Nine Inch Nails and the Mad Pulp Bastard

FROM THE DEAD THINGS MAILBAG:

Bill Cunningham writes:

Since this whole Story2Oh Facebook debacle, the whole argument made by the "new media" types was that "people want transparency so they don't feel like they are being used to sell things."

To that, I have to point every last stinking one of them to this:

http://www.42entertainment.com/yearzero/

This is 20 tons of cool that is wrapped in both the digital and real worlds. Interactive, intriguing and oh yeah, calls "bullshit" on the whole transparency argument. I am going to have to study this further. It could take my espionage series to a whole new level of "story."

Absolutely, spot on, Bill. I remember bumping up against some Year Zero stuff in the last little while, and not knowing exactly what it was, but knowing it was really cool. It works on a level beyond. Kind of like that weird spate of Val Kilmer face graffiti that appeared on walls around Toronto last year.

The convergence of art and new media is going to happen. It's just probably not going to happen anywhere near Toronto, or with many who attend CaseCamp.

The cautionary tale remains, creatives: before you get into bed with some marketing type, be sure to kick the tires. You don't want to wind up having 2003 arguments in 2009/10...

F*%%tardery, and the Creative Gap

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Brave New World (Not Fully Distributed Yet)

OR...THE PRECISE MOMENT FACEBOOK STARTED TO SUCK. (FOR ME.)

THE BEST WAY I've heard all the head-scratching over "how do we approach storytelling in a digital medium" described was in this quote from William Gibson: "the future's already here. It just isn't fully distributed yet."

The music business sucked for years -- offering a warmed over product at too high a price point -- before Shawn Fanning came along and blew it all to hell.

And the person who is going to make the first jillion on the killer storytelling ap on the 'Net is already out there, right now. Maybe they're only four or five. Or maybe they're rounding out their angry teenager phase. But I'm pretty sure they're out there.

One of the obstacles to change, though, is always going to be those who simply don't get it. I kind of completely despise these people. No, let me remove the qualifier. It hate these people.

They're the same people who sniff at any change like removing Classical music from a public radio service barely anyone listens to. They're the people who whine whenever a handheld camera shot graces the TeeVee, whether the shot is motivated or not. They're the ones who immediately dismiss any music they aren't immediately familiar with as 'noise.' They're the people who reacted violently when they made Starbuck a girl.

And apparently they got shirty with Jill Golick last night.

If you've been following Jill's storytelling experiment, story2oh, you might have known about the two experiments she conducted earlier this year -- a combination of social networking profiles and wall posts on Facebook, and video podcasts, twitters, and other methods used to move a story along that wasn't quite performance, and wasn't quite narrative. It melded real and unreal. It was pretty neat.

Last night, Jill presented her findings at Casecamp. And a few people were...well, upset to learn that -- omigod -- some of the people who "friended" them as part of Story2oh were fictional constructs.

That was kind of the point.

Most people got it.

But a few didn't. And in classic fucktard, "I don't get it" fashion, they waded in and got all the story2oh characters deleted from Facebook this morning.

Game over.

Jill has a very evenhanded and philosophical take on the thing over at the story2oh site.

It’s sad because it was fun having them on Facebook and using Facebook for storytelling way back in January was a really effective way to communicate with the audience. But even by early March when we ran the second experiment, Facebook was already too crowded an environment and we did very little storytelling in that venue.

It seems to me that early this year, Facebook took a strong cultural shift. Instead of being an underground play space it turned into a business must-have. People are serious about and on Facebook.

I made a rather large boo-boo in not taking this cultural shift into account. Some of the attendees had gotten friendship requests from Simon and Ali and were upset to learn that imaginary people were rubbing shoulders with them. I did apologize to them, from stage and again in person — rather profusely in fact. But too little too late apparently.

If any of them are reading this, I do apologize once again and especially the woman with dark hair who questioned me from the audience. I would have sent flowers this morning if I knew who you are.

Jill is, I guess, simply a better person than I am. Because I'm not as sanguine about the whole thing. A culture defined by the uptight is no culture at all.

The future is already here. But luckily, we've got plenty of fucktards ready to keep us from fully distributing it.

Idiots.

or should I say...Idiots 1.0.