by the SEC and their invited panelists until 2pm, at which point we reassemble into breakout groups to develop recommendations (we'll all be in Room 6000). The agenda does not make it clear how the resulting recommendations make it back to the SEC, and also indicates that that neither SEC Commissioners nor SEC staff are expected to be present at these discussions. So I guess we'll be left alone to play paper football and trash the place.

For more info on this campaign and to sign up for updates visit crowdfundinglaw.com. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2010/11/12/grassroots-securitie.html/feed 6 http://boingboing.net/2010/07/03/sec-crowdfunding-exe.html http://boingboing.net/2010/07/03/sec-crowdfunding-exe.html#comments Sat, 03 Jul 2010 03:26:31 +0000 Paul Spinrad crowdfunded securities. The upshot was that crowdsourcing platforms like Kickstarter can't support investment, because that's illegal; they can only offer tiered "perks" for donations at various levels.]]>

When I guestblogged here last year, I wrote about crowdfunded securities. The upshot was that crowdsourcing platforms like Kickstarter can't support investment, because that's illegal; they can only offer tiered "perks" for donations at various levels. But I (and others) believe that crowdfunded securities should be legal without expensive SEC registration under certain conditions, starting with if individual investment is capped at a relatively low figure, like $100.

In that post, I also floated the idea of crowdfunding a campaign to pursue such a "crowdfunding exemption." I invited people to contact me if they wanted to keep up with such efforts, and got nice feedback from a bunch of folks. Encouraged, I dug in some more and found out that getting something like this going would actually be easier than I thought. First of all, the SEC has the authority to rewrite its own regulations, without any congressional review (which sounds like a recipe for corruption, and indeed...). Second, the SEC, via its website, lets anyone submit Petitions for Rulemaking and solicits comments on these petitions. You send it, and they will post it-- and then also post all the comments they receive. This quiet backwater of the SEC's website struck me as good territory for some crowd action.

Now, a half year later, all the pieces are in place. A campaign on IndieGoGo quickly raised the money to fund the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC) to draft the petition, which was completed last week. I'm thrilled at how the petition came out-- it's very well researched and argued, and joy to read. The SELC sent the petition to the SEC last Thursday, and as of this morning, the SEC has posted it to their website, as File No. 4-605. You can see the list of funders in the first footnote, at the bottom of page 1. Huzzah!

In addition to the $100 cap on individual investment, the petition recommends: a $100,000 cap on the total offering; offerors can only be individuals; offerors can't have more than one offering open at a time; and disclaimers must be included stating the possibility of total loss of the investment, and that investors must carefully evaluate the offeror's trustworthiness.

This all sounds good to me, but maybe the cap should be $50, or $500, or $5000. The more thought that goes into this, the better, and now that the petition is on the SEC site, it's time for all of us involved to spread the word. For anyone who's interested, here's what you can do to help:

1. Email the SEC's Office of the Secretary at rule-comments at sec dot gov Include "File No. 4-605" in the Subject: header. If the document is an attachment, indicate the format or software used See the SEC's How to Submit Comments page for more procedural recommendations, but disregard the references to an online form or file numbers beginning with "S7-" or "SR-", which refer to other types of documents. You can also send your comments as hardcopy in triplicate via postal mail, for them to scan and post. (Either way, please keep it relevant and polite-- amusing though it may be to have your prank page appear on the website of the United States Securities Exchange Commission.)

2. CC the message to comments at crowdfundinglaw dot com -- this is just for me to archive what's been sent, to see if anything isn't making it onto the SEC site.

3. Explain in your own words what you think of the idea and what your personal interest in it is. Fine with me whether you're for it, against it, or somewhere in between-- the main thing is just to encourage the SEC to consider this issue and open a dialog. Note that if you cut and paste, they will designate your letter as an example of a "Type" rather than an original contribution, which presumably carries less weight. I don't think burdening the SEC with copy-pasted activist spam will make any friends there or help the cause.

4. Spread the word!

You can follow this effort at my freshly-minted Change Crowdfunding Law blog.

SEC File No. 4-604: Petition for Rulemaking: Exempt securities offerings up to $100,000 with $100 maximum per investor from registration. 

I tried to pursue what Cory has called "That feeling of trepidation, of being slightly out of control, of taking a risk, of not knowing whether you are going to crash and burn." I hope that this showed, and that the results were enjoyable to you. I think that if you're not continuously checking your sanity, testing if you're correct or deluded about how your efforts might bounce off of the real world, then you're limiting yourself.

Here it goes, one last post into the ether-- watch it bounce: boing, boing, boing, boing, boing...

Fondly,
Paul

The Surf Punks were primary stars of my teen years. One of my favorite concert experiences ever was seeing them with my friends Ed and Peter at Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium, probably around 1982. They set up an entire beach scene on stage, complete with a lifeguard station. For their finale, guitarist Drew Steele donned an emergency life vest, stood in a kiddie pool, and let drummer Dennis Dragon (who also played on his brother's The Captain and Tennille albums) poured the following over his head: maple syrup, chocolate syrup, strawberry syrup, marshmallow Fluff, and several boxes of breakfast cereal. Now, that's entertainment! Steele then took the life vest off and threw it into the crowd, and Ed caught it. I believe that this {price-, worth-}less piece of rock history still resides in a paper bag in the back of a closet at Ed's parent's house. Here is a short taste of Surf Punk magic, a video for their 40-second song "New Lead Guitar."

The Upper Crust, champions of faux-aristocratic "roque music," played songs like "Monarchy In The U.S.A." wearing breeches, stockings, and powdered wigs. If you know the AC/DC song "Big Balls" then you have a sense for what the Upper Crust's songs are like-- but the Crust develops the concept further. They put on a fantastic show which I enjoyed at Bottom Of The Hill in San Francisco about 10 years ago, but I missed seeing them with original member Lord Rockingham, who had left the band to write speeches for Bill Clinton. Here is a video of their rousing "Let Them Eat Roque" (2:48). Enjoy!

Some upperclassmen pals whom I sang with clued me into this class, which had a cult following on campus. It was a huge lecture course out of the Political Science department, but people from all majors took it-- and that's how Professor Mendlovitz wanted it. The class was basically about solving great problems on a global scale, formulating optimal world governance-- in other words, Saving The World. Mendlovitz openly described his class as indoctrination, and he often repeated this point: You young people, sitting in this room, are the leaders of tomorrow. You will inherit the world some day, and you will be able to change it and make it better. So aim high-- agree that this is what you want to do, know that you can, conspire to make it happen, and stay true to your vision.

It was an absolute thrill for me to hear this message, and it has stayed with me ever since. Star professor Mendlovitz, on 5-year loan from the University of Chicago, was also a great lecturer. He combined tall, grey gravitas with idealistic zeal and a great sense of humor. He obviously loved being around young people.

The poli sci majors who dug deeper became involved with the World Order Models Project, co-founded by Mendlovitz and Princeton professor Richard Falk. I remember looking through the WOMP books and seeing things like diagrams of what the layout and seating scheme should be for a world governance chamber-- like the UN's General Assembly chamber, but presumably better. Things like this seemed a little wanky, but they didn't put me off from the underlying ideals.

Around the same time, I was also immersing myself in the ideas of Fundamentalist zinester Jack Chick (and others) who viewed world government as the great plot of the Anti-Christ, signaling the End Times. But this didn't seem like a good thing to bring up in class.

Anyway, it was a wonderful, inspiring class. I have not lost the hope that it instilled in me, and listening to Obama's words has several times made me think, "Wow-- he must have taken Mendlovitz, too! Mendlovitz was right!"

The beautiful people, who feel the most threat from paparazzi, bored security guards, and network-based voyeurs, cover up and disguise themselves in public places. Others soon follow the trendsetters, adopting the glamor of incognito. As status indicators, the well-toned face and body that come from the ample leisure time give way (outside of private spaces or posted no-camera zones) to a language of elegant, concealing garments, like you see in more modest countries.

Teenage girls become statistically less fearful about body image, and anorexia rates drop. Rifts develop between groups with different attitudes towards concealment. A tipping point is reached, and in the Prisoner's Dilemma of female modesty, power is taken back by the unionized-sisterhood strength of concealment over the winner-take-all competition of the freer playing field. Male attitudes toward women change as a result.

Meanwhile, law enforcement and the intelligence community don't want faces covered, with all their face-recognition and tracking software. So anti-concealment laws are put in place. The cool rebel kids (along with true criminals) also push in the direction of concealment. A mini industry springs up of wearable concealing devices, analogous to radar jammers and license plate concealers, with a similar "arms race" between laws and the innovations designed to circumvent them. Welcome to the see-easy; check your headcover at the door.

(I'm guessing that there's Sci Fi and Gender Studies out there that has a lot like this, and would love any pointers. Again, I feel lucky to access the firehose of BoingBoing community knowledge.)

Some day we may discover a formal test for playability-- whether a setup will go nowhere or explode into interestingness. (Which is probably also a function of mental capacity-- a greater intelligence might find chess as boring as we find Tic-Tac-Toe.) If and when these meta-rules are understood, and we can do things like simulate evolution to levels of real-life complexity, it should convince at least a few more evolution deniers. In Darwin's day, when timekeeping was a leading geek-magnet, theologists described God as the Great Watchmaker. If there is a God, I think "The Great Game Designer" would be more accurate.

I'm mainly talking about paper games here. In the same way that mathematical formulas distill and express universal laws of nature, simple board/card games capture essential social phenomena-- this is a major avenue of research in Economics right? Is there a game like "Monopoly" that distills the phenomenon of an investment bubble growing and bursting? Or a game in which competition between players creates an ever-expanding complex that grows to require all available resources, and constantly presses to extract more? If so, the rules of this game should inform legislation that might increase the efficiency of medical insurers, military contractors, and the like (which is what competition is supposed to do, but in these cases, there seems to be a rule or two missing that takes the systems into another direction).

There are many phenomena I would love to see or come up with essentializing games for, and most of them seem to fall under the categories of consensus, hierarchy, group affiliation, and mating. For different aspects of these, I have numerous half-baked notions about what a group of players in a room could do. For example, draw a new Tarot card every round, and then have to agree on a single narrative that includes all of them in order. Or build the most accurate model of what other teams know and don't know about a selectively concealed array of random numbers, communicating only through severely limited bandwidth.

Hopefully I'll get serious and actually create and try some such games, and although much can be done with things like cards, dice, and paper, I've also been dreaming up a simple platform that would enable more party games and related experiments. My current notion is a small microprocessor-controlled, programmable device that has one knob, an internal clock, a physical contact detector (just a 9V battery clip for clicking into someone else's), a visible LED and a hidden/secret LED. Zigbee for the wireless and Arduino for the control. The contact detector and clock could automatically measure things like "face time" in games where that's a valuable resource, for example, and the hidden and visible LED status indicators could be just that-- status indicators. Or anything else. You could also use the platforms for other things. Like, you could run "dial groups" the way political consultants get focus-group feedback on campaign ads. Or you could run some fun interactive theater experiments. Does anyone know if something like this already exists?

