Dynamic Hypocrisy

Big Data says Kevin Spacey is a beloved and crowd-favorite actor. Netflix reaches out to Spacey for their original show “House of Cards.” House of Cards’ pilot rated well by a wide demographic spread. Citing that big drama thrillers involving murder and mystery score high with many people. 

For Netflix’s next hit, they go back to Big Data, and find that Kevin Spacey is still beloved and a crowd-favorite. Spacey is locked in for their next hit in 2018’s “Embassy Detective.” He plays a tough-nosed international detective solving crimes ripped from today’s Buzzfeed headlines. Jennifer Lawrence guest-stars as a season one mastermind villain because statistics show that Jennifer Lawrence rates highly when she’s plays tough-nosed characters.

For Netflix’s next show, Big Data says that people enjoy surprises like when Jennifer Lawrence guest stars in shows like 2018’s hit “Embassy Detective.” So Netflix’s next show is a gritty sketch show with an ensemble cast. (Stats show that people are fatigued from drama thrillers, but still love grittiness.) Every episode features a surprise guest ranging from well-loved Andy Samberg, recent host of the Emmy’s, and crowd-favorite Kevin Spacey (slated to be next year’s host of the Emmy’s.)

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
—Henry Ford

The greatest and easiest danger in applying deep trend analysis to creative categories will always be forgetting to be creative in asking questions in the first place. Always asking the same questions will lead to repetitive and imagination-poor answers. 

So the challenge to data scientists in creative fields will be how imaginative can they ask their questions? 

As opposed to asking who will be a popular actor for a particular show, maybe ask if an episode needs to be 23 minutes?

What are audience tolerances for 90 minutes (films), 12 minutes (Adult Swim cartoons), 30 seconds (Vine)? 

What sort of trend analysis could have predicted the seven millions views for the 11 minute “Too Many Chefs?” How can you slice the data in unorthodox ways to frame experiences that audiences will find refreshing or novel or just plain interesting? 

The ease of tools doesn’t magically make a sculpture better by virtue of it existing. It still requires work and content to be invested into the artifact regardless.

I’ve been working on this as of late. I have an anxiety of stillness. If there was a pond, then I would be very tense that soon something will fall in. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, of course because nothing really stays still. So my unchecked mind will go “See? You are justified in continuing to feel tense.” 

The drawbacks are why I’m starting to work on it. It’s exhausting. It isn’t fun anymore. 

I used to feel like a detective. Feel like the climax of a mystery when all the clues start rolling in. 

“Ah, that’s why I was worried. It was [X]. Or it was [Y]. Cool, what’s the next thing?”

And so I’m working on it. Therapy has been great for this. Admitting that it was bigger than me was a hard hurdle. Took several years to get over that hump. But it’s approaching three months now, and it’s monumental. 

I was fortunate to find a professional that matched my mental temperament. The other half was being open to the process. (I would have easily dismissed much of the work and tactics before.) 

But of course, this is an ongoing process. I have a session tomorrow, but right now I’m having an episode. Writing about it in the process is difficult. I checking Twitter, checking Spotify, checking texts as if I’m dodging a moving spotlight. 

But shining the light is first step. Writing about it is a hope that I’ll remember. That I can anchor this to to a point in-time, and not have to start from step zero every time. Will it work? 

I don’t know, but it’s worth a try because I’m very tired. This anxiety has me very tired. So I’m going to keep working on it. Good night for now.

So I’ve been thinking about space travel. In the future. Like way future.

I’ve been keeping a general idea that consistently the slowest bottleneck in any technology is the humans. Typing is slow. Waiting for a cab driver is slow. Having to eat is slow. 

And in space travel, the human body is slow. And large. And high-maintenance. You need water and food and exercise to keep a body going.

So what if we didn’t have bodies? That we just had an image of our brains connected to the ship itself? It’d take up a lot of virtual space, but then all you’re really carrying is a giant flash drive. No need to maintain the biology of a physical body, but you get the brain to capture the experience. 

No weight, no bulk, no slowness.

Which reminds me of viruses. These things are just floating capsules of RNA. When they happen to land on a biological creature, it dives into its nucleus, and uses the cell’s own machinery to make copies of itself. 

And if the creature dies, it just keeps floating along until the next thing that comes along. 

It’s light, it survives almost any environmental condition, it doesn’t need any like eight glasses of water a day or exercise. It just floats.

Like we would inside our giant flash drives. The ultimate biomimicry of life: surviving and living by copying something that isn’t really alive itself. 

It feels like the most successful tech companies has an one-two punch. And everyone keeps focusing on just the first punch. 

