Ken’s Blog

If you start a company, you can say: “We are creating a company, and if it is successful, then we will make money.” That’s a perfectly reasonable thing to say, and it’s probably correct. Yet it misses an essential truth.

Suppose instead you say: “We are creating a company, and if it is successful, then what we are doing will be self-sustaining.” You are still describing the same endeavor, but now you’ve shifted the emphasis to a far more useful description of the process.

After all, the purpose of a company isn’t really to make you money — although it might end up making you a lot of money. The purpose of a company is to generate value in the world in a way that is self-sustainable.

Your company is in the business of providing a product or service. If people find that product or service to be useful, then they will pay for it. The revenue generated by that customer demand allows your company to keep going. The product or service thereby becomes stable and self-sustaining. Everybody wins.

Note that if you get greedy and take too much money out of the company to give to yourself, then the company can stop being self-sustaining. Such a short-sighted strategy might win you more money up front, but in the long term everybody loses, both you and your customers.

We sometimes reflexively associate capitalism with greed. Yet capitalism, when done properly, can create good in the world.

My recent trip to Canada got me thinking about Canadians and hypercubes. I realize that may sound like an odd association, but I have empirical evidence to back it up.

When I visited Montreal a while back, and had the good fortune to get a tour of the National Film Board, I saw a large mural drawn by Norman McLaren himself — the pioneering and enormously influential animator. In fact, the building I was visiting was named for him.

As part of this mural, McLaren had drawn a line, then a square, then a cube, then a hypercube. Essentially, a progression of “cubes” in successively higher dimensions. And then he continued the visual sequence on to even higher dimensions.

I was reminded of this mural when I visited Autodesk in Toronto. One the many brilliant people who works there is Jos Stam — a genial giant, and the genius responsible for some key computer animation techniques you see in movies.

On the wall outside his office, he had drawn a line, then a square, then a cube, then a hypercube … continuing onward to seven dimensions. When I met with him, I meant to ask him whether he had seen McLaren’s work at the NFB. But once we got to talking, our conversation quickly wandered to so many topics that I completely forgot about my question.

Interestingly, I have my own association with Canada and hypercubes. Back in 2010 I built one of the first things I ever made on a 3D printer, during a summer I spent at the Banff Centre for the Arts.

It was a zoetrope of a tumbling hypercube. In a way it contained five dimensions, since it expressed four spatial dimensions plus time. Here is the blog post I wrote about it.

Maybe easier access to higher dimensions is just one of those Canadian things, like their easier access to affordable healthcare.

Here in New York City, I gave a talk this evening to a very large audience at NYU Shanghai. To them it was morning, since there is a 12 hour time difference between our respective cities.

The talk went very well, and I used my interactive Chalktalk program throughout. The audience could see my face and hands, and they could also see pictures I was drawing, and watch those pictures come to life as I described various ideas about the future.

What was cool to me about the process was that I was able to use an interactive style of presentation, from halfway around the world, that mimics what ordinary conversation might be like in the future. One day we will simply draw in the air as we converse, and those drawings will spring to animated life, in ways that today would seem completely magical.

I believe that this future way of communicating will help us to bridge the gap between talking in person and talking with people who are far away. As advanced technology enables even casual language is able to become more visual, we will experience some of the rich and expressive interactions over great distances that today we share with people who are in the same room.

After all, this planet of ours is really very small and fragile. Hopefully these future ways of communicating will help to remind us just how close to each other we really are, and maybe that will help us to view people in other parts of the world with greater kindness and empathy.

As I have conversations with very smart people about the effects of advancing media technology, I am starting to see a pattern to the conclusions we draw. Essentially, there are two orthoginal dimensions.

On one dimension lies the ever-advancing course of technology. Over time, we develop new ways to express ourselves, to communicate and build culture. A while back there was moveable type. Then came radio, cinema, television, the Web, and SmartPhones, with wearables just around the corner.

On the other dimension lies everything that is intrinsically human, and that will always be human: Love, hate, loyalty, jealousy, tribalism and betrayal. The entire panoply of human experience has existed for millenia, and nothing about our modern technology can move it by even an inch.

It is an apparent contradiction: The ever evolving landscape of new forms of technology-enabled expression on the one hand, and the unchanging landscape of the essential human condition on the other.

I don’t think of this as something negative. Rather, I find it heartening that we continue to be who and what we have always been.

It tells me something very important: Regardless of where the twists and turns of ever evolving future technologies may lead us, we will always be recognizably human.

The analogy between the Trump campaign and A Face in the Crowd was never perfect. “Lonesome” Rhodes presented himself to the public as a sweet, benevolent force. Only those who knew him in person were aware that he was a shallow, power seeking narcissist.

Trump’s strength throughout this campaign has always seemed to be that he could, in fact, publicly present himself as a shallow, power seeking narcissist, and many people would still support his candidacy. It was a kind of super power.

