ASCII by Jason Scott

My talk in April at Notacon on Wikipedia is coming up, and should be either fun or interesting (or maybe even both). As part of that I’ve been both observing and in contact with people embedded in Wikipedia, and I figured it was time to make some predictions. Make of these what you will. I’m focusing on the “negative” predictions since everyone else is in the business of the “positive” predictions. Some of these might sound obvious, some might not; that’s the way of “predictions”.

Note again, this is about Wikipedia, not the general concept of the Wiki. In all of these cases, I am predicting all of these things to happen before the end of 2006, although I suspect some will happen by the summer.

Wikipedia will no longer allow anonymous edits of any kind.

One of the core aspects of Wikipedia from its beginning was the ability of anyone to edit anything at any time. While nice in theory, this approach fails under critical mass. The work of the programmers of Wikipedia’s software and the increase in tools to track edits has cut down on pure unchecked destruction, but the fatigue of an ever-growing army of people who actually want to do minor edits and little else is wearing out on people who wish to control the encyclopedia’s direction.

A flurry of press implied that this is already the case; in fact, anonymous editors cannot create completely new articles, but they can edit existing ones. Currently, if you edit an article and do not have an edit history, your edit is often undone until you “prove” yourself. This trend will continue, in my opinion, and I expect they will move to some level of registration and reduced user account creation, walling the garden from the point of view of the editing active user.

Wikipedia will have to split off “user space” from “Encyclopedia space”.

Right now, you, as a Wikipedian with an account, can have a page about yourself, the stuff you’re into, what Wikipedia work you’re doing, and so on. It is absolutely tearing Wikipedia apart.

Why it’s tearing Wikipedia apart is part of my talk at Notacon, but the short form is that these user pages, once simple waves from behind the screen to talk about what you’re up to, have become pulpits of controversy and hatred that are linked (even if not completely) as if they’re just more articles under Wikipedia.

The solution is simple: a “user.wikipedia.org” or “wikiusers.org”, a separate area allowing this sort of self-expression to continue.

I see absolutely no fault in this happening; it should have been done from the beginning. In the beginning there weren’t really “user accounts” at all on Wikipedia, so it kind of grew organically from the natural urge of people to go “look at me, look at the work I’ve done, here I am, making my place”. But this is causing huge, huge distress on both the infrastructure, and the “anyone can edit” approach. The whole point of a user space is that you control it, and having others come in and either “fix” your work or tell you you’re not “allowed” to have things in your user space is causing wasteful friction even by Wikipedia’s standards.

Either this will happen soon, or more people will leave/pull back from being treated like they joined the world’s largest homeowner association.

Jimbo Wales will be either ousted or have his power curtailed relative to Wikipedia.

Without a doubt, Jimbo is a vital part of Wikipedia’s success. His funding, initial guidance, and approach to the site are what helped bring in the critical mass of editors. Unfortunately (for him), he has also created an entity whose entire point of existence is an overriding anal-retentive attention to “policy” and “the rules”, all reached by a variety of methods, each with their own set of “policy” and “the rules”. And so on, and so on, like a hall of mirrors.

The newspaper articles about Wikipedia in the last six months have focused on two major “events”: An article in the journal “Nature” that compared a whopping 42 articles (out of 972,000) to decide all of Wikipedia had only 20 percent less errors than the Encyclopedia Britannica, and errored information in an entry about a man named John Seigenthaler with the attendant hand-wringing about “what is truth” and “what position does Wikipedia and The Internet hold in the nature of accuracy”.

What has not gotten any focus are moves by Jimbo Wales that skirt and avoid “policy” or “consensus” or any of the other buzzwords that users who edit Wikipedia live by. He has appointed administrators without following Wikipedia’s own “rules” on how that is done. He has had articles not just removed, but their entire editing history removed as well (this violates their own license). He has blanked out and locked down (prevented editing) on articles about people who have threatened him with a lawsuit. And in cases where he has encountered activities he doesn’t approve of and appears concerned of looking bad (editing his own biography was a minor offense), he has taken on the approach of mentioning idly what he’d like to see done, and an army of folks will do his bidding, out of a natural urge to follow the “leader”.

