Ken's Blog

I’m fascinated by the way creativity within any one individual is triggered by interaction with other individuals. For example, You might encounter somebody and subsequently convert the emotional energy of that encounter into a play, poem, song, painting, sculpture or novel.

What I find most intriguing about this process is that the other person does not need to directly contribute in any way. Our human to human interaction can simply inspire one of us to rise to the occasion and create something new in the world — which in some cases may end up being shared and appreciated by millions of other individuals.

To be the muse in this situation is perhaps an odd thing. It may be gratifying to be forever associated with such creations as “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” or “Walk Away Renee” or “Famous Blue Raincoat”, but as the muse you haven’t actually flexed your own creativity — you simply helped that process to happen in the mind of another, through some mysterious alchemy of human interaction.

On the other hand, I find it absolutely wonderful that we can have this sort of transcendent effect on each other — that our encounters with another can suddenly lift us out of the every day and give us a voice that can touch the hearts of millions.

This evening somebody raised a topic I’ve heard from time to time: As our cyber-puppets — such as the creatures you can see these days in computer games and electronic musical instruments — become ever more autonomous, will there come a point when we lose control of them, and of our own creative process?

My take on it was that there is nothing to worry about. Every time you see an entity in a computer that seems autonomous, it is actually an illusion. That “autonomy” is in fact a reflection of the creativity and ideas of one or more people, although they may be people that you have never met.

Just as theatre is a collaboration between actors and a playwright (through the medium of a script), and a guitarist collaborates with the luthier who made her instrument, so it goes with computer mediated procedural performance.

As a dancer interacting with an autonomously animated human-like figure, or a jazz saxophonist accompanied by a program that improvises counterpoint to your melody, you are always actually collaborating with other humans.

There are many variations on this. It could be that there are many other humans on the other end of that collaboration, and it could be that your collaborator is long dead. Still, in all cases the computer itself is merely an instrument, designed by people to channel human thought, emotion and creativity.

One day quite a few years ago I went to the corner Korean deli and purchased a tin of sardines. I didn’t think anything of it at the time (this was back when I was still an omnivore). It was just one more random purchase among many.

But then, that evening, feeling peckish, I opened the can, and something very odd happened — I smelled a smell I’ve never experienced before or since.

And then time seemed to jump forward.

In particular, I have no memory whatsoever of the several minutes after those first moments opening the can. My very next memory is of furiously scrubbing the floor, the sink, and every nearby surface, while the tap remained open full blast, although the contents of that can had long since been flushed down the drain.

I am pretty sure that what had happened was this: The contents of the can were not just “bad”, they were very, very bad. The moment I opened the can, the aroma of some sort of anaerobic bacteria had hit my nostrils.

And that was the moment at which ancient life-preserving instinct swung into action.

I suspect that there are certain deadly smells that our ancestors became quite sensitive to, through a process of Darwinian selection. In other words, if you were not highly sensitive to those smells, you would die, and leave no descendants.

So I have first hand knowledge that the right sensory stimulus — for example, a particular smell — can cause us to immediately cast off the thin veneer of our recent evolution, and become a creature of pure instinct, focused only on the deadly serious process of immediate survival.

So many people
Gathered together, and then
Scattering like leaves

In the spirit of yesterday’s post, last night a friend issued a two word challenge. I needed to spin something out from the words you see in the title of this post.

The following is what I came up with.

-KP

_______ 

MacDougal Street at 3am was quiet as a ghost. Stray trash littered the street, and stray thoughts littered the mind of Bobbie Sue as she strode from Third Street down to Houston, scowling, hands thrust in her pockets. She was late, and Draco didn’t like when you were late. Not when he was finally gonna let you deal some smack.

So the last thing she wanted to see was Eddie in his green hoodie, standing in the middle of the street.

“Hey, yo, Bobbie Sue, what’s shakin’?”

“Can’t talk Eddie, gotta go, got a connection to make.”

“Can’t you slow down for an old friend?” He smiled shyly — the same shy smile that had drawn her in all those months ago. Before she’d gotten wise.

“Man, really no. Business is business.” But even as she said it, she felt herself slowing, coming to a stop.

He looked serious for a moment. “You hangin’ with the punks these days Bobbie Sue?”

“None of your damn business,” she snorted. “You gonna get out of my way or what?”

“It’s just,” he said, “I’ve got something for you in my pocket…”

“Jeez Eddie.” Why the hell had she even bothered.

He dug into the pocket of his hoodie and took out an orange, “… and I thought you might wanna share.”