But it seems that Trump has finally reached his “Lonesome” Rhodes moment. His recorded private comments in 2005 were so sickening, so out and out hateful and demeaning to women, that a line is finally being drawn.

Now it is coming out that he enjoyed walking in on naked 15 year old girls against their will — and publicly bragged on the Howard Stern show about his power to do so with impunity — it’s possible that the trend will accelerate. People who were holding their noses until now will flee from the sheer stench of it all, in ever greater numbers.

And not a moment too soon.

I’m in Canada at the moment, and the view from here about our upcoming election is one of complete disbelief. They see one candidate who is highly qualified, and another who is … well … there are no words to describe it.

When people here ask me how a person like Donald Trump could get so close to the White House, I have no answer for them. Frankly, I have no answer for myself.

It feels to me as though there is some sort of sickness in the American psyche that we are working through. Hopefully that sickness will run its course, and we will get it out of our system. But it is indeed unnerving that we are even as close as we are to making such a bizarrely self-destructive choice.

Fortunately Trump is doing everything possible to lose this election. As far as I can tell, he’s given up on running against Hillary Clinton, realizing that he is hopelessly outmatched. Instead, apparently, he’s decided to run against Bill Clinton.

Which makes about as much sense as anything else he’s done.

Today I got a great idea for a tribute band. Our band would do only cover versions of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. Nothing else — just that one song.

Except that we would do it in every conceivable style: Blues, Bossa Nova, Calypso, Country, Death Metal, Doo-wop, Dub, Folk, Funk, Fusion, Gospel, Goth, Grunge, Klezmer, Lounge, Motown, New Wave, Polka, Prog Rock, Psychedelic, Punk, Ragtime, Rap, Reggae, R&B, Rockabilly, Ska, Soul, Swing, Techno, and of course Zydeco.

Our interpretations would fill entire albums. Eventually, this thing would grow beyond us, to become an ever-expanding movement. People all around the world would spontaneously start to host their own Hallelujah parties, raves, concerts, even theme parks.

Entire channels on YouTube would be devoted to new and exciting interpretations of Hallelujah. This could be just the beginning of something really big.

I think it’s a great idea.

Recently someone has started attempting to comment on my posts, with a point of view that most readers of this blog would think of as a “hate agenda”. By that I mean something rather specific.

When you group together any large segment of the population, be it women, or jews, or blacks, or whatever, and take the position that you hate the lot of them, that’s a hate agenda. You are willfully ignoring the fact that you are speaking about a diverse set of individuals, and you are therefore essentially attempting to deny their very humanity.

The next step — which this would-be poster has eagerly embraced — is to then start making up or spreading nutty hateful untruths about the group they’ve chosen to victimize. I suspect that the person who does this sort of thing probably knows, on some level, that all their accusations are false. After all, it’s easy to check actual facts.

But when we deal with hate agendas, we are also dealing with an extreme form of confirmation bias. The Holocaust denier never even glances at the enormous body of evidence documenting genocide. Similarly, the mysogynist and the racist scrupulously avoid looking at any and all facts that would put the lie to their nutty theories.

Whatever drives such people, it is coming from some deep psychological place, perhaps a place of pain, that seems to be beyond rational discourse. Therefore I have come to the conclusion that there is nothing I can do about people with hate agendas.

Except, of course, not let them use my blog as a forum.

This morning we took a huge chance and did a live demo, in front of a very important audience, of something we had never before demo’d in public. And it worked.

Going into it, I was feeling a lot of anxiety. When you do something for the first time, there are a lot of things that can go wrong. And the things that actually go wrong are just about never any of the things you thought might go wrong.

But thanks to the work of a number of very hard working people, the demo actually worked. And the highly technically literate audience was clearly surprised and delighted that it worked.

That kind of reaction is often an indication that you are on to something important. I think we might be on to something important. 🙂

So much of what passes as public discourse about “the history of technology” is false. Most people in the field know it’s false, but there’s not much they can do about it.

When you tell anyone in the press something you know to be true about that history, but which is generally at odds with the prevailing “story”, you can be pretty certain that what you say will not be reported. If you are speaking to a reporter on the phone, what you say will not make it into the article. If you are doing a television interview, those parts will get edited out. Believe me, I’ve been through it many times.

I don’t think that this is because reporters are trying to not be truthful. It’s more that they don’t think it is their responsibility to correct incorrect history. It’s simply not something they think of as part of their mandate.

Which is why it was wonderful today to seew Brenda Laurel get up in front of a group of young people at the Weird Reality conference and give an accurate history of the relationship between interactive narrative and evolving media technology.

She didn’t say anything that would be controversial to someone who actually knows the true history of this stuff. But many of the things she said would not have been heard before by the young people in the audience, if they had heard only the conventional wisdom — the version that “everybody knows”.

Some of those young people, noticing the disparities between what Brenda said and what they thought they knew, might even look it up afterward and realize that her accounting of that history was accurate. That would be nice.