This dichotomy cannot continue; Wales makes appearances on television shows and in newspaper articles speaking in a tone as if he majorly or solely guides the direction of Wikipedia, while at the same time promotes an environment where people are led to believe that a consensus guides Wikipedia. Something has to give.

(Of all my predictions, I am weakest on this one, because power is pernicious in its effect on sense, and few things are more steely-gripped than a person holding onto power.)

Wikipedia will make it almost impossible to edit entries on living people (or any entity that can sue).

I’m vaguely cheating with this prediction, since this is already becoming the case. If you don’t like an article about yourself in Wikipedia and you wish to ensure that the entry on you contains no information you don’t like, threaten to sue Jimbo Wales. Threaten to sue the Wikimedia Foundation. There are notable cases where entire swaths of information have been pulled down for shaky reasoning, simply to get legally-concerning items out of Wikipedia.

This is the bucket of cold water that will affect the love-fest of editing on Wikipedia more than anything else. There are facts that are, by any measure, accurate and real (dirty deeds listed in public records, criminal histories, and so on), that are simply not ‘allowed’ to be on Wikipedia. They are blanked out (again, not put into a “document editing history”, but all trace of them removed) and in a few cases the articles have been locked so that no work can be done on them.

This is working for the moment, but it can only increase in frequency, so it is likely that a rule will be put in place, phrased in relatively neutral language, that will prevent living entities from getting too detailed a background in anything but the most basic of facts about them. And it is because of lawsuit threats.

Subpoenas are the ultimate edit.

Wikipedia will add advertising (banner ads, text ads, or pop-ups).

What’s the sound of a million people going “Well, Duh”.

I only make this prediction because there are a number of myths that people who do editing work on Wikipedia and who pour weeks of life into the production operate under. One of them is the idea that the Wikipedia will always be open and free and sans the grubby hands of capitalism fingerprinting their work with urges to buy, buy, buy. Apparently the story of CDDB has not had an effect on them. That’s fine.

A lot of people are offering Wikipedia a lot of money to put advertising into their pages. One day, they will win. I just happen to think this is the year.

Check back in 2007 for how many I got right or wrong.

19 Comments

I am terrified of planes. I don’t discuss it much because, well, what is anyone going to do about it?

I should also say I’m not terrified of the planes themselves, just being in them when they’re flying.

Flying is a complete torture to me, from the moment I board until it slowly taxis towards the gate after landing. I am literally in a state of pure fear for most of the time, until I reach some sort of anguish threshold and collapse onto myself, often into sleep. I wake up and I’m just messed up enough that I don’t really realize where I am, and then eventually we land, during which time I am back in terror.

Why do I fly? Because logically, it is the fastest way to get to places, and when doing my films or meeting people who I care about or respect, I don’t want “it’ll take too long to get there” to be a reason not to see them. I do it, one might say, for a form of love. Love of people, love of my work, wanting things to be done and not to hide away in a cocoon of intentions and rough sketches. So I take it, like a beating. I’m usually back to normal around an hour or two after landing.

Occasionally, very rarely, I can reach some sort of zen moment where I forget where I am and why I am here and everything that can go wrong and just look out over clouds. At that point, I consider the span of my life, the things I have done and the things not yet done. And inevitably, I always think about how I didn’t get down any of my Fundamental Truths.

One of life’s many little jokes is that we don’t start to get a real grip on stuff until it’s often too late to do anything about it. The worst part is that we get told by others who are later in their lives how they got a grip, but we often don’t listen. Or we sort of listen and then drop it. So, I’m going to write two things that have been getting on my mind a lot recently, and leave it at that. It’ll let me feel a little better that I put it down somewhere, the next time I board a plane (February 24th, actually).

Everything has a Lifecycle.

I’ll describe this truth within the context of the three obvious examples: Jackie Chan, Lloyd’s of London, and Slashdot.