Amazon with its commerce tech allowed people for the first time to trust online shopping, and became the behemoth that it is today. One of the Apple’s early decade winner was the iPod. Your music library in your pocket. Netflix toppled the video rental store with its DVD delivery system and now streaming service. 

But these are all one-punches. 

The two-punch of these companies is far less flashy and visible. Their recommendation systems. Their algorithms to be personal and aware and “intelligent.” 

Now the two-punch is easier to ignore because honestly they’re all in their infancy. “Oh you like cop dramas? Here’s another ten.” “Did you just buy spatula? How about another spatula?” 

But this is where non-tech companies can leapfrog these tech firms. 

People have lost sight that name-brand fashion represented more than a quality fabric, or cultured awareness. But used to be symbolic of a relationship between designer and client. The value came from the designer being knowledgeable about the world of we exist, but also of their clients’ world and body. 

Shapes, colors, and flow that fit the bodies of a person. Knowing that the needs of a tennis player playing is fundamentally different from having to sit at a three-hour dinner party. 

We’ve started to do body scans to get fitted suits. But that is such a nascent phase to be in.

Imagine not just fitted clothing at scale, but informed awareness at scale. Not just letting you pick pink, or specify a color, but a knowledge algorithm that tells you that actually violet is best if you going to wear this next spring. 

Access to the “Gucci Engine (beta)” will be $95 per outfit, please have your credit card ready.

“Sometimes young boys on Facebook send me rape threats, so I’ve started telling their mothers,” journalist Alanah Pearce tweeted.

Pearce, always getting rape threats on her articles and pieces, had decided to look up some of the commenters. She realized that a number of them were young boys, not even adults. Suddenly, the specific relationship and power dynamics between writer and commenter shifted. It clarified into a fairly routine interaction: child is rude to an adult, the parent intervenes, and the child gets into trouble and learns a lesson. 

Anonymity has been one of the touted benefits of the internet for a long time now. Allowing for free and unfettered expression from individuals that may have never thought they could say something aloud. It’s allowed for protest and discourse in places that would have punished heavily for such actions.

However, it’s also removed the day-to-day consequences of social norms that regulate a safe society. Normally, you can’t just yell in a group of people, and expect no negative feedback to stop. Nor harass someone within their space 24 hours a day. 

But with the internet as it is, you can. You can form limitless identities and accounts, and have access to people’s attention around the clock.

There’ll be a shift though. As we, all of us, are using the internet more-and-more and contributing and participating—it’s an ever-growing component of us, our lives, and our identities. We will have to start connecting our virtual selves closer to our physical selves. We will start needing both positive and negative feedback about our actions whether online or off. 

In the process, we hope to eliminate the traditional biases that plague our current offline selves like bias against appearance or location or nationality. But that shouldn’t stop the need to remove a bit of anonymity to create a sustainable global community. 

When I think about tradition, I inevitably go back to 2010 when Conan O’Brien started his late night talk show on TBS. The NBC debacle before that is well-documented, so I won’t go recap that. So I’ll start at that spring when he was officially ousted, and started his live tour. It was complete departure. He played instruments, he was touring like a stand-up comedian, no more late night desk, no ties. Even with his Simpson’s writing stint, and time at SNL—this was different, and unconventional.

So when TBS announced that they were picking up his show, that summer was exciting. Not just because he had “recovered,” but I didn’t know what he would do. Seemingly, he had all the leverage in the world. Between “Team CoCo” and the general public, people showed that there was an appetite for his “weird” comedy. Now on cable and momentum, would he get weirder? More outrageous? More unconventional?

Turns out, not really.

Before the show debuted in the winter of 2010, my buddy and I imagined what the show could be. Would he axe guest interviews? Would he go full skits and sketches? Would he go into more absurdism? Would there be animation? Conan seemingly could have done anything. 

And yet in the end, he maintained every trope of a tv late night show. A monologue, an interview, a guest band, an in-house band, and all neatly segmented into a 60-minute show. 

I was disappointed. I knew how weird he could get. I saw how freeing a cable show could be. But what I didn’t see what his admiration for Johnny Carson. I forgot how many comedians and writers grew up striving to be just like the man behind that desk. I neglected how many of those same people treated it as an institution to be maintained. 

So it took me a while to process how Conan, writer of something like the “Masturberating Bear,” would be in the same mindset. And that when given the freedom to do whatever he wanted, he would choose to do the most conventional possible thing. And how he would consider that to be not short-sighted or disappointing, but as the greatest achievement for his comeback and redemption. 

Let’s put a Wi-Fi chip in your brain. It’s on all the time, every day of the week. 

