events
The cyborg impresario
How great was Tim Maly’s month of cyborgs? I liked it not only because I like Tim, and not only because I like, um, cyborgs; I liked it because it seemed to play into the events-as-future-of-media model, and to deepen it. It seemed to suggest a new way of both producing and presenting ideas.
Bruce Sterling said this about Tim’s undertaking:
[It is] a project with an extremely heavy science-fictional tinge that is in fact quite remote from science fiction. It lacks the look, feel, extrapolative techniques and sense of wonder payoff of science fiction. There’s no fiction in it, and it has scarcely a whiff of science. Basically, it’s a large clique of obviously intelligent and creative people who all more or less know each other through the Internet, and are all loosely riffing about cyborgs, and what-cyborg-means-to-them. A cultural artifact of this kind could not have existed without collapsed barriers-to-entry in publishing.
And it’s not even dull, fannish, or self-indulgent. It’s a little overwhelming in its volume and its focussed erudition, but it’s a very readable and illuminating “project” (whatever a “project” is). Certainly it’s far more interesting and gets much more to the core of the matter than, say, a commissioned science fiction anthology titled “Cyborg!” which might have had fifteen science fiction stories about cyborgs. Even if they’d been great science fiction stories by top sci-fi authors with lots of gosh-wow and plot twists, they wouldn’t have torn into the depths of the subject in this remarkable way.
Emphasis mine; I think that line sets up such a revealing comparison. It ought to make anybody in the anthology business pause and ask themselves if they’re using the right tool for the job. It makes me think, for instance, of New Liberal Arts; how might that project have been different if we’d thought of it as a slow-burning event—an internet-powered lecture series—instead of as a static body of work that we rushed to complete and then release whole?
And maybe this is noteworthy, too: I read perhaps 25% of all the cyborg posts. First of all: that’s a way better ratio than any anthology I’ve ever picked up. Second: maybe this is an important new technique! You want to get an idea out into a big, busy world? Don’t just take one shot. Instead, refract the idea through dozens of different minds; send it ricocheting through dozens of different niches. Blast it out like grapeshot. Modernist poetry fans? We got ya. Kanye West fans? We got ya.
It’s not just grapeshot across, like, idea space, either; it’s grapeshot across time. Stringing the project out over a whole month gave Tim and all his contributors more opportunities to talk about it. It gave readers more time to discover it and get excited about it.
And now that it’s done… it’s done. There it sits, almost book-like, waiting to be discovered and consumed by curious passers-by. Flow becomes stock.
There’s a lot to chew on here if you’re a media maker or a media inventor. I’m eager for a post-mortem from Tim himself; I’d love to know, from his perspective, what worked, what didn’t, and what surprised him.
In the meantime, here’s Alexis Madrigal’s capstone to the project: an interview with the man who coined the word cyborg in the first place. Click over for the context, and stick around for the kicker; I guarantee it will make you smile.
The future of media? Bet on events
What if the magazine article of the future, the album of the future, and the novel of the future are all the same thing?
And what if they’re all events?
Start here: TED is one of the surprise media successes of the last few years, but not by chance. Their insight was that a conference can be a machine for making media—media that can build a big audience on the web. They invested in media production, and it paid off.
But TED is just a starting point. They’ve done a remarkable job, but—this always happens—it’s almost too big at this point. Too homogenizing. You could squint your eyes and recognize a TED talk by its red-blue glow. And—snark aside—it has a real weakness.
To understand it, get out of Long Beach and head into the woods north of San Francisco. Last month, Laura Brunow Miner invited a small posse of photographers out for a long weekend that she called Phoot Camp. Like TED, Phoot Camp produced a lot of media. Like TED, it’s now reached many more people online than it ever could have in person.
But here’s where Phoot Camp has an advantage. TED is an act of recitation: smart people stand on stage and explain the amazing things they’ve been up to. Phoot Camp was an act of creation: things came into the world that would not have otherwise. (And really, if nothing else, you ought to go peek at some of them.)
I’m making a big deal out of it, but I guess it’s a simple difference. TED is a conference. Phoot Camp was a workshop.
Hold that thought for a second.
The great virtue of events today, in the dawning 2010s, is that their value seems durable in a way that the value of super-abundant copies of digital media does not. They provide “embodiment,” to use Kevin Kelly’s taxonomy—and that’s something you can still charge for.
Now, media companies do actually get this! There’s a reason the New Yorker Festival exists. Ditto the Atlantic’s Aspen Ideas Festival. Media companies sponsor and produce events all the time.
But the 2010s demand more than that.
First problem: None of these events have become machines for making media. I mean, yes, there are videos of the New Yorker Festival that you can watch online. But the event is designed and produced primarily for the people who attend. It’s no Phoot Camp.
Second problem: Even if these events all get wise in 2010 and bring it TED-style, they’ll still just be recitations. What we need are generative events. Here’s why.
A specter is haunting the internet, and I think it’s even scarier than the challenge of getting people to pay money. It’s the challenge of getting them to pay attention. I think it’s only going to get worse—which is to say, better, because we as internet users and blog readers and tweet slingers will have more cool, weird, interesting stuff to look at all the time, and it will just keep coming faster and getting cooler and fragments and—ack!
In this environment, I think generation beats recitation. I have a whole meta-riff on this—in some ways it’s as much a moral case as a practical one—but really, more than anything, it’s just that media is already full of recitation. So, for the moment, I think you get a real competitive advantage if you can show and share the process of creation. It’s an opportune time to make music without a mask.
So! If you’re suiting up for battle in this Hobbesian media world, and you get to bring a weapon, I think the event is the weapon to carry. Now let’s actually design it.