Donors can get a little something in return through these sites if the projects they fund come to fruition, like a signed copy of a book that's produced (Kickstarter), or reimbursement in credit if a news organization buys the story (Spot.Us). But what if a crowdfunding site could offer donors a piece of the action, not just some thank-you goodies? That's what I would want, and I don't think I'm alone. I want investors for my schemes, not patrons, and if people support me to do something that flies, it would only please me to give them a cut.

Technically, launching something like this wouldn't be too difficult. The Spot.Us code, written in Ruby, is public domain and already uses an accounting system with a Paypal merchant account. The Spot.Us interface is close to what an investment-enabled version would need, and the main tough technical piece would be to add a digital signature scheme for the contracts. I met with Spot.Us founder David Cohn a few weeks ago, and he estimated that once the details about the user experience were all figured out, an appropriately-modified adaptation of the Spot.Us code could be up and running in a few months.

But then I started talking about the scheme with lawyers, including Boingboing counsel Rob Rader, who has been extremely helpful. The legal terminology for my notion, it turns out, is "patronage-plus ex ante crowdfunding," at least in a recent article by Tim Kappel in the Loyola of Los Angeles Entertainment Law Review The short answer is, such a site would probably be illegal under U.S. federal securities law. "Securities" are defined as any investment whose return is dependent upon the effort of others. It's a one paragraph definition, very broad, hard to get around, and there's no de minimis dollar cutoff below which the regulations stop. A lemonade stand venture could be subject to SEC regulation.

Securities regulations don't apply if the investors are genuinely active in the day-to-day management of the venture-- but it isn't enough to just give them access to a project wiki and consider their suggestions; you must demonstrate that they are all critical to the venture's success. So much for that loophole.

Another possibility is the SEC's "Private Placement Exemption" under Regulation D, which allows unregulated investments if the number of investors is limited. Specifically, you can sell shares to at most 35 regular individuals (and an unlimited number of accredited investors, i.e. various institutions, plus people who have a net worth exceeding $1 million, an annual income over $200K, or a personal trust exceeding $5 million).

But Regulation D also prohibits any "general solicitation or general advertising" to let people know about the venture. The only published announcements of such investments are the cryptic "tombstone ads" that you sometimes see in the print versions of the Wall Street Journal or New York Times business section. These ads, which AFAIK have never been published online-only (although this might be possible) must be very limited in their disclosure. It might be OK to say "Paul Spinrad offers shares in a graphic novel based on the life of Elliot Smith" but that's about it. The announcement can't include anything that makes Kickstarter and Spot.Us so fun to browse through-- no details of the project, no wish lists, no video clips of people saying, "I'm so excited about this project-- it's got great indie film potential-- all I need is 4 months time and a round-trip ticket to Portland!"

Another possible loophole is to keep offerings entirely intra-state, in which case the SEC lets a state's "blue sky" laws and regulatory apparatus control them. But this would just mean swapping the California Department of Corporations (for example) for the SEC, with similarly expensive legal and registration costs, and similar restrictions on disclosure. It doesn't make sense to have to spend $50,000 to be able to legally raise $5000. Attorney Jay Parkhill gets into some of these same issues in his 2007 blog post,"The World Isn't Ready For Crowdsourced Securities Offerings." 

Yet another approach, which no lawyer could ever condone, is to make the whole thing run under a honor system. This was the premise behind my 2003 website, Premises, Premises, which now lies on the vast dustheap of failed website experiments. Under this scenario, offerers would set their payback terms as a promise, but would be unfettered legally from just keeping all the money they might make using others' investments. The only "teeth" would be that everyone would know what they did, with an electronic trail to prove it, and would presumably consider them assholes until they made amends. Community reputation based enforcement has succeeded in resolving disputes outside of legal channels in the past. But such a system is unsuitable for serious investment.

So my question now is, how can we make this legal? I want to pursue this. For example, how does one go about changing securities law to establish a de minimis exception for total offerings-- say, less than $10,000 and individual investment less than $100. This is chump change for the SEC, and they shouldn't waste their time worrying about activities at that level. Aren't there other laws that protect naive investors from being cheated out of their last $100?

If I can Kickstart up the funding for some lawyer-time to draft a such a bill, who in Congress might sponsor it? The legislation would help artsy types and grassroots ventures, while also lifting financial regulations and oversight-- so it sounds like a candidate for bipartisan support! It's a stimulus bill, it's an investment in American ingenuity, it's "new thinking," it helps the little guy! Meanwhile, I can try to talk to people at the SEC-- I'm happy to just call their listed phone number and see if I can explain my way in to someone who might actually help, but does anyone in boingboing-land know someone who works at the SEC, who might be interested in this?

If you want updates on this quest, please email me! I don't want to include my email address here, but it's pretty easy to find.

Last year, cultural empire Disney launched its first "Disney English" school for kids in Shanghai, China. It would be a big win for Disney if they could own English language learning in the non-English speaking world. Any Disney English schools in areas where their presence might be controversial could be constructed like castles, with real moats! Chinese TV news clip here and Disney English website here.

I have a living cousin who was an early conceptual and performance artist, and I think his work is wonderful. His given name is Paul Cotton, but now he goes by adam, or "adam (The Late Paul Cotton)."

adam studied sculpture at UC Berkeley in the 1960's, and for his final thesis project he submitted his own naked body in a 5-piece unpainted canvas business suit, framed (in a sense) by numerous paper pathways a chain of letters leading into the exhibit room from the halls and walkways outside.

Since then, his work has always been about the body and presence, and also laden with puns, mythology and religion, and plays between high and low culture. His communiques are called "Art Link-Letters" for the way they link the reader to art, and link art of the body to the world of letters. His "Zippily Boo-Duh" costume persona has wings on his feet to invoke Hermes, who bridges different worlds: stasis and revolution, the dead past and the eternal present, the Alphabet and the Goddess.

Like many others during the Sixties, adam was inspired by Norman O. Brown, whose books called for breaking free of the past and ending repression. But while others merely discussed Brown, adam enacted two performances wherein he entered Brown's classroom lectures at UC Santa Cruz. In the traditional sense, he did this uninvited, but in another sense, he was invited by everything that Brown stood for in his writing. You can see adam's video documentation of his second attempt, "The Second Norman Invasion," here: Part 1, 9:18 (includes long title sequence) / Part 2, 8:51.

adam has given much creative thought to his relationship to Norman O. Brown. Indeed, a letter that he wrote to Brown back in 1969 was exhibited earlier this year at the Berkeley Art Museum, in a show drawn from their permanent collection called Galaxy: A Hundred Or So Stars Visible to the Naked Eye" (With a subtitle like that, I would have titled it "Small Star Cluster," but that's just me.)

adam sees his work (and therefore himself), as the embodiment of Brown's ideas, and his "Norman Invasion" performances apply multiple metaphors to the relationship between the two, including bride and groom, and Jesus Christ and John the Baptist. But Brown himself, faced with this costumed classroom invader, didn't know my cousin from Adam. Brown did not seem to recognize my cousin as a cosmic bride, an epic fulfillment of Brown's ideas, or even a sweet and thoughtful artist presenting (present-ing) him with the ultimate gift, himself, and thereby inviting him to experience the liberation that he advocated throughout his writing. Instead, Brown just ran out of the classroom.

And so Brown became not N.O. but NO! Brown-- the archetypal father figure rejecting his son, telling him that his time has not yet come. Years later, my cousin attended an appearance by Brown at Cody's Books in Berkeley, and Brown said, "I cannot personally live my vision."

I don't think it's good for people to interrupt classrooms and I certainly understand Brown's reaction. But I also think this is all such a fascinating body of work on many levels, loaded with great attention to detail. It makes me sad that Brown didn't embrace my cousin's offering and know how disappointed my cousin must have felt-- but in terms of good theater, I think it couldn't be any other way. As performance art, it goes deeper and is more daring, more emotionally risky, than any other piece I'm aware of (not that I'm too up on the scene). The whole Norman O. Brown thing is something that my cousin still cares deeply about, decades later, and it strikes me as so human-- sad, beautiful, funny, tragic, hopeful, etc. He isn't just being clever with it, and he doesn't want to move on from it all just for the sake of following what's happening with the art world or retaining public attention. He still wants to talk about these art actions, and rightly so. I don't think the message underneath them is any less relevant now than it was back in the hippie days.

Unrelated to Norman O. Brown, but also interesting, here is a 1971 radio interview with adam about his experience being physically beaten at the Esalen Institute for having removed his clothing on the premises.

Also, my cousin's sculpture "Random House Converter/Trance-Former," which consists of a series of frames that invite the viewer to step through, was exhibited last year in Paul McCarthy's "Low Life Slow Life" show at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco. The piece one of his pieces is also slated for inclusion in a Spring 2011 show called "State of Mind," covering California conceptual and performance art from the 60's and 70's, co-organized by the UC Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive and the Orange County Museum of Art. I mention these two things with a sense of advocating for my cousin's continued relevance!

It's fantastic that so much written knowledge is becoming generally accessible and cross-linked these days, but this is just an intermediate stage-- a universal library on the way to becoming a universal brain. The missing piece is encoding the underlying meaning of the stored text, the deep-structure logic behind it. It's one of the oldest challenges in Computer Science, and there has been lots of progress and companies dedicated to doing this. Powerset, for example, has software that has parsed and can answer questions from all of Wikipedia.

The thing is, you really still need a person to get it most reliably right, because people understand the way the world works. Luckily, we already have people whose job is very close to doing this already-- they're called fact-checkers or researchers, and they work for every reputable publication.

I don't think the fact-checking process is very well understood by the public-- it's hidden from view and uncredited (which is lame), and I didn't understand it myself until I began working with magazines. Basically, someone combs through a piece of text and makes sure every fact is verified. They look things up in established references, they call people on the phone, they call their friends who have experience in some area, or whatever else it takes. If they're doing it on paper, they start with a printout of the article, and then when they're done every word, every clause, and every spelling of every proper name, has a pencil mark through it.

I have wondered for years, as magazines, newspapers, and other news organizations have been hemorrhaging money and employees, why someone hasn't gone into the contract fact-checking business. Like, it could be an extension of Snopes.com. There's a huge redundancy in every publication having their own research desks, so they could lay off all of their fact-checkers and then outsource the job to the new, independent company that the best of them then all go to work for. Meanwhile, the company could also be hired by anyone else. Then, when the public sees the "Fact-Checked by MiniTrue (SM)" seal on someone's independent blog, they know the information there has the same credibility as the big boys.

Now, what if these fact-checkers didn't just vet and correct the text? While they dig into the logic and accuracy of everything, as usual, they could also use some simple application to diagram the sentences and disambiguate the semantics into a machine-friendly representation. Just a little extra clicking, and they could bind all the pronouns to their antecedents, and select from a dropdown box to specify whether an instance of the string "Prince" refers to the musician Prince or to Erik Prince-- the president of XE, the company formerly known as Blackwater-- within an article that for whatever reason mentions both of them.

Then you would really have something. The text wouldn't just be fact-checked; its underlying meaning could be added into a shared pool of human knowledge, chained through, verified or denied, and used in other ways by any technology that may now exist or may exist in the future.

Many of big ideas that computer visionary Douglas Engelbart came up with in the 1960's have come true, but a couple of them haven't yet. One of these is his notion of the "Certified Public Logician." Engelbart predicted that a new class of knowledge worker would act as front-ends to the machine-enabled collective intelligence. Part logician, part notary, these "Certified Public Logicians" would review texts for logical consistency and then tag them up with appropriate envelope information and enter them into the machine. It's a great idea, and I think we could promote all of our fact-checkers into Certified Public Logicians pretty easily.

