Everything That Happens Will Happen Today
We saw this first with Radiohead’s
“In Rainbows”, a pay what you want model that
was overwhelmingly successful in terms of conversion
(despite the fact that Radiohead refuses to give
data on sales, know that this first experiment was
very successful). Radiohead was followed up
by NiN with a truly original offering,
which saw Reznor & Co. offer their fans a
variety of bunled offerings - everything from 9 free
tracks to digital ownership ($5), to digital +
physical ($10), to value add offers including blu
ray discs and signed LPs, costing upwards of $250
for the most expensive offer. The effort by NiN was
hugely successful and embraced by a music industry
hungry for a new method of music delivery and
discovery beyond the colluded offer of traditional
radio and the impersonal presentation of traditional
physical retail. Check out some great google
maps screenshots
here that demonstrate
the global potential brought on by self-distribution
and disintermediation.
As for the Eno/Byrne collaboration released this past Monday on Topspin’s platform - I would say I am pleased with the outcome, though not floored. “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts”, their 20 year old previous collaboration is the far more challenging and diverse of the two albums, infused as it is more by Byrne’s 80’s-infected instatiable pop rhythm than Eno’s more reserved and electronically (over)-produced soundscapes and sonic curiosities. That said, the album is hugely important as a defining mark towards artists owning their relationships with fans, instead of handing off their rights to corporate behemoths. To be sure, songs like “Life is Long”, and “Strange Overtones” represent Byrne and Eno at their very best. For those interested, the digital album costs $8.99. The CD and the digital album together go for $11.99. For the deluxe package, including a film about the album, it’s $69.99.
The Exhausted West?
In particular, I find his Harvard Commencement Address speech in 1978 to be one of the most perceptive critiques of Western Society. Many of the questions he poses I think have yet to be resolved, even 30 years later. One of his more probing assertions is that Western Society, which was founded upon the notion of a “pursuit of happiness” has come to define that pursuit, rather narrowly, as the desire for physical objects or “well being”.
Notions of right and wrong, according to Solzhenitsyn, have been trumped by the freedom of the individual and the ascension of the legalistic framework of his society. But does “the law” ipso facto define moral standards or does a suspension of legal precedence exist in a higher ethical realm?
Solzhenitsyn can be heuristic at times, if not downright prophetic in the manner typical of the Russian literary tradition, and his assessment of US foreign policy and the anti-Vietnam movement comes across as outdated. Compelling, however, is his criticism of Western journalism, which is supposed to represent the highest mark of freedom in our society.“An oil company is legally blameless when it purchases an invention of a new type of energy in order to prevent its use. A food product manufacturer is legally blameless when he poisons his produce to make it last longer: after all, people are free not to buy it.”
In my view, journalists have an unwritten duty to society to provide an in-depth depiction of the truth, yet that obligation has largely been sidestepped by a more pervasive concern surrounding ratings and what I call “news as sports”, less about informing people than about entertaining their every whim with pornographic pop culture pizzaz.“Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 20th century and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press. In-depth analysis of a problem is anathema to the press. It stops at sensational formulas.”
Solzhenitsyn puts the blame of what he calls “psychological weakness” and “spiritual exhaustion” on a fundamental flaw in the humanistic tenets that our society is founded upon, namely the notion that mankind in a natural and free state is good and rational, and that only a flawed society will corrupt him. He clearly sees the disease as endemically related to the core of our system’s fundamental belief in the freedom of the individual. I would say, instead, that morals and ethics are strongly tied to the notion of collectivity, which in our society at least is often displaced by individualistic priorities such as material possession and status. In other words I don’t necessarily think individual freedom is inherently problematic, but when coupled with a system that more or less ignores the importance of social duty, the higher ethical spirit of man is diluted.“a selection dictated by fashion and the need to match mass standards frequently prevent independent-minded people from giving their contribution to public life. There is a dangerous tendency to form a herd, shutting off successful development. I have received letters in America from highly intelligent persons, maybe a teacher in a faraway small college who could do much for the renewal and salvation of his country, but his country cannot hear him because the media are not interested in him. This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, blindness, which is most dangerous in our dynamic era.”
In almost half a century, more than 30 million of Solzhenitsyn’s books have been sold worldwide and translated into some 40 languages. In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature.“If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it. It is imperative to review the table of widespread human values. Its present incorrectness is astounding... Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism.”
New Shower Device
Anyway, we have completed patent, prototype design and extensive product testing and we’re now at the stage where we are working to take the product to market. We’re in talks with mass market retailers as well as the upscale spa and hotel market. To help refine our understanding of the product I have developed a comprehensive concept test that I have now built online. If you’re reading this, please check out the survey at lavitashower.com. It takes no more than 3 minutes to complete and would helpe us tremendously. Also, if you can forward it on to a few people, I’d be much obliged.