Jackie Chan, international movie star, beloved kung-fu action hero, and worldwide beloved charity head/businessman, was born in 1950. As has now been documented countless times (including the excellent autobiography I am Jackie Chan), he had an extremely hard childhood: put into a Peking Opera training school where he was abused and subject to all manner of physical training/trials which, ultimately, had little use in the modern world upon his teenage years and graduation from the school. From this, he got involved in construction and odd jobs in Australia, before taking on stunt work in the Hong Kong film industry. He got small parts in films, and then got fashioned as a “New Bruce Lee” upon Lee’s untimely death. His talents, physical skills and self-reliance have resulted in many excellent films containing action sequences and stuntwork that he’s played a part in.

However, Jackie Chan has a life cycle. He is in his 50s now, entirely unable to do some of the work he was doing in his 20s, and risks he took in his early film career would now be past suicidal. He is obviously going to continue to make films, and add his mark to them, but to expect him to do some of his earlier work is both unrealistic and refusing to think of him as a person who is growing older and into different directions; he has tried romantic films, producing other films that simply have his name on it, and basically branching out. While I would love a world where Jackie created new films equivalent in approach to Police Story and Drunken Master, there is simply not the same Jackie Chan that made those films available to do them. His life has gone on.

Similarly, Lloyd’s of London, being hundreds of years older than Jackie Chan, has a more involved life cycle. There are also many recountings of its history (an excellent one is here) but here’s a short form.

Started as a coffee house by Edward Lloyd in the 17th century, located on the docks, had good business from sea traders and runners providing information on shipping, and facilitated this with writing supplies and desks. After Lloyd’s death, the swarm of illegitimate business in underwriting led a group to split off and call themselves “Lloyds” and do underwriting. Throughout the next two hundred years, Lloyds has had a number of ups and downs, both insuring unusual items and paying out/taking in enormous sums in celebrated cases, including the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, and a variety of celebrity body parts.

The Lloyd’s of the 17th century was wildly different from the Lloyd’s of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. But there is this “tradition” and “history” urge that people have to compare what it is to what it was, even though the very natures of the world Lloyds moves in have inherently changed. Fundamentally. While there will always be conceptual ideas (bad things happen, pay in against that in insurance, reap some reward in tragedy) that hold true, the nature of a life cycle means that the Lloyds you walk into today will be nothing at all like it was.

This is either really obvious or not so obvious. What I am saying here is that many people fall into the trap of pointing to the multi-hundred-year history of Lloyds as ongoing proof of its relevancy, or choices. While some of that might be true, nobody who works at Lloyds was alive when it started, or when it broke away from Coffee. Nobody there would have first-hand knowledge how it was functioning before World War I. Almost none would know how it functioned before World War II. There have been thousands, many thousands of meetings, arrangements and contracts that have shifted Lloyds in many directions since it was started. To point to how it was as indication of how it should be or lamenting how it has changed… that is denying this fundamental life cycle.

It is likely that 2050 will not see a Jackie Chan. But 2050 might see a Lloyds. But if it sees either, they simply will not be the same entities they once were, no matter what dollops of marketing, slow-moving montage films, or posters will proclaim.

It might be easier to then point to Slashdot, which will be celebrating 10 years of existence in 2007. Started by a couple college students, this discussion/news site has grown to enormous amounts of influence and power within online circles, guaranteeing not just a huge amount of hits to a site but lots of ancilliary attention and placement in minds outside obvious “geek” realms. Take it from me; I’ve been Slashdotted or caused Slashdottings a number of times and I’ve seen the effects. People call and contact you from amazing places when you’re Slashdotted.

The Slashdot of 1997 is nothing like the Slashdot of 2006. It has similar outward appearances, with the logo and color scheme being the same, but almost everything else is different: the staff, the underlying software engine, the hosting facility, the choices of stories and the nature of communication within it.

The founders are there to some degree, but they are simply not the same people; they are 9 years older. How co-founder Rob Malda is at 30 (which he will be in May) is a lot different than how he was at 21. To apply the same measurements of how he should act or play a part in the site, or draw on his statements when he was a recent college grad as indications of what he’s thinking today… it just makes no sense.