I love Tom Geisler's art illustrations, which combine the life-improving spirit of chindogu with the obsessive precision of antique technical drawings (he's also a technical illustrator). Tom is working on a book, "Reduce. Reuse. Reinvent: Free Patents That Will Save Our Galaxy," and here's some material from it, including an hilarious series of pages that illustrate the inventor's personal history.

As a kid, I liked classical and easy listening music, not the rock or disco that other kids listened to. But at age 12 or 13, I was, for some reason, moved to tape Jesus Christ Superstar off of the radio. I played that cassette over and over again, memorized the whole show, then kept playing it and singing along whenever I got the chance. I played it loud, too, turning the volume up higher than I'd ever wanted to before. I was cranking JCS one evening when my dad came home from work. With an expression of curiosity, he asked me why I had the music up so loud. I said "I don't know," and then he asked if I'd gotten the idea from anywhere. I told him no, and he said, "Hmm-- interesting!" He didn't disapprove, but I got the sense that he recognized something happening to me.

JCS taught me the story of Jesus, which as a jewish boy in Los Angeles, I never knew. It had a huge impact on me. Ever since, I've looked at the world in terms of Jesus vs. Rome, righteous rebellion vs. institutional power, hippie values vs. capitalist values, love vs. control. As far as I'm concerned, the "hippie Jesus" of the 1960s and early 1970s is the true Jesus (and centuries of art bear me out on this, at least superficially). "Jesus Was A Hippie" -- that's the tagline for my imaginary ad campaign to take Christianity back from all the high-power imposters and restore it to its apolitical, communitarian roots.

Continued after the jump 

I've long outgrown my love for much music I used to like (Spyro Gyra, I'm talking to you), but never JCS. I was indignant when I flipped through the 1980 book The Golden Turkey Awards and saw Ted Neeley picked for "Worst Performance As Jesus Christ" in the movie version. And I've always been attuned to other JCS-lovers, other people who know all the words. Mitchell Morris, professor of Musicology at UCLA, you probably don't remember me, but I'm a friend of your grad school colleague Steve. About 15 years ago, when we were all having lunch one day, JCS came up, and I know you know all the words too! Some BB readers may recall Suck.com, which was the first website that had a new fun thing for me to read every day. One day on Suck, a cartoon character's speech balloon said, "Fools-- you have no perception! The stakes we are gambling are frighteningly high!" This is a line sung by Caiaphas in the song "Jesus Must Die," and seeing it in such a different context (which I also liked) gave an explosive jolt to my soul-mate radar.

In more recent years, the rock band Skycastle performed the show around Easter every year at the Transmission Theater in San Francisco, staging it with costumed singers, minimal props, and no scenery. I went a couple of times (I think they stopped, unfortunately), and it was always a thrill. Pretty much everyone in the friendly audience of like-minded JCS-heads sing along to the whole thing. I imagine that outside of a gospel church, there is no feeling more righteous than that of screaming, "Die if you want to, you misguided martyr!" with 200 other people over wailing guitars and crashing cymbals. My friends John and Sophia say that a band in Boston used to do the same thing over there, with the same annual success.

Which brings me to my business proposition. I love karaoke and sing-alongs, and I've been pleased to see the success of subtitled, sing-along versions of The Sound Of Music, Grease, Mamma Mia and other favorite musical movies. So how about a sing-along Jesus Christ Superstar? It's a trivial job technically-- just some time spent pasting lyrics into a video editor. I have the movie on DVD and I could do it bootleg, but I think it needs to be legal so that it could be advertised, shown in theaters and churches, and draw crowds. It would be good, clean fun-- who could object? I understand that JCS was disliked by many religious leaders when it was new, but if they had just felt threatened by the hippie-ness of it, I'm sure that has since faded.  

I'm a month late on this, for the spotlight of public attention, but I have an Ayn Rand story, too. 11 years ago I blind-pitched Wired magazine an ill-defined article on Rand. In response, they asked me to write an "interview" with her, where I would come up with all of the questions and then cobble together her answers from things that she had written and said (she died in 1982). Fun! Around the same time, they published similar "interviews" with Nicola Tesla and Mark Twain under the rubric "The Wired Living Archive."

I had a great time researching and writing it, and although they never published it, they must have seen something they liked in it because I started working at Wired the following year. Meanwhile I never did anything with it. But re-reading it now, I like the added time-trip aspect of it. The idea of the article was to make Rand relevant to the current day, of course, but things were different in 1998. Like, the biggest newsmaker was Monica Lewinsky (hmm... I didn't see much 10th Anniversary coverage of that), and personally, things like the Critical Mass bicycle demonstration had a much larger role in my life than they do today.

Rand was a contradiction-filled woman who hated all contradictions, and whatever fiery, petite actress can succeed in bringing this complex character to life, in the inevitable major studio biopic, is pretty much guaranteed an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. Meanwhile, here's my attempt at bringing Ms. Rand to life.

Note that it's long-- over 4000 words, and written for an editor to cut down. Sources for all quotations are noted as abbreviations inline, with full titles listed at the end.

WIRED: Last March, when Bill Gates testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee as part of the Justice Department's antitrust investigation, I thought of you.

RAND: [Margin 195] This is as crude a case of penalizing ability for being ability, and of national suicide via anti-capitalism as one could invent in any fiction. Straight out of Atlas Shrugged - [Obj News v1 5] the sacrifice of productive genius to the demands of envious mediocrity. [Margin 195] This is horror and vicious insanity.

But isn't there a point at which monopolies can injure competition?

[Letters 61] Boy, oh boy! If this isn't collectivist Party Line, I'll eat Das Kapital unabridged. [Margin 210] Just how are you going to compete if you cannot "injure" competition?

And government has no business trying to guide technology either.

[Obj 963] "Restricted technology" is a contradiction in terms. [Obj 983] Technology is moved by such a complex and interconnected sum of the work of individual minds that no committee could prescribe its course. Who can predict how a given bit of information will strike an active mind and what it will produce?

Which is why the Internet has been so valuable for research, facilitating idea flow.

[Column 127] Think of the human ingenuity, the technological development, the large-scale synchronization of effort required to create such a worldwide system! [ARL 13] Nothing can raise productivity except technology.

But the net's development was hardly a private, laissez-faire effort...

[Obj 712] Scientific research is not the proper province of the government. But this is a political issue; it does not alter the superlative technological achievement. [Journals 323] What was the most important thing? The government did not attempt to run the project. The government took orders from the scientists - not vice versa. The government provided the means - and let the scientists do the work as they wished.

We don't need the government to protect the environment?

[Playboy 23] My position is fully consistent. [Obj 977] In the Middle Ages, man's life expectancy was 30 years. If it were true that industry is destructive to human life, one would find life expectancy declining in the more advanced countries. But it has been rising steadily. Anyone over 30 years of age today, give a silent "Thank you" to the nearest, sootiest smokestacks you can find.

What about the other species?

[Obj 966] Contrary to the ecologists, nature does not stand still and does not maintain the kind of "equilibrium" that guarantees the survival of any particular species - least of all her greatest and most fragile product, man. [Cult Update 12] Man cannot survive in the state of nature ecologists envision. Man has to discover and produce everything he needs, which means that he has to alter his background. Man has to manufacture things. The lowest tribe cannot survive without that alleged source of pollution: fire. It is not merely symbolic that fire was the property of the gods which Prometheus brought to man.

Don't you enjoy the world's biological diversity? Doesn't the natural world fill you with wonder?

[Donahue #2 26:18] No. You know when I'm filled with wonder? When I look up at skyscrapers, at the manmade, at what men were able to achieve on their own, without the help of faith or any sort of mysticism.

But you do acknowledge that pollution can cause problems for people?

[Obj 789] Pollution is primarily a scientific, not a political problem. In regard to the political problem: if a man creates a physical danger or harm to others which extends beyond the line of his own property, the law can hold him responsible. If the condition is collective, such as in an overcrowded city, appropriate and objective laws can be defined, protecting the rights of all involved - as in the case of oil rights, air-space rights, etc.

How about laws based on "True Cost," like pollution-credit systems, which incent industry to compete on finding environmental solutions?

[Obj 790] Such laws must not be aimed at a single scapegoat, i.e. the industrialists. [Obj 981] Industry is not the only culprit. The handling of sewage and garbage disposal problems, so frequently denounced, has been the province of local governments. [ARL 21] Americans will enthusiastically clean their streets, their rivers, their backyards, but when it comes to giving up progress, technology, the automobile, and their standard of living, Americans will prove that the man-haters "ain't seen nothing yet."

You must despise alternative transportation protests like London's annual "Reclaim the Streets" action or the "Critical Mass" bicycle demonstrations.

[Obj News v4 56] It can be rationally proved that the airplane is objectively of immeasurably greater value to man, to man at his best, that the bicycle. But if a given man's transportation needs do not extend beyond the range of a bicycle, [there is no] reason why the rest of mankind should be held down.

So, mass transit and roads themselves should all be private. No more departments of transportation or motor vehicles.

[Column 24] The only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off. [Margin 143] By their very natures, bureaucrats are neither intelligent nor competent, but parasites. The competent do not go in for government service.

And of course, any government power opens the door to corruption.

[Obj News v1 40] Cases of actual corruption are not a major motivating factor in today's situation. The motive power is the manipulations of little lawyers and public relations men pulling strings. These lobbyists are profiteers on America's self-immolation.

Your philosophy leads you to differ with domestic lobbyists who push a number of "family values" issues, including reproductive rights, censorship, and symbolic speech.

[Mediocrity 5] Speaking culturally, not politically, the worship of the "Family" is un-American. According to one of the best American traditions, a person had "to be on his own" in order to prove his value and independence.

How about foreign lobbyists? China's "Pull Peddlers," as you call them, have had considerable success, as shown by their "most favored nation" trade status and Clinton's visit last June.

[ARL 58] Morally, it was impossible to watch all the gracious ceremonies, benevolent smiles, handshakes, speeches - and hold in mind the reality of China's terror, starvation, torture chambers, mass slaughter. For the Chinese to see an American President drinking toasts to their jailers is cruel. [Obj 584] There is only one form of protest: do not help them to pretend that they are the morally acceptable leaders of a civilized country.

Generally speaking, you think our foreign policy is too soft?

[ARL 68] What is America's image? It used to be a stern Uncle Sam. Has it now become an international social worker, cooing baby talk and wagging her finger at armed gangs, urging them to remember that they are not infallible?

I must raise a topic very close to you: Russia. Since the fall of Communism, business activity there has not managed to improve people's lives, except for a new class of ex-Party members turned to organized crime. Meanwhile, violence, or at least violence perpetrated by private citizens, has risen.

[ARL 133] It may take a long time. [Cult Update 13] It is still precarious, still without intellectual leadership, still perverted by social pathology. A trend against something is not enough; when and if it becomes a trend for capitalism, it will triumph. [Column 60] One liberated area of economic activity requires the liberation of further areas that require the liberation of still further areas, and so on. [Obj News v4 20] A mixed economy, economically, is the equivalent of robber gangs.

