Revolution Time: Looking at the Clock
“Power rarely ends up in the hands of those who start a revolution, or even those who further it; power sticks to those who bring it to a conclusion.”
I think I am going to tack this up above my desk. Ken Robinson broke down the world situation in a profoundly illustrative way for me in his book. If we were to set up all of time on a clock, with each minute as roughly fifty years, you can start to appreciate where we are today in a “real” way. The internet is less than 15 seconds old. The car is less than 3 minutes old. Literally, less than 90 seconds ago people were living in America were living in dirt houses and sharing pants. Walker Evans didn’t just make that stuff up.
Getting there first is important of course, but it really only matters if you Get Things Done. All this idiot talk about how Mahalo is going to defeat Google, or that the iPhone will change the world is just that, idiot talk. None of it matters, none of it means anything. We weren’t really designed evolutionary to comprehend time in that way. That’s the whole problem with predictions, they don’t make much sense to us either. Raynor had a good example: If you predict that there is a 75% chance of rain tomorrow and it rains, that doesn’t mean you were right. There could have actually been a 99% chance, or a 1%.
This whole internet thing–though it has forever changed our lives–hasn’t changed everyone. It’s just getting started. Don’t fall prey to thinking that power today is fungible tomorrow or that a legacy just a few years down the road is anything more than whispers and memories. So there are three courses, as Robert outlines: to start, to prolong, to conclude. You can accept this or set yourself up for a fall. It seems to me that in this revolution, we are at the transition between the first and second step. The interim-men in history never win–they have a good time, the made some money but they do not win. Simply by nature of the cycle you destined to be replaced. Knowing this, why set yourself up for transience, when permanence could be yours?
You’ve fallen for the ultimate folly: young idealism. Your posts are nothing more than the grandiose dreams of a typical pre-25 year old struggling to make his medicore dick stand out amoung the rest of the mediocre dicks out there. Your ventures will lead to nothing; you think you’ve tapped into some inner core that the big whig Hollywood boys haven’t, because somehow you are more erudite than they are? Trust me, the Hollywood boys are raping every avenue out there for every cent…you are like a monkey in a tree throwing rocks at the fusion tank that is about to ruin your forest. There is no revolution. The media and the entertainment industry is well in the hand of the professionals, kid. Go back to playing with html.
This is comical really.
The entertainment industry is well? Box office receipts account for less than 17% of Hollywood’s revenue in any given year and yet the ENTIRE system is based around a big opening weekend. Chris Anderson–he wrote The Long Tail and runs Wired, you might have heard of him–guess that the movie industry is leaving 60-70% of the market on the table by this approach. Sounds like it’s working just fine to me. People in the industry joke that the box office franchises now look almost identical to how they did in 1997. And there is very little new on the horizon. The writers are about to strike and you know what? Movies are going to keep on coming, because people don’t need the studios anymore.
You have no fucking clue what you are talking about. Not even an inkling. Name me three Hollywood backed ventures that have succeeded online. Hell, I bet you’d be pressed to name ONE other than TMZ (which is a different story and I say a conflict of interest and mostly hype). What does that mean? It means there is a whole section of the population, millions of people deep, that regularly consume content with an appetite that Hollywood can’t seem to appeal to. That power is more than likely fungible. That is the smart bet, but we will see.
They are raping every avenue? 1) It’s not that they are, it is that they would if they could and that’s the problem. 2) I could name things right now that your average Hollywood INTERNET person hasn’t even considered as far as monetization goes. THEY DON’T KNOW HOW TO DO IT. That’s the whole point.
Look dude, go ahead and knock me for being young, whatever. But you’re an idiot and so absurdly wrong here that it has made me happy. People like you are precisely the reason that opportunities go unmined and unnoticed. What happened to you? Did you give it a round and they spit you back out? Did you never make it off a desk? I can see why.
BTW, am meeting with Robert tomorrow, so I’ll talk to him about it. I think he’ll enjoy it.
Yeah, we better trust this anonymous person’s opinion, he clearly knows his shit. Those Hollywood guys, they have it all figured out. No room for any other media companies…like YouTube…or Google…or Apple. Yep, he’s right, we’d better just quit.
Ryan, you know you are onto something when you start getting anonymous hate comments that are both grammatically correct, yet overflowing with disconnected rage. But you need to step your game up; you don’t even have a hate site yet.