Slashdot was sold to an entity relatively early in its existence, which was sold to another entity. Slashdot is, primarily, a business, geared towards generating revenue for both itself and its related sites. It’s easy to forget this, and apply standards on it as if it was being run out of someone’s home, but that’s the fact. It’s also the fact that in some ways Slashdot itself will fall back on this, and not do the least bit of journalistic research or credible action, simply because there is no outward reason for them to do so; getting things fundamentally wrong has not affected readership, and the comments below each entry allow some amount of “wait, that’s wrong”, so little obvious effort shows up in the final, scrolling collection of new stories.

Pro or con, Slashdot has changed, and is changing ever onward, until it will disappear or be further unrecognizable from what it once was. As a historian, I am interested in the changes, and in the previous incarnations, but I try not to fall into the trap of acting like the Slashdot I load up on my browser is anything but an entity of the present day, subject to the pitfalls and triumphs of 2006.

So where the hell am I going with this?

History is not a template for the future. History is an explanation of why certain mistakes happened, why we got to where we are now, how we did it, and an excellent way to spend a lazy Sunday afternoon. There is an enormous of hand-wringing, online and off, comparing the world of the present to the world of the past, and attempting backflips and neck-stretches to somehow use these past worlds as templates for the present one. We live in a world where you can contact your loved ones from a field or in a moving car, where you can know within seconds what someone is thinking about you, and where you can turn a frozen block of meat into a dinner better than princes once knew.

To ignore lifecycles and to use the past as shackles holding back progress or, at the least, inevitable change, is a mistake. Don’t do it.

There’s Fundamental Truth number one. I will relax the next time I see the wings shake.

Hatred Often Springs From Uninterested Audiences

A shorter Fundamental Truth, but one that I care very deeply about. I’ve been reading an enormous amount of online material lately (this always happens when I’m working on a project like GET LAMP) and what I find, more often than not, are dismissive or highly-critical treatises about creative or commercial works from people representing audiences the work should never have been put in front of.

Let’s stick with just movies this time.

The absolutely best Kung-Fu movie is still an absolute wreck to someone who doesn’t want to watch Kung-Fu movies. A person who wants to see a romantic comedy will never enjoy a zombie flick, no matter what amount of effort was made into making it the best zombie flick ever.

The nature of marketing and publicity is to expose a product to as wide an audience as possible. The issue with that is that often the work, through no fault of its own, is not actually geared towards as wide an audience as possible.

On the flip side, there are films that are most certainly geared towards as wide an audience as possible. They make certain concessions in plot, casting and shooting so that they will appeal to everybody who walks in the door. It is unlikely, therefore, that it will treat any one of those groups with much respect or satisfy them fully, but on the other hand they won’t lock too many people out, either.

This may or may not seem obvious. But how much energy has been wasted avoiding it!

I am asked about putting my BBS documentary in front of as wide an audience as possible. But I’ve spent a lot of time watching reviews and responses to it; and there are people for whom this is the greatest movie ever. They absolutely love it, they love the length, the subject matter, the approach, the shooting.

But I get people who hate it too. I find, generally, that they were misled by others as to what the film was, or they came in with a different expectation. (“Should have been more like Wargames. Should have had less people talking. Shouldn’t have been so technical”)

This is why I’ve always worked to make the film and its contents known, to have lots of preview material and descriptions that show it’s a very technical documentary that features a lot of people talking. If someone comes along and shows it with the inherent lie “It’s as amazing as Star Wars” floating in peoples’ heads as they watch it, it will be horrible. It is absolutely the worst episode of Star Wars ever. (Episode XI: I Keep Getting a Busy Signal).

I’m just sticking to movies here, but this Fundamental Truth applies to a lot of stuff besides creative works. It applies to education (being told a subject will be a certain type of experience in learning and it is not), to tools (being told a tool can be used a certain way when it doesn’t do that very well), and to people (presenting someone as having skills they do not have). In all these cases, these subjects all have very good uses and skills and abilities, but only if they’re presented the right way or are upfront. The energy then spent defending or criticizing the entire misfit characterization, dilutes the equivalent of many human lives over the years.

There. Now they’re both out. Enjoy them. And the next time you see me somewhere where I flew, realize how much I truly wanted to be there.