I also have to ask you about Clinton. What's your take on the scandal?

[Journals 379] I don't believe the American people should ever be told lies, publicly or privately. I don't believe that lies are practical. I don't think it was necessary to deceive the American people?

But is it impeachable?

[ARL 187] It is not the worst offense of today's politicians - and of small significance compared to what most of them do to the country. The attempts to cover it up translated it into a felony. But here, the fog is so thick that nothing can be judged with certainty. [ARL 187] In spite of the enormous coverage given, it is impossible to untangle facts from allegations, proof from rumors, truth from innuendo.

What's your impression from watching his testimony?

[ARL 216] It was a solid act, a studied act, and an act aimed at showing that he had no act. [ARL 217] Did the camera reveal anything beyond this act? Only the look in his eyes - the cold, shrewd, calculating look of a manipulator. [Donahue #2 6:49] He is not a strong personality, nor is he showing genuine emotion. I don't think he has any ideas, and if so, he has no feelings.

But it's hard to tell just from TV.

[ARL 209] Television is a wonderful invader of psychological privacy, more potent than a lie detector. [Donahue #2 7:23] You can tell a lot about a person - more than in a personal encounter.

How does Clinton's sexual behavior reflect on him personally?

[Letters 138] A person betrays his own valuation of himself in his attitude on sex. If the attitude is cheap and sloppy, the person has no real self-respect, whether he know it or not. He usually does know it. [Fountain 461] Let a man corrupt his values and he will cut himself in two. His body will not obey him; it will make him impotent toward the woman he professes to love and draw him to the lowest type he can find.

Does it say the same about Monica?

[Wallace 21:21] Most certainly not. [Obj 562] For a woman qua woman, the essence of femininity is hero-worship - the desire to look up to man. [Letters 156] The danger is to succumb to some such fallacy as that "the heart is more important than the brain." (By "heart" they actually mean here a less polite anatomical organ.) Nothing is more important than the brain.

Wait - so you think that women are less rational than men?

[Margin 42] Good God, no! [Obj 561] It is not an issue of the notion that women are motivated by their emotions rather than by reason - which is plain nonsense. The issue is primarily psychological. "To look up" does not mean anything implying inferiority. It means an intense kind of admiration experienced only by a person of strong character and independent value judgments. [Letters 58] I'm a natural-born hero worshipper, but I find damn few heroes to worship.

So you think she's fundamentally confused and admires the wrong men as a result.

[Margin 170] Correct.

What advice would you give her?

[ARL 289] "Without a ruthlessly honest commitment to introspection, you will not discover what you feel, what arouses the feeling, and whether your feeling is an appropriate response to the facts of reality, a mistaken response, or a vicious illusion produced by self-deception. [Letters 592] You are young; I suggest that you study philosophy more carefully."

Do you think many young people have a similar "erroneous" outlook?

Yes. [Obj 774] They have accepted the philosophical beliefs of their elders. [Obj 774] They are the distilled essence of the Establishment's culture. [Obj 916] The average graduate has no concept of knowledge. He has the cynicism of a decadent adult and the credulity of a child. His mind is in a state of whirling confusion. [Obj 917] He finds himself in the midst of the brilliant complexity of an industrial, technological civilization which he cannot begin to understand.

You refer to "graduates" in particular - you think it's education's fault?

[Donahue #1 41:56] Today, those who didn't go to college are better informed and less easily fooled than those who did. [ARL 52] Of all government undertakings, none has failed so disastrously as public education. [Obj 933] The grade-and-high-school teachers blame it on parental influences. The college professors blame it on the teachers. Few, if any, question the content of the courses.

So, what's wrong with the courses?

[Obj 956] The purpose of education is to teach a student how to live, by developing his mind. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e. conceptual. He has to be taught how to think, to integrate, to prove by his own effort. This is what the colleges renounced long ago. What they are teaching today has no relevance to anything.

Is this necessarily the fault of public education? Wouldn't private schools under no regulation run the risk of being even more limited and trend-driven?

[Margin 35] Oh, no! The exact opposite is true. [ARL 78] A private school has the right to teach any ideas of its owners' choice, and to exclude all opposing ideas; but it has no power to force such exclusion on the rest of the country. The opponents have the right to teach a wider spectrum of viewpoints, if they so choose. The competition of the free marketplace of ideas does the rest, determining every school's success or failure - which, historically, was the course of the development of the great private universities. [Faith 8] If you want to prove to yourself the power of ideas, the intellectual history of the Nineteenth Century would be a good example to study.

So you would support a voucher system?

[ARL 81] It would work not as a motor of freedom, but as a brake on total regimentation, [ARL 77] a temporary measure in a grave national emergency. [ARL 53] We are living in a disastrously mixed economy, which cannot be freed overnight. In today's context, the proposal would be a step in the right direction.

What about government scholarships?

[Obj 92] The recipient of a public scholarship is morally justified only so long as he regards it as restitution and opposes all forms of welfare statism. Those who advocate public scholarships have no right to them; those who oppose them, have. If this sounds like a paradox, the fault lies in the moral contradictions of welfare statism, not in its victims.

This brings to mind a couple of issues from the California ballot. One is affirmative action.

[ARL 92] The notion is so obviously an expression of racism that no lengthy discussion is necessary. [Global 13] There is no surer way to infect mankind with hatred than by splitting it into ethnic groups. The record of hatred is always the same. A recent, grand-scale example was Nazi Germany.

The other one is bilingual education. Californians voted against both affirmative action and bilingual education in 1997.

[ARL 138] The election demonstrated that the people are ready to hear the voice of reason. [Global 9] A country has to have only one official language. I have observed that bilingual countries tend to be culturally impoverished, by comparison to the major countries whose language they share. Consider the record of Belgium against France - or Switzerland against France, Germany, Italy - or Canada against the United States. My hypothesis is: bilingual rule is a perpetuation of a strong ethnic-tribalist element within a country, an element of anti-intellectuality and stagnation. The best minds run from such countries.

Don't you think a healthy amount of ethnic pride can be valid and enriching?

[Margin 81] Who have you been talking to? [Obj News v2 33] There is no such thing as a collective or racial achievement. There are only individual minds and individual achievements. [Global 6] The acceptance of achievements by other individuals does not represent "ethnicity." It represents a free market. Tradition has nothing to do with it. [Global 7] The old, the tired, the timid, and those who gave up before they started are the carriers of "ethnicity:" folk songs, folk dances, ways of cooking, traditional costumes...

I take it then you're not particularly fond of folk festivals.

[Margin 40] Boy, what a set-up! [Global 7] All folk art is essentially similar and excruciatingly boring: if you've seen one set of people clapping their hands while jumping up and down, you've seen them all. [Obj 1068] If there is a more repulsive spectacle than a television broadcast presenting - as news - pretentious, self-conscious adolescents performing some Slavonic folk dance in the shadow of New York's skyscrapers, I have not discovered it yet.

What sort of culture do you like?

[Donahue #2 43:22] The school I prefer is Romanticism. [Obj News v1 49] Romanticists present a hero as an abstraction of man's best and highest potentiality. [Obj 641] Romanticism recognizes the existence of man's volition - and Naturalism denies it.

Examples?

[Obj 646] Among novelists, the greatest are Victor Hugo and Dostoevsky. Among playwrights, the greatest are Friedrich Schiller and Edmond Rostand. [Obj. 1011] The greatest of all artists? Vermeer.

Nothing more modern?

[Obj News v1 49] Take a look at modern literature. The subjects are such themes as: the hopeless love of a bearded lady for a mongoloid pin-head in a circus side show - or: the tragedy of a gentle young man who just can't help murdering strangers in the park, for kicks. All presented to us under the Naturalistic heading of "a slice of life" or "real life." Why is the soul of a murderer worth studying, but not the soul of a hero?

How about in the visual arts?

[Obj 75] One finds the same sewer in somewhat different forms. The visual arts are ruled by a single principle: distortion. The kindest thing to say would be that the purpose is to take in the suckers and provide a field-day for pretentious mediocrities. [Obj 1046] I do not know which is worse: to practice modern art as a colossal fraud, or to do it sincerely. [Obj 1047] "Something made by an artist" is not a definition of art. A beard and a vacant stare are not the defining characteristics of an artist.

And in music?

[Obj 1016] In the field of musical perception, man is still in a state of infancy. Until a conceptual vocabulary is defined, no objectively valid criterion of esthetic judgment is possible in music.

Well, do you enjoy the work of minimalist composers, like Philip Glass and John Adams?

[Obj 1029] The endless repetition of few notes and of a rhythmic pattern that beats against the brain with the regularity of the ancient torture of water drops falling on a man's skull, paralyzes cognitive processes, obliterates awareness and disintegrates the mind. Such music produces a state of sensory deprivation.

How about older, avant-garde composers like John Cage or Toru Takemitsu?

[Obj 1030] No scientific discoveries are required to know with full, objective certainty that it is not music. The proof lies in the fact that music is the product of periodic vibrations - and, therefore, the introduction of nonperiodic vibrations, i.e., of noise, eliminates it automatically from the realm of art and of consideration.

In general, you're not too keen on today's culture.

[ARL 69] There is an air of impoverished drabness, of stagnant monotony in all our cultural activities. Everything produces the effect of déjà vu or déjà entendu. How long since you have read anything startling, different, fresh, unexpected? [ARL 225] Art (including literature) is the barometer of a culture. If you find political issues too complex to diagnose, take a look at today's art. It will leave you in no doubt in regard to the health or disease of our culture.

Surely there must be some bright spot somewhere. For instance, don't you think US postage stamps are better than ever? After the Elvis stamp in 1993, they really started branching out.

[Margin 136] Now this I agree with fully! [Column 127] There is change in the world of stamps, and spectacular displays of human imagination. [Column 128] I like the enormous amount of talent displayed on stamps - more than one can find in today's art galleries. One finds real little masterpieces!

On that positive note, I'd like to start asking about you personally. Some background--

[Letters 616] Don't ask me about my family, my childhood, my friends, or my feelings. Ask me about the things I think. The only thing that really interests me is ideas.

But I'd like to bring more of you into this. Many journalists and critics discussed your background when Atlas Shrugged came out.

[Letters 607] Reviews and interviews are two different kinds of undertaking. A review does not require the victim's cooperation. An interview does.

How about this: In 1934, at age 29, you wrote in your journal, [Journals 68] "I want to be known as the greatest champion of reason and the greatest enemy of religion." In 1973, at age 68, you wrote to your long-lost sister, [Letters 657] "I have achieved everything I wanted to achieve in my youth." You've clearly been successful. How did you do it?

[Letters 599] The most important thing in life is never to surrender one's concept of what is right, what life could be and should be.

You also wrote in that early journal, [Journals 73] "Some day I'll find out whether I'm an unusual specimen of humanity in that my instincts and reason are so inseparably one, with the reason ruling the instincts. Am I unusually intelligent or merely unusually honest?" What is your answer?

[Journals 73] Honesty is a form of superior intelligence. [Letters 229] I'm the kind of ballplayer who endorses what she really smokes, and smokes only what she really endorses.

Meanwhile, you've had countless critics.

[Donahue #1 17:07] I don't give a damn about my critics. I have not heard a good one. [Donahue #2 38:12] I would love to see an honorable adversary, but I have stopped hoping.

