And then it occured to me – that this is a pretty good visualisation of a creature of the New-Economy. I’m sure there are other species as well – evolving in the primordial soup of bits and bytes, but as a simple example, this is pretty good..

At the top you have The Lure. The honeypot. The Cube-Grenade. The viral bit that zings around the internet passed from peer to peer. The object that is the catylyst for conversation. The most effective device for doing this right now is video… but it can be anything that gets people to say to other people, “look at this”. Music. Pictures. Stories. It all works.

The next bit is the payload. This is the thing that is exchanged for money (or whatever). These are your products. If you are good (or lucky) this bit will allow people to participate more intensely in the conversation started by the bit above… in fact the more you can blur the first two stages the better off you are. Even thinking of it in terms of “Lure” and “Payload” is slightly counter-conversational… but I think they need to be kindof separate though… otherwise you’ve got “all conversation, no income” or “no conversation, no income”

The long tail at the bottom is the community. These are you conversationalists – the people that care enough to comment. If you’re lucky they will buy your stuff. If you’re lucky they will link/copy/embedd your stuff. If you’re lucky they will polinate your next generation with the new DNA of criticisms/suggestions.

This creature rarely if ever lives on a single machine – it’s distributed across the web… and it rarely if ever exists as a single entity – but belongs in a web of inter connecting others, which could be visualised like this:

So you need your competition. They are part of your conversational memosphere and part of your gene-pool.

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The reason the entertainment industries are in trouble is because their honeypot and their payload are the same physical thing.

So they’re eating their own tail – their fanbase, who’s function it is to replicate and share The Buzz as widely as possible. The most devout of these people are (more often than not) musicans/writers etc themselves. The recent news that pirates buy more music than everyone else should only come as a suprise to people who are living in a bubble. Which of course many of the more powerful of them do deliberately, because it is their job, or to hide the fact that they haven’t been doing their job.

The purpose of the entertainment/culture industries in the 20th century… the value they created was to allow the rapid global sharing of culture (and if it’s not shared, it’s not culture) – the manufacturing, the distribution, the metadata. This was the problem they solved.

The environment that gave them a problem to solve no longer exists… so they are attempting to write it into law. They have become the problem that they once solved.

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This isn’t our problem though. Our problem is: We have allowed corporations to become too big and too powerful.

Edible cloth versions of photographic microplanets:
(from)

Ok, they’re not edible – unless you’re a goat or a baby, which is apparently who they’re designed for. Babies I mean. Kids.

If they were designed for people who might not try to eat them, you could make them even better by making the planet bit out of furry velcro stuff and the trees and cars and whatnot having prickly velcro bits on their bases. Then people could make their own things to stick onto them. Maybe. Alternatively you could have a metal-cored ball and neo-magnets.

Or a lego one. You could play spherical chess. The world’s your oyster, face it. Go forth and multiply and stop wasting my time. I’m busy. Call me back when you need a flood or a plague or something.

In fact for some reason they’re more engaging… there’s something about a commercially produced movie that makes me think “Oh, right. It’s you. Everything you do has an agenda, and I can’t really believe anything you say”.

eg: this:

Which really is a piece of work… A (or at least B++) List Hollywood stars, fantastic production values etc… I mean really, this is very, very good…

… but I feel like I’m watching an advert. Part of me (my brain) switches off. “Oh right. No matter what happens, you’re going to tell me a load of deceptive shit about your “product”"

For some reason I don’t get that with these Etsy videos – they seem more authentic, and the weird thing is, they’re selling these:

Why would I find those more interesting than a BMW? Because I don’t know what’s going to happen next? Because I’ve become hyper-sensitive to the emotional subterfuge that every, every, every corporate advertising campaign employs?

All these offspring of Edward Bernaise?

Maybe this is no longer the Century of the Self. Dear God, I do hope so.