Thanks, and I will keep everyone posted.
The Longing
Every day I count the states
of mind, fragile and endless
the states, built up like burnt plaque
the forest fire echoes through the tundra
and the quiet trembling harlequin winces
Every day I count the states
7 of them to be exact
slammed together by borders
where glue trickles down in the form of rivers
and the heart drips like an archipelago
my tongue a peninsula for your aqueous,
open mouth
Every day I count the states
Texas bulges like a fat cowboy
a stomach the size of El Paso
and an appetite that grinds the heartland
and churns out the savory sediment of rebellion
rolling down the rio grande
Every day I count the states
fraught with urgent letters
spelling out names of cities
like corpus christi
the body a pale entity
breathing in topography
like oxygen, fingers tasting
the papered method,
the lay of the land
Every day I count the states
Arizona sparks the orange based
silhouette sometimes wearing a purple cloak
so hard to look past the transparent
superhighway of Phoenix,
flying toward Albuquerque,
the marsh land waiting with wet
anticipation, your moist palms
the dearest things
Every day I count the states
Maddening outbursts of spitfire
Louisiana and Mississippi
Tank topped and alive
nose in mouth and the cantankerous
rickshaw twiddlin' my message
with lackluster echoes
bouncing from inside the spittoon
Every day I count the states
of shattered love, the ghost of you
somewhere in my voice, crawling out my mouth
in the crudest form, the veins of your skull
shining through shoe polished countryside
shining through trailer land, and Alabama
glistening with the sweat of your mind
the rind of your cerebrum tasting how
hunger must feel
Every day I count the states
7 of them to be exact
the states of mind, caught in between
rubbing up like a prickled backscratch
fighting the flaring sirens of
interspersed distance.
Somewhere down below
the pacific floods inside the atlantic
down there in panama
but for my blood
i must count the states
perched in mental holograms
the finest memory
just a bleached out
corollary of your
alabaster artifact.
Nine Inch Nails Album Is Free Online
For the second time, Nine
Inch Nails has released an album off of its website. The newest album, titled
"The Slip", is entirely free. Says Reznor on the
site, "thank you for your continued and loyal
support over the years - this one's on me." This
represents the first time an artist has
distributed an entire album without providing
fans any opportunity to pay for it. The
development is particularly exciting for me as I
have been working directly with the technology
team in developing a spin-off closely related to
"Ghost I-IV" and "The Slip".
test
I also think NiN embracing "free" is a very wise move, given the particular climate of the music industry. Earlier today, a friend expressed curiosity at the new release: "What is the business model?" I would call the business model community relationships 2.0, one in which the model is fundamentally based on built and fostered trust between artist and tribe following. Reznor already proved that he can cater better to his fan base than any major record label could do in the old model, by allowing fans to pay anywhere from nothing to $300 based on their individual loyalty, audiophile status, and economic flexibility. Given that he raked in over $1.7 million on Ghosts, it seems like the perfect strategy to reward fans for sustaining his model. We are quickly shedding the mentality of music as a one-for-one commodity, into one where music begins to gain value precisely because it is free.
The Slip is being released with a Creative Commons license. Stay tuned for my review of the album...
Change Congress
Stanford Law Professor and founder of the Creative Commons, Lawrence Lessig, is starting a new movement aimed at reducing corruption in politics. Lessig's contention is that the fundamental obstacle preventing political change is not a misunderstanding or disagreement over policy, but instead a lack of transparency and, therefore, accountability. Because campaigns are privately financed, our candidates are able to take money from lobbyists and political action committees and often do out of lust for power. The obvious problem here is that these candidates are no longer solely accountable to the American people that elect them but are forced to compromise their supposed duty to their constituents by returning favors to those special interests that helped elect them. The ultimate result of this is a lack of trust in government, manifested by consistently low congressional approval ratings that today stand at 23%. Lack of trust, of course, leads to two even more profoundly detrimental trends: apathy and disengagement.
Lessig's project, Change Congress, will aim to establish a wiki-style watchdog movement that will seek pledges from elected and running officials in terms of campaign finance, with the goal of reducing the influence of lobbyists, PACs and earmarks. Ordinary citizens will be called upon to hold their representatives accountable and to upload their own political pledges for reform, so that like-minded candidates can link up with like-minded citizens. It will be interesting to see whether or not Lessig can galvanize a community around building an application which has as its sole function a kind of use-value and utility that members of the web 2.0 community are unfamiliar with. Social media applications have rarely been centered around the idea of political utility, but instead are more often centered around more hedonistic or voyeuristic value propositions. So, yes, you can build a site that enables people to upload home movies or pictures, or allows peers to keep up with their ever growing network, and these applications have tremendous value in terms of creative collaboration and social utility. Lessig is asking whether that social energy can now be leveraged into political activism.