Do you ever conclude that you take things too seriously?

[Journals 88] The truly joyous man does not laugh too much, because there is little to laugh at in life as it is today. The truly joyous man takes himself very seriously, because there is no joy without self and pride in self. One does not revere with a giggle.

You never pop out a frame and laugh at how serious you are? Come on...

[Lexicon 207] The worst evil that you can do, psychologically, is to laugh at yourself. That means spitting in your own face.

There's one last quote of yours I want to bring up--

[Journals 319] Be careful. [Letters 170] A quotation must be clear and unmistakable - by its own terms, through its own words - so that it retains its meaning no matter who is quoting it.

It's from a letter you wrote to a friend in 1948: "I have seldom enjoyed anything concrete or in the present. I am always in the abstract or future." When you think about the future, what do you see?

[ARL 16] If America is to be saved from destruction, she will be saved by her sense of life. [Obj 610] Contemporary events are slowly bringing men's minds to Objectivism. [Obj 380] If men dedicate themselves to the greatest of all crusades, a crusade for the absolutism of reason, the twenty-first century will have a chance.

I hope so. Thank you!

[ARL 388] Good-bye and good premises!

SOURCES

Here's my idea for a Monty Python And The Holy Grail-like opening title sequence. The following titles fade in and are crossed out one by one:

• A True Story
• Based On A True Story
• Inspired By A True Story
• Inspired By Real Events
• Inspired By Reality
• Partially Inspired By Reality

I've argued here before that storytelling, like language itself, is a compression scheme-- ideally, you leave out everything that doesn't matter or doesn't in some way contribute to the whole. If you're decompressing the story-- reading, listening to, or watching it-- the first thing you need to know is, is this true? You need to know where to put it in your head, whether to incorporate it into the model you use to navigate the real world, or whether it should go into the "not true" bin. Our survival depends on this distinction.

Meanwhile, on the storyteller's side, there are many reasons to blur true and not-true-- particularly, I think, if a story is being told for profit or to maintain of power relationships. Stories interpreted as real demand more attention and more likely to influence people's actions than fictional stories.

There was an interesting discussion here (in response to a great piece by Susannah Breslin) about the future of porn video when CGI can simulate humans realistically. Yes, there is an "uncanny valley" problem where the simulations are not quite realistic enough, but let's assume it will be overcome. My prediction is that there will still need to be living, breathing porn stars in the world, because viewers need something to build a fantasy around, no matter how remote. Recall the parade scene at the end of National Lampoon's Animal House, when a college cheerleader flies through a window and lands on the bed of a teenage boy reading a porno magazine. He says, "Thank you, God!" It's funny because it's true-- or so I am told. 

It's true that people can become obsessed with animated fictional characters, and for them the real/unreal issue doesn't matter (or works the other way). But those of us with more "stalker" type personalities want to be able to think, "I wonder what she's doing right now?" Instead of pitching our fantasy tents comfortably in the world of fiction, we anchor them to some contrived but remotely plausible chain of circumstances where we might, just might, really have a chance.

I wish we could all be together now, singing sea chanties in some friendly tavern. That's not possible, but I think we can still have some fun coming up with and sharing new verses for What Shall We Do With A Drunken Sailor. I'll start, and if you have any, please post them in the comments:

• Ream his bunghole with a rusty scupper (repeat)
• Wring his sack in the starboard windlass (repeat)
• Soak his cheeks in the Devil's bath, now (repeat)
• Coat his mizzen-mast with tar and feathers (repeat)

(Obligatory Distancing Comment: Yes, this is totally immature.)

Guestblogging for Boingboing has been a real treat-- I always love the discussions here, and as anticipated, I learned and will continue to learn a lot from this opportunity. Thank you!

If you're interested, check out my website Premises, Premises, devoted to one-paragraph descriptions of new business ideas and inventions. I haven't updated it in a while and need to re-do it using all the great free online community tools available now, but I think many of the ideas there have real potential. Others are just for grins, and most are somewhere in between. Deciding which is which is left as an exercise for the reader. It also lists other "ideas sites" -- which is a genre I love and have been following, although it has yet to succeed as a frame.

FWIW, with this post about atheism I apologize to any atheists who thought I was saying they should shut up or be untrue to their beliefs-- that's not what I wanted to say! I am an atheist myself, by Greta Christina's definition of certain enough although I've always been fascinated and inspired by religion. I like these quotes:

"Religions fulfill deep-seated psychological needs for people, and if you don't get it from a specific religious doctrine, you'll get it from the kind of films I like to make. A film like The Terminator is consciously meant to give a sense of empowerment to the individual."
--James Cameron, American Film, July 1991

"We think heaven on earth is a real possibility. There are resources enough to create it. And people are intelligent enough to advance it. Now all that remains is to market it."
--Olivier Toscani, (media director of Benetton), Colors #12

Thanks also to Mark F. and all of the other boingers for their help and support-- and I'll see you on the boards! I will leave with another favorite quote, from Flaubert, which I got from my father (it's originally from Madame Bovary):

"Human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity."

In this post I asked boingboing readers what mini-essays by me they would want to read, and now it's time to pay the piper. Here are the votes tallied from the first 103 comments, in descending order, followed by the goods. Since some interest was expressed in all of them, I'll hit them all with at least a line or two. The top vote-getter was "D) Guys need a coming-of-age ritual that has some teeth, like exist in other cultures," with 35 votes. I guess it's true! Anyway, for those interested, thank you for your interest!

D) Guys need a coming-of-age ritual that has some teeth, like exist in other cultures. (35 votes)
M) Styles of dress follow people's differing views of human perfectability (22 yes)
L) Laughter and crying serve to carve new cognitive pathways in a hurry. (20 yes)
H) Poetry will become popular again. (19 yes, 1 no)
B) My cynical Public Service Announcement campaign idea to get more people to major in Science and Engineering. (17 yes)
I) "Method" acting changed the role of celebrity in all cultural disciplines, starting in the late 1940's. (17 yes)
C) Was Jesus a comedian? (17 yes, 1 no)
J) The 6th-8th Century Iconoclast Controversy in Eastern Europe has fantastic dramatic potential. (16 yes)
F) Control vs. Love: breadth-first, top-down vs. depth-first, bottom up search strategies that work in opposition. (12 yes)
G) Some countries "get" rock 'n' roll better than others. (14 yes, 2 no)
K) Where there is vice, there is connoisseurship. (12 yes)
A) What is a crackpot? (7 yes, 1 no)
E) We need a communications language standard for networked devices, and why this is more of a social/political problem than a technical problem. (3 yes, 1 no)

Guys need a coming-of-age ritual that has some teeth, like exist in other cultures. 

If you wanted to design the perfect consumer, what would they be like? How about someone who thinks and acts like a "typical teenager" their whole life? Empathy, patience, and responsibility are hard to monetize, so there's huge commercial interest in keeping these out of our repertoires. (Sorry, together teens-- you know the stereotype.) All the seductive advertising got to me, anyway, on some level, even though I don't consider myself a big consumer type.

A coming-of-age ritual would counter the industrial production of overgrown boy-men and girl-women. Speaking personally again, I think that if I had grown up knowing that I could screw around and count on people's indulgence until I was, say, 26, and then after a big public ritual everyone would expect more, I would have risen to the occasion, as would all of my pals. Other things we call rites-of-passage (moving out, supporting yourself, getting married, having kids) can certainly have the same effect, but you can do all of those things while still just always trying to see what you can get away with.

The bar mitzvah age of 13 is too young, as one example. I'm guessing that when people came up with that age, more was expected of 13-year-olds than is today. I'd push it out, to allow for things like college and some good years of sowing wild oats. As the ritual itself, what do you think? It's great that this question got the most votes, and I just wish I had some hard information to contribute. For those of us who, like me, haven't read our Joseph Campbell, let's hop to it, and we'll all try to figure something out. Meanwhile, I love the comment from the man who marked his change by cutting his hair, and also find it interesting that a couple of generations ago, men wore hats all the time. How did you get your first hat? Did your father and grandfather ceremoniously take you to a haberdasher?

Styles of dress follow people's differing views of human perfectability. 

Let's say you're an alien who comes to Earth and happens to land in the middle of an abortion rally. Both sides are there waving signs, which you can't read, but you notice differences in the way each side is dressed. On one, colors and patterns match more closely, fabrics are smoother and more uniform, hair is neater, there are more suits, and jewelry is finer. On the other side, patterns are louder, hair is looser, materials are rougher, there's more eclecticism and asymmetry, and more costume jewelry. You wonder, is this species fighting about what they should wear?

There are many flashpoint issues surrounding reproductive and drug policy, and I think they have to do with differing views of human weakness and what to do about it. If people should be guided by divine ideals, you don't want laws to assume (and reward) falling short, and you want to wear things that are as neat and coordinated as possible. If people are fascinating, flawed animals whose missteps should be expected and provided for, you're more liable to wear things that reflect the complex collage we all live.

Laughter and crying serve to carve new cognitive pathways in a hurry. 

One theory I remember from a psycholinguistics class ascribes humor and laughter to suddenly resolving a tension. Like "What has four wheels and flies? / A garbage truck" or seeing someone fall and then realizing they weren't hurt. They're all "aha!" moments that revise your model of what's true, and the brain gets extra juice in order to carve revised pathways, so the new understandings stay permanent.

When you lose someone you love, you also need to carve new pathways in order to remake your model of the world. But it takes much longer and requires much more juice.

Aside: What made the Anthony Perkins character in Psycho so creepy is that (spoiler alert!) he found a way around having to process his mother's death, and so he never learned what death means.

Poetry will become popular again. 

My cynical Public Service Announcement campaign idea to get more people to major in Science and Engineering. 

This is an idea for a series of 30-second promotional spots. They're totally dishonest because they imply that you can't do as much good for the world as a liberal arts major (for example), but if you see this as a war, then I guess all's fair!

In straight-ahead Errol Morris style, each spot would present a real person in mid- or late life who regrets not having pursued science or engineering, talking about the wrong turn they took. Formula: I was interested in and good at science/engineering, but for stupid reason A, I pursued/majored in B instead. 3) So now I'm doing unsatisfying-C while my scientist/engineer friends are doing meaningful-D. Examples:

"...I was also always great at BS-ing, so when the math started getting too hard, I decided to switch to B, and then I went into advertising. Now, if I reach the pinnacle of my profession, I can convince people to buy more cars and liquor. Meanwhile, my old friend Sam, who studied Civil Engineering, is bringing clean, safe water to poor people in India. Pursue BS, and that's what you get."

"...But I also noticed that there were more babes at the Art library than the Engineering library, so I majored in something else. Now I grub for grants to do minor variations on the one concept I'm quote-unquote 'known' for, while my college buddy Alex, who did Chemical Engineering, is figuring out how to stop the spread of brain cancer."

"I was intimidated by all the hot-shot guys in those classes, so I changed to B and wound up in Law school. Now I work 70 hours a week doing corporate law to pay off my debt while my college roommate Carol, who studied Biochem, is figuring out how proteins fold. I'm happy for her."