3 Comments

When I was 17 and a senior in high school, we had to pose for yearbook pictures. Horace Greeley High School, where I attended, had a nice policy about the pictures, which was that the students could basically choose their backgrounds, poses, and the rest. Since I spent most of my time in my house, that’s where I had my photos taken, and beyond that, I had the photos taken in my computer room. A student named Rachel Lovinger was assigned my photo, and we took a bunch.

I lived a happy life for my years in Chappaqua, NY. I lived with my father in a 4 bedroom house, and I had run of the top floor, which became a kind of weird geek paradise, one I tried to live up to later when I bought my own home. I do remember, at the time, being very happy with the world I’d set up for myself. My bedroom had two parts to it, a computer lab and a bedroom/media area (the pictures you see here are from the computer lab) and I even had a remote monitor coming out of the computer into my media area, so I could watch the goings-on on my BBS while also watching TV or playing music. I have nothing but the fondest memories of my late teens, sans a small incident where I was thrown out of the house.

Unlike a lot of the “person in front of swirly background” photos that populate yearbooks, photos like the ones I had taken also document my room, and my earlier computer life before I went to college or ran textfiles.com or anything else. Of the 20 or so photos taken, we obviously only used one, but I was able to get a contact sheet from Rachel, which I kept, and which these photos came from. Obviously, they weren’t really meant for final publication, and look a lot worse than they could, but the information is there.

Obviously the second one is posed, with a Commodore PET computer lodged in front of my main system where it normally wouldn’t be. The rest of it is pretty accurate.

There’s so many little reminders in these photographs, I don’t know where to begin. That’s an IBM PC with an expansion chassis, making it look like a two-level monster. I ran The Works BBS on that for two years before leaving for college. It’s impossible to see in the photograph, but the Works BBS login screen is up. I can see business cards from BBSes that I used to call, taped on the desk. There’s a dot matrix printer there, which I printed out many messages and files from, which I kept (and still have) and which I’ve been slowly re-digitizing BACK into text. And the walls are completely covered in computer and BBS articles that I would pull from Microfiche at school, photocopy, and then tape up.

(Naturally, since all yearbook photos should have semi-secret messages, there’s those two pieces of paper with letters on them, with the simplest of one-letter shift ciphers on them, for others to find: “HELLO: DONNA, JOHN R., JEREMY, JASON B., BRANDON, BRITT W., SARAH – B.I.S. FOREVER!” By doing this in the photo, I didn’t have to put it into the paragraph in the yearbook. The B.I.S. did in fact end up being forever, since that’s the name of the production company for the documentaries.

If you’re a die-hard fan (I apparently have a few), you can feel free to download the entire contact sheet (700k) from the BBS Documentary site. I like the last one from the bottom, left side.

I’ve had a number of people send me photos like these posed near or using their computers, often taken by family members going “Here he is in his natural habitat, always in front of that computer.”

My advice is that if your family member does something all the time, take photos of them doing it, they’ll thank you years later, because everyone wants at least a little memory of the times before, and stuff they may not have thought about for decades will come rushing back. I know this because I get many dozens of letters a month telling me that’s what textfiles.com does. And thank goodness for that.

1 Comment

Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2006 18:56:37 +0200
From: Chevron System LLC
To: textfiles.com
Subject: Regarding textfiles.com

Chevron System LLC

I get a request to buy one of my domains about once every few months. At this point, I just ask for an incredible amount of money, and leave it at that. I’ve had domains for 10 years now, domains like cow.net and someone comes along hoping to buy it for two thousand dollars. Goodnight!

I wouldn’t let textfiles.com go for less than seven figures now. And why would I let it go at all? Because at seven figures, I could use that money to further the goals that textfiles.com stands for and the work it does. And why wouldn’t I let it go for less? Because it’s a part of me, like my name or my voice.

5 Comments

I know I always hate it when someone tells me where they’ll be speaking…. TOMORROW. But there you go.

I’ll be speaking/presenting at the Princeton Library in Princeton, NJ tomorrow (February 7th) at roughly 7pm. You get to see some of the documentary, hear me babble, and then, if you’re feeling frisky, buy a few copies.

See you there, assuming about 100 details about your life that I shouldn’t.