And you can use all the apps you know. So if you want to schedule lunch with Bob, you can just your brain to send a request. And Bob can do the same. 

Now post something to Reddit. Ask “Should I make chicken tonight for dinner?”

40,032 people say “Yes.” 23,012 people say “No.” 9,045 people say “Make tofu instead.” 1,023 say that “chicken is unethical.”

You make chicken tonight.

Now go to the bank, and ask “Should I rob this bank today?”

34,012 people say “Yes.” 31,387 people say “No.” 4,505 people say “Maybe.”

You rob the bank.

When the currency changes hands. This triggers a global voting session: “Should you get punished for robbing a bank?”

6,012,342,001 people vote yes. 1,669,382,923 people vote no. Everyone else abstains.

The police track your location, and a call an Uber taxi to come and  arrest you. Your jailhouse, sentence duration, and parole hearings are automatically determined by the time you get in the cop car. 

Crowdsourcing.

Today’s topic is a weird one to me. If only because the thing I question is the very thing that I’m a part of.

I’m a product of an fairly expensive private college education. I graduated out of 2008 into a recession, and got lucky. Real lucky that I happened to be tech literate and had design skills. It let me land into a stable creative industry with a valuable digital advantage. I’m still benefiting from that to this day.

I also wouldn’t have traded my time in college for almost anything. It was a time where I met life-long friends, learned good lessons, and questioned many things about myself. All for the better.

And yet I find myself critical of the very system that I praise. 

There was a narrative I grew up with: you go to college, and you can get a better job at a better salary. 

And I think that was quite true for every generation up until mine. Because a few things happened in my time: 

1. Saturation of degrees. High school is no longer adequate. The undergrad degree is now de facto. (Heck, even a Master’s is becoming commonplace.)
2. Saturation of white-collar jobs. 

The second one is the prickly observation in all of this. It’s an ugly implication. It’s says that there’s finiteness where we presumed infinity. It says that we have excess, and that some efforts were wasted. It says people will get a bum deal. 

But that’s what I’m seeing. We’re in a strange time where 30-year industry veterans are competing for the same job as a 22-year old with no experience. It’s uncomfortable for everyone. 

It feels like we’re reaching a saturation point for the “thinking industry.” True startups are rare. And there’s only so many projects that need consultants or planners or strategists. Only so many TV commercials and performance pieces that need people to brainstorm on. 

And that might be the new narrative moving forward. One where you tell your kids, “Hey, I do truly believe you can become anything you want, but the world will need 1,041 plumbers in 2034 because Bob is retiring that year. Just sayin’.”

Social studies 7th grade: The Fertile Crescent. 

That whole lesson was great. Agriculture, irrigation, cradles of civilizations; all lovely topics.

But what really blew my mind back then was the idea of specialization. That some could just farm while others just hunted and others just raised children. (-ish, of course.)

I think a lot of that concept when I look at our current world.

Like how right now, ebola is spreading around the world.

And some are really panicking. While some are really apathetic. While others are just annoyed with the first two.

But that’s really interesting. Especially the question of “are enough people panicking at right at the right panic level?” 

Of seven billion people, should we all be panicking? Or is six billion enough? Five? Three? One?

We’re reaching a saturation point of people where we can specialize in panicking, and at even panicking at specific and different things. 

We have people panicking about ebola. Others about the flu. Others about obesity. Others about leaked celebrity nudes. Not all of us, but some of us. And that’s okay. Just like how not all of us have to farm anymore, not all of us have to worry about J-Law.

Just some. 

Can you imagine when we truly truly specialize, and get real granular?

“Hey, what do you do all day?”

“Oh, I like to panic about the potential Christmas shortage of Batman movie action figure toys. Just the Batmobile though. I might transfer to The Joker in a few years, but a job’s a job, amirite?”

 

Elon Musk just revealed “Autopilot.” A “four-sensor” system to self-drive his electric cars. A combination of radar, camera, sonar, and satellite GPS. And it got me wondering is that enough to overcome malice?

A lot of war history is a game of cat-and-mouse. You start using planes, I improve radar. So I do that, so you improve radar blocking. You do that, so I improve artillery to destroy that. Then you improve that, and I bypass this, and so on.

So what if I can trick your sensors? Can I fake out your sonar, and make your car veer suddenly? Can I deform your GPS signal ever so slightly? Can I make your car think can a tree is actually an open road? 

What if I can do this without ever leaving my house? What if I can operate a low-flying drone that leaves the crime scene before anyone can respond? 

Not that I ever would because you know, the technology isn’t there yet…this is all science fiction, right?