"My buddies were mostly liberal arts majors, so that was the easy path. Now I work for an investment bank, and if I do a really good job, it means some rich people get even richer. But my friend Keven, who studied Aeronautical Engineering, and now he's building autonomous robot aircraft for putting out fires and rescuing people."

And so on. The stories must be real, not acted, which is where some actual work would have to get done. But if the subjects wanted the video to obscure their identities, all the better-- they would just look that much more pathetic. Possible tagline: Engineering - Make something of your life. It's in the grand tradition of sobering, cautionary, and presumably effective PSAs about V.D., drugs, etc.: Don't let this happen to you!

"Method" acting changed the role of celebrity in all cultural disciplines, starting in the late 1940's. 

When actors began stepping into their roles rather than viewing acting as a craft, it brought more attention to who they were personally. Audiences knew that Marlon Brando's "Stella!" was a window into his own emotions. As critic Richard Schickel recalls, "People who saw him as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire in 1948 cannot forget the sense that they were seeing the beginning of something for which there was no precedent."

Maybe there's no cause-and-effect, but other fields soon shifted their focus the same way. Swing music's tight arrangements and orchestras gave way to Bebop's small-combo improvisation and personal signature styles. Abstract Expressionist paintings came entirely from what the artist dreamed up, with no observations the viewer could share. Beat writers rejected editing as separating the reader from their raw, original thoughts. In all cases it feeds celebrity-- to appreciate their work, you think about the artist.

Kerouac's On The Road manuscript, written on a roll of teletype paper, is currently on a museum tour. Writing that way helped him avoid breaking his flow, and if he also more self-consciously thought it might become a precious relic some day, a quasi-religious object the way Pollock's paintings were valued records of his artistic trance at the time, he was right.

I learned this stuff from reading Richard Schickel's Intimate Strangers and Leo Braudy's Frenzy of Renown, both fascinating books about the phenomenon of celebrity.

Was Jesus a comedian? 

I'd seen numerous references to Lenny Bruce's notorious "Religions, Inc." routine, and when I finally read it, I didn't find it that funny. Sure, I appreciated that it was revolutionary at the time, but in the years since, so many of us have accepted Bruce's comparison between organized religions and corporations that it's no longer daring or funny to point it out.

Humor tends not to age well. If being "edgy" means testing the edge between taboo and acceptable, then each generation turns edgy into obvious or even doctrinal as it moves the line.

Jesus reportedly called out hypocrisy and put authority in its place, and his words resonated with people, but the accounts we read are filtered through subsequent generations. If the Sermon on the Mount (or the sermons it summarized) was so daring and dead-on that it had its audience howling in the aisles, and if the surrounding culture eventually came to accept the views it expressed, how would later generations describe the event in their accounts? To say that it provoked laughter would be unthinkable.

The 6th-8th Century Iconoclast Controversy in Eastern Europe has fantastic dramatic potential. 

Another great chapter from Frenzy of Renown describes the Iconoclast Controversy, which raged on and off from the sixth to the eighth centuries. Christian churches under the Byzantine Empire developed a tradition of icon painting, and the lay worshipers loved praying to these icons. But bands of iconoclasts, who saw this as un-Christian idol-worship, began storming into churches, ripping the icons off the walls, and smashing them.

Meanwhile, the top of the church hierarchy felt that the icons had too much power over people, and interfered with their authority. So a series of Byzantine emperors began to secretly support the iconoclasts in smashing icons. So the iconoclasts, zealots who justified their views with scripture, took payoffs from the Byzantine Empire to destroy the most precious possessions of the icon-worshipers, many of whom were mendicant monks. Wheels within wheels!

Towards the end of the controversy, one pro-icon author was captured by iconoclasts who branded his forehead with some of his pro-icon verses. After the Byzantine Empire withdrew its support for the iconoclasts, he obtained a high position in the church.

Control vs. Love: breadth-first, top-down vs. depth-first, bottom up search strategies that work in opposition. 

A great meta-recipe for systems that learn and adapt is to have opposing forces fighting each other. It's the basis for our legal system, and I see this dynamic everywhere.

One of my favorite pet pairings is Control vs Love. As I see it, Control uses a breadth-first, top-down search strategy, whereas Love is depth-first and bottom-up. Control without love causes large-scale death, destruction, and suffering in the service of generalizations and abstractions. Love without control gets pulled this way and that, universally sympathetic but unable to step back and build systems that are ultimately more helpful. Together, locked in eternal combat, they keep the excesses of the other in check.

Another requirement for the recipe is that the opposing motivations should prompt similar actions. This allows for infinite flexibility within a spectrum of motivation. When the rules of the game are set up like this, something clicks, and complexity grows.

And so, for example, the artist seeking connection and artist seeking fame search for the same cultural niches to occupy and grow from. The careerist who always wants to prove himself right follows the same course as the ethical professional who always wants to do a good job. The seducer follows the true lover's thought process when determining his next move.

I like the commenter's suggestion that "Love vs. Control" could be an album title!

Some countries "get" rock 'n' roll better than others. 

Some countries expect young people to move away from their childhood home and strike out on their own. In others, extended families are more close-knit, and young people tend to live close to their parents, grandparents, and other relatives. The wealthy English, who traditionally hired nannies and sent their children away to boarding schools at young ages, represent the first extreme. But in the U.S. as well, young people have more distance from their families than in other countries.

The rock 'n' roll that drives the genre comes from young people who want to connect with each other over something that they love but that their parents would hate. The first type of country breeds this type of rebellion, but in more family-oriented countries, the rock musicians are more liable to produce a derivative form, by applying rock-sounding style to melodies and music that the whole family can understand and enjoy.

Where there is vice, there is connoisseurship. 

Briefly, connoisseurship develops in part as a rationalization: alcohol, tobacco, etc.

What is a crackpot? 

Someone who produces non-disprovable, non-quantitative, descriptive generalizations. Whether it's Sigmund Freud or Lyndon LaRouche, it's all the same impulse.

We need a communications language standard for networked devices, and why this is more of a social/political problem than a technical problem. 

It should be a simple but complete language, not just a protocol. Then you could do anything you want in the communications layer, rather than applications themselves having to handle multiple protocols redundantly. You could write fancy cross-platform rules to control when and how to send or open all of your communications, and how to handle the ones directed to you. In the 1980's, Adobe got its start by doing the same thing with a page description language for printers, PostScript, and look what happened to them!

My friend Andy's literature blog recently pointed to this essay by Pat Holt, about how book publishers lose tons of money printing hardcover books. Publishers see them as expensive promotional copies that they need to print in order to get the reviews and interviews that sell profitable softcovers later.

But to use a trite formulation, publishers of hardcover books must realize that they aren't in the printing printed object business, they're in the talking-stick business. We have a shared general public dialog, but because there are more people with things to say than the public has time to hear, we need some object to confer attention-- like the talking stick around a campfire. In our culture, this object is the hardcover from a major publisher, which ideally makes a single timely point to inject into the public discussion.

Here's something less expensive that I think could replace hardcovers. Each publishing house puts a video billboard in a protected, shared area of Times Square or similar that's dedicated to showing the authors/books currently being promoted. I know outdoor advertising in NYC is expensive, but one sign has got to be cheaper than thousands of hardcovers plus distribution. If the signs are properly imbued with significance, which the industry could easily do, they would accomplish everything that a hardcover run does.

The book industry would tell book reviewers, talent coordinators, etc. that the signs are the new hardcover. In other words, this is the pool of people we're putting out there to make the rounds in the media, and other people will be covering them and people will be thinking about them at the same time that you are. Meanwhile, aspiring authors should want to see themselves up on one of those signs. They should be framed with appropriate gravitas indicators (marble, columns) and designed by famous artists.

According to Pat Holt, publishers fear that reeducating the audience away from hardcovers is impossible. But I think it would happen quickly if all the major publishing houses unveiled their signs at once with some fanfare and ribbon-cutting. It would be a major cultural event, and would get plenty of free coverage.

The signs would also establish a site for publishers to compete against one another, telegraphing how well they are currently doing, by things like how big their sign is, how well-maintained, how state-of-the-art the display technology, and any other ways of showing off how much money the house can publicly burn on image.

LATE ADD: With the "single timely point" etc. I'm just talking about nonfiction.

Boingboing's current guestblogger Paul Spinrad is currently Projects Editor for MAKE magazine and the author of The VJ Book and The Re/Search Guide to Bodily Fluids. He lives in San Francisco. 

I love the idea of NuRide, although I've never used it myself. Anyone have some first-hand experience? It's a ridesharing system that hooks up drivers with passengers via the web, and it's running now in a few cities. The way they get past the axe-murderer problem is by having participants sign up via their employers or schools. Maybe the reasoning there is that if employees or students do go psycho, at least they'll be traceable?

Two things that would help would be to put it on mobile devices and get rid of the requirements for joining. I expect that when API's for mobile phone services come out, which someone told me should happen within a couple of years, an open system like this will be written that anyone will be able to use. This would mean way more people using it, which means way more rides offered-- and at some point it would reach a tipping point where people use the service casually, without planning ahead, figuring that they'll be able to get a ride back from wherever they are pretty easily. You could just rely on it the way people in some cities rely on being able to catch a cab.

If so, some custom would likely bubble up to make it worthwhile for the person giving the ride, probably some system for estimating gas and toll expenses. As the classic 70's dashboard sticker warns, "Ass, Gas, or Grass: Nobody Rides for Free." (NuRide rewards drivers with gift cards from participating retailers-- maybe they get money or tax breaks for promoting clean air.)

As for the axe-murderer problem, I think it's less of a liability and insurance issue if it's freeware tapping into a publicly hosted database, rather than a single company owning and running the system. And on the user side, I think there are enough people out there who would trust their own judgment whether or not to get in the car. But I suspect that it might find trust and acceptance faster if it started out only running on Blackberries.

I have just a few days left of guestblogging and more ideas than I can fit, so here's a list of some. For all of them, I'm thinking super-short here, just a few paragraphs each, outlining the "and here's why..." part. If you want to read any of these, please post in the Comments, and I'll write them up. Just one reader's expression of interest is enough to put me to work, and if no one cares, I'll pick myself.

A) What is a crackpot?

B) My cynical Public Service Announcement campaign idea to get more people to major in Science and Engineering.

C) Was Jesus a comedian?

D) Guys need a coming-of-age ritual that has some teeth, like exist in other cultures.

E) We need a communications language standard for networked devices, and why this is more of a social/political problem than a technical problem.

F) Control vs. Love: breadth-first, top-down vs. depth-first, bottom up search strategies that work in opposition.

G) Some countries "get" rock 'n' roll better than others.

H) Poetry will become popular again.

I) "Method" acting changed the role of celebrity in all cultural disciplines, starting in the late 1940's.

J) The 6th-8th Century Iconoclast Controversy in Eastern Europe has fantastic dramatic potential.

K) Where there is vice, there is connoisseurship.

L) Laughter and crying serve to carve new cognitive pathways in a hurry.

M) Styles of dress follow people's differing views of human perfectability.

