In Cannibals and Kings, Marvin Harris talks about differences between expansive and collapsing cultures. He said that it’s not too hard for a king to convince his people that massive parities in wealth are a good thing but that it is nearly impossible – in fact no culture has ever managed – to be convinced that being killed and eaten is of mutual benefit. That’s why Europe took over the world, and the Aztecs never got any further than temples. Working someone else’s land is one thing, he quipped and committing suicide is quite another.

It’s funny because that’s exactly where Hollywood is right now. For a while, I think, it made sense to pay your dues and learn the system instead of a trade. You start as an assistant, get shit on, get taught nothing and finally replace the person above you who knew nothing. The business is office politics, not making movies. The cultural conditions made that possible, in the same way they encouraged serfdom, imperialism, cannibalism or centuries of stagnation.

But people my age face a very strange fork – there is a decent chance that buying in is agreeing to be eaten. Holding back is risky too, how many people would pass up a shot at a 300% annual bonus?

I heard a pretty major film producer this morning begging the support staff to do his work for him. Go to the clubs, he said. Gossip. Chase the hot writer and keep track of what everyone else is buzzing about. Then hand it off to me so I can take credit. Nothing about finding something they loved. Nothing about doing something new or participating. Nothing even incrementally different than what he’d done twenty years ago.**

At this point, people my age would be safer betting on social security. Superempowerment is very real and very scary. When you base your business on arbitrage and the inefficiency goes away, intensification only makes the problem worse. That means being a little better that the producer I talked about earlier (who is actually awesome, did one of my favorite movies, and I have tons of respect for) is not a strategy – it’s immolation.

Think about it this way, yesterday a fresh wave of interns showed up for their first day of work at Bear Stearns. We like to laugh at the quaint servants who buried themselves alive in the tombs of their Pharaoh’s. Well? Do you want to be that person?

I don’t. I certainly don’t know the solution but I can’t imagine their better first step than state of mind.

** Then there are people like TheExecutive, who don’t whore themselves out and do better than fine. They never wedded themselves to a system, so the landscape today didn’t come as a surprise. They help people. Give people time to grow. They actually give people credit (literally, credits.)

And yet I find

And yet I find

Repeating in my head

If I can’t be my own

I’d feel better dead…

From a business plan I am writing for one of the Agency’s clients:

Wikipedia, in the last 7 years, has racked up nearly 2.3 million English-written entries. There are over 300,000 entries each in German, Spanish, Italian and French and a 100,000 in Finnish, Romanian and Turkish. When you include sub-pages, user profiles, templates, tutorials and discussions the number rockets to nearly a 100 million aggregate pages. And the average article is essentially indistinguishable in terms of accuracy when compared to any for-profit publication. This seems overwhelming, if not impossible to replicate when you imagine that they were written by amateurs sitting in their living rooms. What this ignores is that as its base Wikipedia rests on the bedrock of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, which fell into the public domain and was absorbed into the site. Also incorporated is the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography, W.W. Rouse Ball’s Short Account of the History of Mathematics and Chamber’s Cyclopedia, among many others. Wikipedia was seeded by professionals.

Communities cannot be willed into existence. Communities need more of a reason to form than superior technology. Almost every massively successful community can be traced back, not to the owner, the technology or the genre, but to a group of incredibly passionate users at the core of it.

Businesses almost always have that. They sit dormant in cubicles or overwhelmed with soul-crushing office politics. And the only reason they fail in the transition to the web is that they cannot unleash those assets. Remember, corporations are incapable of love but individuals are full it. Top down businesses continually stagnate on the internet because no one is willing (or allowed) to get down and dirty and do the work.

So what if someone took the pro’s and had them start at the bottom just like everyone else? What if you had the ‘best in the world‘ as your 1911 Britannica? That’s what I’m trying to figure out now – I was at YouTube on Monday and with a band that’s sold over 50 million records on Tuesday – and I think what we’re on to is game changing.