"There's no such thing as harmless entertainment."
-"New Young Gods", The Book of the War, 2002. (Ed. by Lawrence Miles.)
-"New Young Gods", The Book of the War, 2002. (Ed. by Lawrence Miles.)
Friday, February 28, 2014
Podcast: Free Music and the Industry
If the player hasn't embedded properly, the original mp3 is on Dropbox here.
This was all recorded in one eleven-minute take, with myself, Stephen and Alex all having read the articles I bring up concerning the issue of free music within the music industry. I mostly bring up topics of discussion here, while they provide the commentary and I occasionally play devil's advocate.
Our referenced articles were, alphabetically, In Defense of Free Music, Recording studio on your laptop could make you a rock star, Steps every indie artist should take to lay a solid career foundation!, and The Future of the Music Business: Farewell to Free.
Sunday, February 9, 2014
My Answers to Those Four Questions
1. There are a lot of examples of the medium being the message for me (the entirety of The Stanley Parable springs to mind), but the easiest to express is one of the tenser moments of the computer game Deus Ex. For background, Deus Ex is regarded as a masterpiece of gaming and was the game of the year in 2000 for taking a market dominated by mindless marine vs. monster shooters and a graphics engine practically built out of packing peanuts and creating an epic globetrotting cyberpunk spy-thriller. It was one of the first FPS games where characters lied to you, political and philosophical debates feature heavily, you could approach problems through multiple playstyles, and it was possible to finish the game as a total pacifist. It received two sequels, the first infamous for being dumbed down and the second being the popular game Deus Ex: Human Revolution. The original can still be bought online at Steam and GOG for 7-10 dollars.
Without saying much more, it's enough to say that there's a point in the story where you and your brother, Paul, are in a hotel room and lots of powerful people with weapons are coming to take you away. If you're knocked out by them, you're moved to the next part of the game. Paul's heavily wounded and tells you to leave, and there's a window you can escape through before they find you. You eventually end up being caught either way, and Paul ends up dead as a doornail. But, although the game doesn't tell you this, it's possible to save Paul by helping him fight through the hotel and get to the other side. It's incredibly difficult, and plenty of people don't notice because they don't understand how interactive the medium is, and think that there's a developer who simply made saving Paul impossible, and that he's just destined to die. Understanding the freedom that an interactive medium gives you is the only way to escape a lose-lose situation without losing everything.
That entire section (and the graphical quality of the year 2000) is shown in the playthrough below.
2. Phones definitely act as an extension of my voice. I suppose I could call word processors an extension of my writing hand, but I write and type with different hands. All technologies effectively act as an extension of my brain, in the same way that my voice box communicates what I'm thinking in audible language and my feet convey my body to places I want to go. In that sense, search engines are my digital feet, and recording software can act as my electrical vocal-chords.
Not to get caught up in an aside, but one idea that Accelerando puts forward is the "metacortex," a big ball of digital information that an individual can access, but that has to be separate because it's so much more information and performs more functions than their brains are able to. Basically it's a personal Cloud of all of the information you take in. And it's so crucial to people that at one point in the book, the main character loses the technology he uses to interface with his metacortex, and forgets who and where he is. Perhaps in the future, we'll all end up being extensions of media instead of the other way around.
3. I engage in the global village by having discussions about whether or not there's a canon in Doctor Who with people who live in the U.K. and Texas. Or, more professionally, I've engaged by editing and anthologizing the work of dozens of authors from around America and beyond. In fact, one of the best, Mike Jansen, is Dutch, and I'd never have spoken to him or any of those other writers if Wordpress, Duotrope, Outlook, Smashwords and Microsoft Word didn't exist.
4. I'm a determinist at heart. It's tempting to point to, for example, the Betamax losing against the standard VCR as an example of people deciding for themselves what technology to take in, but it doesn't matter which one they chose, because they wound up with the same basic technology either way. It's not possible to uninvent technology, and when new technology comes up in competing forms, people are free to choose one, but they can't just choose neither. No one rejects a new technology, even when it's something arguably redundant like an iPad. It's simply the way that progress works.
Of course, this kind of thinking also comes from my own, possibly pie-in-the-sky desire to live in a transhumanist future and see a technological singularity in my lifetime. I'd like to think that, although a lot of popular culture's overplayed, bland and meaningless, we're forced to progress no matter how hard some people try to stay in the dark, and that everything's going to be changed by that next genius development, just around the corner.
Without saying much more, it's enough to say that there's a point in the story where you and your brother, Paul, are in a hotel room and lots of powerful people with weapons are coming to take you away. If you're knocked out by them, you're moved to the next part of the game. Paul's heavily wounded and tells you to leave, and there's a window you can escape through before they find you. You eventually end up being caught either way, and Paul ends up dead as a doornail. But, although the game doesn't tell you this, it's possible to save Paul by helping him fight through the hotel and get to the other side. It's incredibly difficult, and plenty of people don't notice because they don't understand how interactive the medium is, and think that there's a developer who simply made saving Paul impossible, and that he's just destined to die. Understanding the freedom that an interactive medium gives you is the only way to escape a lose-lose situation without losing everything.
That entire section (and the graphical quality of the year 2000) is shown in the playthrough below.
2. Phones definitely act as an extension of my voice. I suppose I could call word processors an extension of my writing hand, but I write and type with different hands. All technologies effectively act as an extension of my brain, in the same way that my voice box communicates what I'm thinking in audible language and my feet convey my body to places I want to go. In that sense, search engines are my digital feet, and recording software can act as my electrical vocal-chords.
Not to get caught up in an aside, but one idea that Accelerando puts forward is the "metacortex," a big ball of digital information that an individual can access, but that has to be separate because it's so much more information and performs more functions than their brains are able to. Basically it's a personal Cloud of all of the information you take in. And it's so crucial to people that at one point in the book, the main character loses the technology he uses to interface with his metacortex, and forgets who and where he is. Perhaps in the future, we'll all end up being extensions of media instead of the other way around.
3. I engage in the global village by having discussions about whether or not there's a canon in Doctor Who with people who live in the U.K. and Texas. Or, more professionally, I've engaged by editing and anthologizing the work of dozens of authors from around America and beyond. In fact, one of the best, Mike Jansen, is Dutch, and I'd never have spoken to him or any of those other writers if Wordpress, Duotrope, Outlook, Smashwords and Microsoft Word didn't exist.
4. I'm a determinist at heart. It's tempting to point to, for example, the Betamax losing against the standard VCR as an example of people deciding for themselves what technology to take in, but it doesn't matter which one they chose, because they wound up with the same basic technology either way. It's not possible to uninvent technology, and when new technology comes up in competing forms, people are free to choose one, but they can't just choose neither. No one rejects a new technology, even when it's something arguably redundant like an iPad. It's simply the way that progress works.
Of course, this kind of thinking also comes from my own, possibly pie-in-the-sky desire to live in a transhumanist future and see a technological singularity in my lifetime. I'd like to think that, although a lot of popular culture's overplayed, bland and meaningless, we're forced to progress no matter how hard some people try to stay in the dark, and that everything's going to be changed by that next genius development, just around the corner.
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