In politics, I think there are two competing motivations for voters to support a cause publicly. One is to influence the majority to agree, to make changes that you believe in, and the other is to distinguish your opinions as superior to most other peoples'. These two motivations generally cause people to act in similar ways, but I've found some "tells" that reveal the underlying elitist motivation:

• Leaving up losing campaign stickers and signs long after the election is over. (I passed a Ron Paul window sign today...)
• Dressing and behaving at political demonstrations in a non-respectful way (partying, trying to "shock people out of their complacency," etc.).
• Saying that it requires superior knowledge or compassion to arrive at the views you hold.
• Saying that it makes you "uncomfortable" or "scared" that a group you don't identify with actually agrees with your view.

Under a democracy, the elitist motivation is self-defeating: If your true aim is to distinguish yourself from the masses, you really don't want your side to win-- your aim is better served when more people vote the other way, and then you can be disgusted with most peoples' stupidity and wash your hands of responsibility.

With religion, I think atheists have the same dissonance going on. If they really think the world would be better off without religion, they shouldn't hate religion and call believers fools. Any successful new belief system must appreciate the beauty of what it's replacing and strive for backwards-compatibility. If Matthew 1:1-16 hadn't explained how Jesus' lineage fulfills the prophecy in Isaiah 1:1-5, it wouldn't have gotten where it is today.

So I put it to declared atheists-- the ones who fly the flag about it, not the ones who are quiet or closeted: Do you think that most of humanity is A) hopeless and doomed to kill each other because of their stupid religious beliefs, or B) capable of coming to and benefiting from your views?

I think closeted atheists who participate in other religious activities are the future of atheism. They know that prayer feels good without a needing brain scientist to tell them, and they know you don't need God to want to feed the hungry, heal the sick, and provide homes for the orphaned. What if they simply stopped reciting the words that they didn't agree with during religious services, without calling attention to it? In many places I don't think they would be kicked out or turned upon and beaten just for that.

An atheism that's well-designed for broad appeal wouldn't need miracles. What miracles do for a belief system is ensure greater investment on the part of the adherent. If something's easily believable, it's easy to take or leave, but doubtful claims require a leap and then ongoing mental maintenance. If a group subscribes to some miraculous claim, it demands shared support, repetition, declarations, indoctrination, etc.-- all of which bind the group together. For a new atheism, the miracle-we-believe function would be served by the question of whether the whole scheme could actually succeed. If the "us" people say yes and are excited at the prospect while the "them" people view it as absurd, that's the identical, effective dynamic.

Meanwhile, I'm putting The Crooked Letter on my reading list-- it sounds great!

Guest blogger Paul Spinrad just some nice leftover pasta for lunch. 

As discussed, language is a lossy compression scheme. I think the most data of all is lost when language is used as a linear narrative, storytelling, to make the generalizations that we call history.

I read Carl Sagan's The Dragons of Eden in high school and haven't looked at it since, but the thing that stayed with me (and I may be distorting here) was his description of how mammalian intelligence originated. While dinosaurs dominated the landscape, our shrew-like ancestors survived underground. The dinosaurs could see and hear over distances, so they didn't need to create persistent models of reality-- they just recognized and reacted. But "we" had to build and navigate underground tunnel networks and rely on internal mental maps of them. Our survival also depended on everyone sharing the same map and agreeing on how to maintain and build out the tunnels.

Today, when we turn this strategy towards empirical pursuits like scientific discovery or engineering, the behavior of physical reality itself helps to keep people in agreement on the tunnel questions, except at the margins. But when it comes to historical or moral "reality," there's no external anchor, and our species fights and dies over its conflicting compressions.

We also develop a primary, exclusionary narrative for culture, which is inevitably influenced by politics. So in a world full of creative expression, we learn formulations like, "after World War II, the center of the art world shifted from Paris to New York."

Last year I was on my bike, stopped at a red light, and saw a busker whom I guessed had no fixed address playing a nice old accordion. I asked him about it, and he immediately told me that he was mentioned on some page of some book-- he actually gave me the page number. Here I was, a complete stranger, and the first thing he tells me is how he's connected into a shared structure that neither of us had anything to do with. Whenever we dig a tunnel, we want other shrews to appreciate it.

Photo from Flickr by cotinis 

Timothy Leary said "The universe is an intelligence test." This line captures the attitude I had well into my 30's (I'm 43), and I'm happy that it doesn't anymore. Around that age, I started thinking more about mortality and failure and accepting their inevitability-- which in turn made me appreciate the preciousness of life. What did I want to do with my time here on Earth? Did I want to occupy myself playing a big version of Solitaire to prove I could win, or did I want to open up and love? Another famous quote began to make sense to me: E.M. Forster's "Only connect."

If it sounds like I'm leaving out a primary actor in this transformation, you're right. During our courtship, my wife Wendy challenged me again and again, with firmness and understanding, to engage with her honestly and completely, no matter what it meant. She led me to the promised land where we could be ourselves fully while delighting in and being committed to each other-- all those things that people wisely recite as their wedding vows. If you want more detail, buy me a beer.

An essential part of this happy destiny is that Wendy is not what I had hoped for, i.e. not simply a hot girl version of the man I wanted to be. I've read memoirs by successful men where the chapter on love runs: "I met the girl who was obviously perfect for me, and then I applied all my power and craft to win her over. It was tough going, and she tested me, but I succeeded." That's it. You learn nothing about her, and the guy seems to learn nothing about himself. Yawn! For some men, maybe the pride of that conquest is enough to keep a fire burning, but given what Wendy and I have now, it sounds like dullsville. When I contrast it to the dynamic collaboration that I have with Wendy, who shares my values but is otherwise so fascinatingly different, I just smile at how much we have to look forward to.

I did want to be famous once-- what if I had succeeded and then used that power to win someone to whom this mattered? I would deny that she was just a trophy based on how smart and accomplished people considered her to be, conveniently avoiding the underlying question of her real role in my inner life: a prop for my self-image. I like to think that I'm deep enough that we may have eventually found true intimacy anyway, but I can't be sure. Considering the effort it took Wendy to bring me out, I wonder whether I would have just lived my entire life in fabulous black-and-white, believing that emotional availability meant simply choosing someone rather than taking the ongoing risk of sharing emotional truth. But mastering the art of surfing the truth together is exhilarating, a connection out to the universe that makes me feel alive. Thank you, Wendy, my love, for saving me from a caricature of life!

Guest blogger Paul Spinrad is not unacquainted with the grape. 

After our distant ancestors developed language, everyone could benefit from the experiences of others. But the bandwidth of speech is so low compared to one's own senses that it required huge compression and decompression at each end of the communication. This process of describing and interpreting was enabled by detailed world models that everyone carried in their heads.

Because these world models vary from person to person, the codec is lossy, and misunderstandings are inevitable. But the imprecision also makes words more timeless and intimate. If the impressions that some words convey to you resonate with you, it's because they are literally built out of the way you view the world.

Words can also lie, but along with interpreting words, we automatically assess the trustworthiness of their source. We can learn not to believe everything we hear, or to distrust certain people, and we can also set the Bible trust level to 100. No such counterpart exists for visual communication-- cameras, television, and Photoshop haven't been around long enough.

That's all background, and here's my point: It seems to me that every so often, the dominant political and cultural machine grows so large and incestuous that it loses its connection to people and makes them feel powerless and irrelevant. When this happens, in the West anyway, there's inevitably a revolution of words, of back-to-basics and idealism, against the image-conscious, superficial, wealth-obsessed Babylon. Because it's based on words, people can place their trust in it fully and spread it, and it will continue to make sense over time. It doesn't propagate through image, might, or personal influence. This empowers people again-- perhaps simply by making them feel empowered.

Big examples are the formation of Christianity and Islam, and the Protestant Reformation. Today we see other fundamentalisms. But the inevitable next one doesn't have to be intolerant and destructive. If we engage with the task of developing it, rather than avoiding it and leaving it to others, it can be a nice one.

Photo of 1522 edition of Martin Luther's 95 Theses, courtesy Wikimedia Commons. 

Boingboing's current guestblogger Paul Spinrad is married 

When my friend John started going to the Bronx High School of Science, he was surprised to find that it contained the same cliques that his former, neighborhood school had had-- the jocks, the geeks, etc. He figured that because the student body consisted of all the geeks taken from other schools, he would only find geeks there. But no-- and when he got to know the school's Chess Team, the geeks among geeks, he saw that they paralleled the same divisions.

Humans and human groupings always seem to break down into the same archetypes, and this also seems to happen at all levels of granularity, from national character to impulses within an individual. Maybe they're the elements from some periodic table of strategies that game theorists haven't yet discovered. Maybe we all intuitively know this table and overlay it with our changing estimations of what niches are open and where we can fit in.

If so, it's a great blueprint for survival, for a group intelligence that reaches into every corner and processes everything. Imagine a prehistoric tribe suffering through a series of cold winters. The conservatives argue to stay, the malcontents argue to go someplace new, the physical risk-takers scout out unknown territories, and so on. Advocates on all sides try to win over the hearts and minds of the people in the middle, who make their own observations and assessments, but also want the tribe to stick together. Consensus is usually found, but when differences become too great, the group splits.

Today, a voter might decide at the last possible minute because they want the most accurate sense of how others will vote. A new Supreme Court justice might go against their prior voting record because they're now in a group where they see new niches that need to be filled. Our programming is simple, but the game setup and ever-changing environment makes complexity grow to the limits of our massive processing power.

I remember an illustration, possibly from my high school biology textbook, of a bunch of ants carrying a chunk of food. It showed that the ants don't all pull in the same direction; instead, they pull in different directions and the vector sum of all their efforts points the way home, to their colony.

And so it is with us. What stories inspire you most? The Lord of the Rings? The Matrix? Hey, I know-- it's that one about the ordinary person who gradually finds out, through a series of eye-opening events, that they're actually a pivotal figure in the great battle between Good and Evil, that everything they do matters, and so they step up to their new-found responsibility.

We like these epic tales because they're true. Our survival as a species (a.k.a. Good) depends on each of us fighting for what we believe in. We all have a different perspective that's valuable to the whole, even when (sometimes especially when) we're confused and undecided. If we aren't true to ourselves and don't think we matter, it diminishes the overall survivability of us all, especially during times of change and new threats.

When disaster does happen, this distributed setup is highly fault-tolerant. Honestly, if 90% of the human population were wiped out today, the rest of us would fill in the gaps and carry on. But two constants, true from a small tribe up to a planet of 6 billion, are that we need each other always, and that we must fight with each other always.

Photo: Margaret Bourke-White - LIFE © Time Inc. 

Boingboing's current guestblogger Paul Spinrad is Projects Editor for MAKE magazine and the author of The VJ Book and The Re/Search Guide to Bodily Fluids. He lives in San Francisco with his wife Wendy, their two young children Clara and Simon, and their cats Ron and Nancy. 

People are always looking do diversify their investments, and I'd like to see a mechanism for directly investing in culture rights. For cultural products that exist already and are protected by copyright, you need to get a specialist lawyer to negotiate with the various offices that handle rights, and it's all opaque. Maybe rightsholders could make more money off of their properties by opening the process up and forming a public exchange.

Not only would a rights exchange make it easier to buy rights for actual use, like for the songs and recordings in Sita Sings The Blues, it would also support speculation. If you know about some other forgotten but amazing recording or movie that you're sure people will want to re-issue, sample from, derive from, or whatever, then great-- buy away, or pool with others who want a piece. Even if you think something is lame but feel many others would go for it, speculate!