She gave the orange a long look, and then she gave Eddie an even longer one.

“Yeah, OK.” And for the first time in ages, she smiled.

This evening I was discussing with a friend a fascinating idea for a game.

Each of you gives the other two words. With the two words you are given, you need to spin out a tale, which can be fantastical, moving, suggestive, ridiculous, or heart-breaking. It’s entirely up to you.

The important thing is that you use those two words as random seeds to fan the fires of your own imagination.

What I like about this game is its perfect reciprocity. Each of you is providing the sand for the other’s pearl. Neither of you has any control over the spark that will light the flames of your creativity.

As games go, this one is pretty good.

There was a time, not that long ago, when it was easier than it is now to make a movie at modest cost, and maybe even turn a profit. But those days appear to be gone.

Young people nowadays seem to have no qualms about watching pirated downloads of new releases. If you try to question their ethics, they can just shrug and say “it’s all freely available”.

Which may account for the precipitous rise in recent years of the Hollywood special effects blockbuster.

The economic logic of these big budget films is unassailable: The only way to lure young people into theaters is to create visuals that are so spectacular, they need to be seen on a giant screen.

The one remaining defense against the attitude of “all films want to be free” is to make a movie that can’t really be seen at home.

In the early 1950s, the idea of running commercials on free television broadcasts really hit its stride (although the first television ad in the U.S. actually dates back to 1941).

Now that content can be delivered asynchronously over the internet, the entire premise of broadcast television may be on its way out. Once people can watch a show whenever they want — and in particular, can skip over ads — subscription models, like the one employed by Netflix, may be the only commercially viable alternative.

Which in a way would be sad, because commercial television is a pure example of something difficult to achieve: A perfectly progressive tax.

When you watch television shows that are paid for by ads, you “pay” with your time. Whatever your time is worth, that’s essentially what it costs you to watch.

For example, somebody who is earning the current U.S. federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is paying approximately twelve cents to sit through a one minute TV ad.

In contrast, Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, who earned $77,000,000 in 2013, is essentially paying about $640 to watch that same one minute spot.

It makes sense that this perfect form of progressive taxation emerged with the rise of the middle class in the U.S. after World War II — a time when the American Dream was truly becoming a reality for a large percentage of the population.

Of course, we now live in much different times. These days, if you are born poor, the pretense that you have a fair shot at merit based success has become a grim and unfunny joke, at least in the United States. For millions of citizens, just the crippling cost of paying off loans to get a college education is placing that dream hopelessly out of reach.

How fitting that one of our most perfectly progressive forms of taxation seems to be heading for the dustbin of history.

Today I was on a transatlantic flight coming back home from Europe, and I got to talking with the pleasant young man sitting in the next seat. He told me that he is in the U.S. Army, stationed in Germany, and now traveling home for a brief leave.

A few minutes later we were joined in our row by a young woman, and we all got to chatting, as people do. She said she is originally from Hungary, had been working in Germany, and was going to spend a few months in New York.

At some point the soldier asked the young woman what she did for a living, and she explained that she is a professional model.

Whereupon I blurted out, with genuine enthusiasm, “Wow, cool, a soldier and a model. I get to sit next to two action figures!”

Fortunately, they both thought this was funny.

Thinking back on the discussion these last few days, I’m thinking that invention and impact are radically different things. You can be the person who first invented something, and yet your invention by itself may have very little impact. If your goal is to have impact, then you need to work on maximizing impact.

And I’ve come to realize that the discussion about who did what first, on a technical level, may be nearly irrelevant when discussing the adaption arc of the Oculus Rift. Their major accomplishment lay in how they led the conversation.

Various VR “solutions” have been around for quite a while, but until now nobody managed to convince the entire game development industry that a credible consumer level platform would be arriving within a year. And the way Oculus did this was particularly brilliant.

They not only made a highly plausible platform, but then they sold development kits for the same low price that a final product would cost. Keep in mind that if you only make a few thousand of anything, your per-unit costs are far greater than if you make millions of something — often by an order of magnitude or more.

So it looks as though they were subsidizing their dev-kits, spending capital from their investors to create the illusion that the product was already a mass-market item.

It worked spectacularly well. Thousands of game developers bought the dev-kits at low cost, and then collectively spent perhaps a billion dollars to build various games. So the idea that “this is the commodity platform of choice” became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

At least in this sort of commercial space (building a new platform), the key is not just to spend money. It’s to get lots of other people to spend their own money.