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RyanHoliday.net - Meditations on strategy and life
Blog

How Not to Think About New Media

Here are two examples of exactly how NOT to think about new media:

Violet Blue files restraining order on Wikipedia Vandal

BlueCollarorDie.com Goes out Business (with a staff of 15 people)

If you take Tyler Cowen’s parking ticket parable totally of context, it makes sense here. He said that government diplomats (when they had blanket immunity) from countries with illegitimate governments received exponentially more parking violations than their colleagues from democracies and republics. The thinking is that if you got your position from somebody who killed their predecessor, you don’t really have all that much respect for “the rules.”

All this is pretty typical for how people think (and fail) online: They don’t legitimize “context creators” enough to bother learning how they work. Stuck in a distribution paradigm, they assume the burden of discovery is on the customer. Lastly, they can’t keep overhead low enough to compete with people who do it for fun. Why? Because their whole careers have been about exploiting distribution monopolies and exclusive access to the press.

That’s exactly how NOT to think about new media. Regardless of how you go where you are (or how you plan on getting there), the people that made “the rules” now have an enormous amount of influence. And you don’t have any leverage over them. Wikipedia is the number 1 place for finding information about bands, above Myspace and their own homepages. You better fucking learn the rules.

BlueCollar didn’t do it. “What could be so hard about making a website?” So they hired 15 people, filled it with the stuff not good enough for TV and figured people would like it. To their credit, that’s a working strategy in the rest of the entertainment industry. When distribution is a limited, 90% of success to getting distributed. But it’s like they didn’t even both to realize that NO OTHER site has that kind of payroll. It’s actually even more embarrassing for Violent Blue. She doesn’t have a generation of tradition to hide behind.

It’s way easier to figure out the rules and their loopholes than to get mad and act like your above them. That’s what Seth was saying, the web doesn’t care.

The wrong way to think about new media is “how can I get it to do what I want?” The right way, just like Alinsky was saying, is to think “How can I work within the system to accomplish what I want to accomplish?”

That gives you one crucial task: Figure out how the system works.

July 23, 2008by Ryan Holiday
Blog

What I’m Reading

The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash: My Life, My Beats by Grandmaster Flash (not everybody famous deserves a memoir)

Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture by Joseph Heath (nice counter to Klein. adbusters having a shoe is the most hypocritical thing I have ever heard)

Winning at Retail: Developing a Sustained Model for Retail Success by Willard N. Ander (basically a book about being “the best in the world“)

The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian by Robin Lane Fox (really long but really good. solidifies a lot of what I read in primary texts but didn’t understand)

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days by Jessica Livingston (the Steve Wozniak one and the one from the guy that started Gmail are the best)

A Short of History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson (still above my level but I like it)

When Humans Extend Rights to Nonhumans (NYT) is really creepy and almost a word for word recreation of a scenario I remember Richard Dawkins writing about in one of his books.

This is me and I also agree with all the tips here.

July 21, 2008by Ryan Holiday
Blog

You’d Think…

You’d think that if by the time you were 21, you’d worked for four New York Times’ bestselling authors, helped sign one of the biggest bands in the world with the digital strategy you laid out, a major player in Hollywood had asked you to leave school to work for him, made enough money to totally support yourself, talked daily with the CEO of a publicly traded company and if sometimes if you decided to really push your luck, you could call up the greatest strategist since Machiavelli for advice, that maybe your parents would have done more than just “come to terms” with the person that you are.

You think maybe you wouldn’t be so angry. That you wouldn’t have to be so quick to turn on people before they turned on you. You’d think that veering slightly from the routine (10-2am daily, 20 miles a week minimum, 2.5 books) might be a source of anything other than anxiety. You’d hope to hell that the high of fitting in double days would last more than a few weeks.

Me: I think I know why I’m so depressed today.

Gf: Why?

Me: Nobody validated me.

Gf: That’s not very good reason to be depressed is it?

I doubt you’d ever say that. And mean it. And know exactly when you’re due for a crash…the day after something good happens. You wouldn’t ever think you find yourself at the top of the stairs to your girlfriend’s apartment and wonder why you did any of it at all.

But here you are.

It will never be enough. May I never be complete. You never fill that hole. Not this way. So if more is not the answer, where does that leave you?

“You’ve wandered all over and finally realized that you never found what you were after: how to live. Not in syllogisms, not in money, or fame, or self-indulgence. Nowhere.

Then where is it to be found?

Through first principles. Those to do with good and evil. That nothing is good except what leads to fairness, and self-control and courage and free will. And nothing bad except what does the opposite.

Meditations, Marcus Aurelius

July 17, 2008by Ryan Holiday
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“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” - Murakami

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