A market like this is an obvious idea, and I'm guessing it's been discussed many times, so I wonder what the barriers have been. Some professional rights handlers would lose their jobs-- are they a powerful lobby? Did anyone ever consider using Max Keiser's Hollywood Stock Exchange as a funding vehicle? Rights are more complicated than stocks, but online stock trading sites have figured out easy interfaces for buying, selling, puts, calls, selling short, and other flavors of transaction. Boilerplate is boilerplate.

A culture market would also be a boon to hipsters whose cultural intelligence and breadth of knowledge would suddenly become a marketable talent. Look for the most successful investment funds to be run by comic book / record / video / book store staff.

The exchange could help fund culture that doesn't exist yet or speed its adaptation to more expensive media. Read a self-published graphic novel lately that you think has great potential, but is not well-known? Invest in its movie rights-- you'll be supporting its original creator, and your investment might pay off. We've been seeing lately that Hollywood producers would rather hear "thousands of people already love this story in comic-book form" than "here's a screenplay-- Gail and Tony liked it, so then I gave it to Marty, and he thought it would do well, especially internationally, so then Louise gave it a read and she said it would work with her ending, so then I gave it to..."

I also think the rights market would be a big win for the U.S. No one has or does culture and information like we do: movies, TV, software, games, etc. Whatever the reasons-- I proudly attribute it to our unique mix of diversity, frontier history, freedom, prosperity, first-mover advantage, and infrastructure-- I think our strength in this will endure.

If you own some rights and do a bad job of exercising them, make a lame product, then you lose your investment, fair and square. If a lot of people own a right collectively, then they can hold shareholders meetings to decide things like who should be offered the female lead role and for how much. Unauthorized use or duplication problems might take care of themselves naturally, through crowd enforcement. The all-seeing eyes 10,000 investors who want to protect their property would sniff out and deal with infringers better than some studio legal department, no matter how hyperactive and well-compensated.

Photo: Yale Joel - LIFE © Time Inc. 

Some communications need to be ambiguous in order to work. Like, if you consciously or unconsciously don't like an idea in a meeting, rather than voicing disagreement explicitly, you might exhale slightly or turn away a bit and then see what others do, also consciously or unconsciously. I think this is one reason teleconferencing is difficult. These channels by their nature need to operate at the edges of perception, and unless your A/V is super high resolution, they're blocked. (Eye contact is another conferencing issue.)

The same goes for flirting-- that next glance should have a plausible other function besides showing interest, and no current online representation can convey this ambiguity. There's no "did he just send a winking smiley to me, or did he accidentally push the button while going to pet the cat?" (Although you could design this in by introducing a chaos filter that wiggles the action just enough to provide plausible deniability for isolated events.)

Live audiences bristle with such liminal communications. As an audient, you don't just hear the applause and laughter-- you also pick up on body language, breathing, attention, and emotional state. You're part of one enormous brain that, among other things, is working out the problem of how people in the surrounding culture and at the present moment react to things, and what reactions are and are not appropriate. Live audiences are where we draw our lines.

Productive settings for comedy always need a live audience, even if it's ultimately for television, and the more worked-up and demonstrative the audience feels free to be, the greater the bandwidth of the internal communications bus of audience-performer interaction. Vaudeville, with short bits and a hook to remove bombing performers, is like speed-dating for culture.

Our expectations and habits around being audience members have atrophied ever since movies became popular, but I think live video will retrain us. Movies taught us to sit together and pay attention to a dead, unchanging recording rather than something living and responsive. Symphony orchestras seemingly do their best to imitate recordings, while the audience sits quietly and obediently. Instrumentalists play someone else's cadenza note-for-note instead of doing something unique and current. (Then the symphony development people wonder how to attract younger audiences.)

Writing The VJ Book got me excited about the possibilities of live video, which supercharges the audience-performer communications bus. Digital projectors, fast laptops, and new software let almost anyone improvise and connect the endless palette of visual meaning for large audiences anywhere. You can see great visual mashups on YouTube, sure, but that's a more alienated setting. Like DJs, VJs connect with fellow human beings who are lucky enough to all be together in a particular time and place.

Although there are loads of VJ applications, the genre is still on the commercial periphery. But I'm convinced that some company will do quite well for itself by being the first to introduce a live video app to a broader market and show people its potential. Beyond music and entertainment, it broadens the arsenal of anyone who performs, speaks, or otherwise presents to audiences. Imagine, for example, being a trial lawyer and using live video (is that allowed?) to present your story to a jury, combining your finely honed sense of timing with seeing-is-believing authority.

I think any of these companies could move into the space, and if so, it would quickly become "real" money-wise:

Ableton
Ableton Live already has a huge following among musicians, and Ableton Live Video would extend it to their visualist pals. VJs have already cooked up ways of getting Live to run video. Ableton just needs some of Adobe's expertise in handling video.

Adobe
Adobe Premiere Pro is the standard for video editing and Premiere Express is a fun online video mixing applet, so Premiere Live is a logical extension. Adobe just needs some of Ableton's expertise in building fast, bulletproof performance software.

Apple
Lots of VJs use Quartz Composer, which is bundled with OS X 10.4 and above. If they offered a full VJ app that hooked into QC, it would be another reason for people to switch.

Microsoft
From a different direction, PowerPoint is increasingly turning into a live video tool, and unlike the 3 companies above, Microsoft doesn't have to explain to Powerpoint users why they need presentation software (performance software-- same thing). When Japanese company motion dive surveyed the users of its VJ software several years ago, they were surprised to find that it was mostly used for office presentations by younger business types rather than the club visuals mixing that the software was originally designed for.

Existing VJ Software companies
AFAIK, all makers of current VJ apps are small, often side operations. The ones I know about people using the most are ArKaos, Isadora, Jitter (with MAX/MSP), Livid Union, motion dive, Resolume, Modul8, Touch, and VDMX. Maybe some of the big companies listed above will acquire one or more of these? One sign might be that Numark now sells its NuVJ hardware, based on ArKaos, and Edirol/Roland sells its MD-P1, based on motion dive.

The Light Surgeons performance photo courtesy Barney Steel 

If you're looking for a way to get back to the land and enjoy an integrated life while society collapses, The Shambhala-Shasta Anastasia Eco-Settlement Project has 466 acres of land and is looking for settlers. It sounds nice! I've long fantasized about this kind of thing. Maybe now's the time.

The "Anastasia" in their name refers to the heroine of the "Ringing Cedars" series of books by Vladimir Megre, which came out in Russia during the mid-1990's and started being translated into English beginning in 2004. If numerous websites are to be believed, the series has a large following not just in Russia, but around the world. "Ringing Cedars" refers to the books' claim that when a Siberian Pine tree (sometimes translated as "Cedar") reaches 500 years of age, it becomes a sort of cosmic energy-channeling antenna. And so also rings the New Age BS detector, but please stay with me here...

I read and enjoyed Anastasia, the first book in the series, and I hope to read the rest. On one level, the book is a male midlife-crisis fantasy-- a first-person account of a spiritually empty entrepreneur who finds a stunningly beautiful and brilliant native girl in the forest, and she changes his life forever. Anastasia runs naked, communicates telepathically with animals, is clairvoyant, and possesses vast wisdom that has been lost to modern civilization. She's the "noble savage," and she's also a virgin who fell in love with the author/entrepreneur during a chance previous encounter that he doesn't remember, and she wants to start a family with him ASAP.

What interests me most about Anastasia (and I know I need to read more in the series to confirm/deny), is how it combines deep ecology with traditional, even conservative family values. There's no sense of hippie "alternative lifestyle" in its back-to-the-land message. It honors Christianity and connects with its audience through their experience gardening in dachas (modest country houses) on weekends. It's a container for hard-core downshifting that I sense would appeal to solid, traditional, family-oriented folks. Meanwhile, the book also has some wacky, unexpected ideas that I liked-- for example, the Anastasia character suggests that pollution from roadways could be mitigated by requiring active air purifiers on every vehicle's front bumper.

Websites that sell the Ringing Cedars books also sell products derived from the Siberian Pine-- nuts, oil, and polished slices of the tree to be worn as pendants. And perhaps the initial bolt of inspiration that Megre had, as an inland shipping entrepreneur exploring the Siberian forest, was how to concoct a new religion that would maximize the commercial value of this common regional tree. A 5 gram pendant (slice of branch on a string) costs $4 plus shipping.

Furthermore, according to the cult-watching Center For Apologetics Research, Megre was forced to admit in 1998 that he made the Anastasia stories up, whereupon psychic healer Olga Anatolevnya Guz began to claim that she is the real Anastasia.

But people can change, eyes can open, and how one comes to create a belief system doesn't reflect on the value it contains. Buddha abandoned his wife and baby son in order to pursue his own spiritual journey, but he turned the deadbeat-dad guilt that he must have felt (although his family was rich, so less damage done) into a philosophy and practice of non-attachment that countless people, including myself, have found valuable. There are numerous paths to insight. (But I've also talked to single women in San Francisco who are sick of all the passive, "hey, babe-- no attachments" Buddhist guys.)

So, Siberian Pine products aside-- not that I've tried any-- the Anastasians seem to be onto something constructive, and although I don't think I'll be joining them, I am "rooting" for them.

I'm thrilled to be guestblogging here and looking forward to learning a lot. I have many half-baked notions that I want to share, mostly in areas I'm fairly ignorant about, and so I am thankful for the opportunity to drink from the firehose of boingboing's collective knowledge. There are many books I haven't read in areas that I'm interested in, even ones that everyone else has read. The Wisdom of Crowds comes to mind here. I can't think of an online community that I'd rather tap into for diverse knowledge and pointers, and by the end of my two weeks I'll have an amazing new reading and check-out list.

Another thing I want to do is process ideas for a new belief system, something like a new religion or philosophy, that will be beneficial to all and resistant to being corrupted. I think people are ready for the next level of consciousness, taking more responsibility for human behavior-- not through some passive mystical transformation, but through actively assembling an empowering and resonant outlook that grows out of the major existing belief systems, fulfilling their prophecies wherever possible, but taking them into a new direction. Let's try!

That's a tall order, I know, but I believe it is possible-- many of the pieces are already here, and the timing's good. As above, I can't think of a better group to noodle on this with. I hope to gather whatever time and ideas you can spare. It's a good cause.

But I've been enjoying it at boingboing for so long, thanks to everyone's participation, and I don't want this to be just take, take, take, all about my needs. I do have fun links and other stuff that I'm looking forward to sharing. But honestly, the regulars here are hard to scoop. So many of the wonderful things I know about originally reached me through them!

How do I know the Boingboing gang? In the mid-90's, I submitted the short piece "Do Not Mate With Gentle Vegetarians" to Wired magazine for their "Idées Fortes" section. It wasn't a good fit, but it somehow got to Mark, who emailed me later to ask if he could use it for bOING bOING DIGITAL. Yay! A couple of years later I began working with Bob Parks at Wired, which introduced me to David and Cory, and Mark pinged me when he was looking for writers for the experimental first issue of MAKE. Later, when it turned out they needed more staff to produce the magazine quarterly, I told Mark that I was looking for a job-- lucky timing! I love it-- the Makermedia folks are a uniformly fantastic and nice group, and I really believe in what we're doing, and that it's making a positive difference. I feel very fortunate.