Comments Off on Speaking in Princeton

I finally removed the Paypal link from the Adventurers’ Club page, as well as the part where I beg people to join. Instead, it’s now a description of what the club is and who the members are.

There are 50 members in the club (not all are listed, at their request).

This is five thousand dollars.

It’s nice to have one of the high points of the production occur before filming begins. That’s just amazing to me, fifty people sending in $100, wanting the film to be made and to show their support.

Since I promised each person 3 copies of the film, that’s 150 copies that go right off the top into the world. Pretty neat!

Filming, by the way, starts this month. Don’t ever hesitate to mail me with suggestions and requests about the production.

1 Comment

I had a call waiting for me on my voicemail, from a Jennifer Pew (her phone number was 206-903-3915) of a law firm called Dorsey and Whitney LLP, who specialize in IP law. She asked me to call her back, in association with an MGM vs. Grokster case.

Now, there’s always that interesting swimming feeling when a law firm calls you. I’ve been through the legal colon enough times to know you give up nothing, discuss not much, bother less. Doesn’t hurt to call back.

Talking with Jennifer for a while, she asked me about a file available on Kazaa, with my name on it and BBS and so on. The track, which she couldn’t pronounce, didn’t sound like something I’d written, but there are a lot of songs on the BBS Documentary soundtrack, and as we all know, most peer-to-peer programs keep the titles and artist names with near-talmudic precision. So with names like Sleepy Rabbit, Manolo Camp, and Treewave, who knows what they could be called now.

I asked, “Wasn’t the Grokster vs. MGM case settled?” She said this was a new one. What the hellafuck. I was wondering if she was from the good guys, the EFF or whatnot. I mean, if I get to testify WITH those guys, hey, free trip to California and maybe I get to give Larry Lessig a hug.

So we’re dancing around simply because I’m wondering who she represents. At some point in my sleepy mind, the “plantiff” vs. “defendant” thing clears up, I remember she said Plaintiff, and I ask who she’s a part of. She explained it was a consortium of firms, including media companies.

At this point, my tone turned what would best be described as “vaguely hostile”.

I hate this shit. I really do. I was kind of curious to figure out what song it was they were associating with me, and how they decided it was me, and how they got the phone number, and all that. But after a while, I realize I’m talking to a paralegal. Paralegals do not consider themselves evil. Paralegals are, in my experience, torturers who have not been allowed to use the forge yet to make the hot coals, but they’re waiting and hoping. I consider them part and parcel of the law profession, very little of which I personally like. (I do like a little of it.)

She offered to put me in touch with an uberlawyer to hear the song that supposedly Jason Scott made or otherwise has his name on, but I said, ultimately, “I can’t imagine they would enjoy such a conversation.” Who needs it, it’s Friday.

I explained that all the music in my documentary was licensed under Creative Commons. Later she verified it by saying “so you provide it under a public license.” I said no, CREATIVE COMMONS.

The salient phrases from me, which basically ended the transaction, were:

“I do not want to be associated with whatever you are doing in any way, and if my name shows up in any legal document from your firm I will be very angry. If people are distributing music with my name associated with it, I hope they are giving it to schoolchildren. For free. Forever.”

Anyway, so if you make or otherwise involve yourself in musical production, maybe you too will be “called on down ” by Jennifer or her other zombie paralegal compatriots to ask if you authorized your music to be made available on Kazaa. Be sure to top my reaction, if you so choose.

5 Comments

With absolutely no fanfare or warning, Western Union ceased its telegram service on January 27, 2006. They notified employees internally in mid-January, and then abruptly closed off the service.

The full message for saying goodbye to 155 years of telegraph service was:

“Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact a customer service representative.”

The first official message (that is, part of a demonstration for a built prototype line from Washington to Baltimore, was sent on May 24, 1844. It read, “What hath God Wrought?”

In fact, you can actually look at a photo of the actual tape that was sent. Badass, those historical archivists can be.

I am not a big fan of the standard weblog “this event happened, now I will comment off-the-cuff-with-no-research for the next 3 paragraphs and look at you dumbly” approach to journalism/event notification, but I do have to say, this was handled quite poorly.

Understand that Western Union has gone bankrupt and then been bought out a number of times, and that the vast vast vast vast majority of its funding comes from money transfers (started in 1871) and not telegrams. I’ll be willing to make a reasonable guess that the telegram revenues were almost in the range of a rounding error. But that’s more of that off-the-cuff stuff I was talking about.

Instead of giving you a massive rant and historical essay, may I instead recommend a book that I had recommended to me by the author/speaker Richard Thieme: “The Victorian Internet”, by Tom Standage. Were that I could compose a book so effective, so perfect in presenting its facts of history and event, and linking them to today.

Regardless, I left a foamer in their customer service box at the Western Union site, and I would send out this call: Send out one last telegram, this day or on the anniversary of the telegraph on May 24th, and give this incredible technology the sendoff it deserves.

Comments Off on Dit dit dit hey wait

35 might not seem like a very old age to some, but in many ways, it’s a good time for me to really decide what projects of mine are going to “happen”, which will not, and what, if any, new projects I should be taking on while I still have the energy and age of the 30s. As a result of this, I started work on about 3 movies and a bunch of other things (GET LAMP is the absolute forefront, of course) and I’ve been dumping off a lot of other stuff that was in the planning or consideration stages.

One of these was a TV show I’ve pushed around my plate like a bit of unwanted vegetables for about 3 years. It’s time to get rid of that one. So what better way to get rid of it than throwing it out on a public website?

For all my ranting about television in previous entries, it might be surprising to know I was considering doing a television show. But part of that was that when I say “television show”, I mean “videotaped show”, which means it could have been distributed online, sold as a DVD, or what have you. Maybe even on a cable channel or one of the other many channels out there for new works. I wasn’t going crazy on that side of things.

So here we go; here’s the “pitch”, as it were, and why I am dropping the whole idea.

First, you need that kind of short-form pitch that either makes people interested or makes them cut bait. So the short form: “Junkyard Wars…. for programmers. Have people hack computers and make programs, for money, in a marathon coding session. Prizes, tie-ins… hey, you gonna do that whole line?”

Now, a little more meat. The title/name was “Hardcoded”, and the basic premise is this: set up in a warehouse with a two level structure, you have four teams of programmers, perhaps an artist or other unusual creative person thrown in, and each gets a corner of this structure on the first floor. On the second floor, two hosts (I wanted two chatty but engaging males, kind of the smart nerd type) talk to their on-the-floor person (an engaging female) about what the teams are up to.

The game goes on for two days (enabling weekend shoots). The teams can be assembled from software companies or other firms, or maybe are all from around the country and thrown together. The teams assemble on the first day to be given the task they’ve got to have finished at around 2pm on Sunday. For my example/pilot, the game would be “Pac-Man”, and we’d have a Pac-Man machine in the center of the place. It’d be plugged on, under a sheet, and lifted up for people to see. Obviously, it’d be playable throughout the event.

The four teams would be given the art of Pac-Man and the sounds, but that would be it, and they’d have to hack something together after that. A point-scale would be there based on creativity, skills… And every 4 hours or so, the teams would be given other “code challenges” they could take on at the same time, and the question would be, do we go for that code challenge and risk failing to “ship”, or do they just jam through?

Like a software project, there would be stages for “alpha”, “beta” and “final”. In the Pac-Man example, having the ability to move around would be a “alpha”, having the game playable would be a “beta”, and then the final bits would need to be there, like fruit and the like, for “final”. If this sounds rough, it is. I wasn’t exactly staying up late at night concerned about how the scoring scale would work.

The question that might come to mind is “how could this at all be compelling”? Well, several answers to that. First of all, you’d have quite a bit of post-production in place, doing things like explaining (in high-level form) how the programmers were coding, how they were working together, and so on. The hosts would be engaging in their own way, but we’d also have sequences about, say, Pac-Man and the videogame industry that could be used if segments were missing some level of interest, until we got to the “beta” stage or so on.

Obviously, all the screens of all the programmers would be recorded, as well as webcams showing their expressions and other cameras showing events within the space. Most shows/events of this sort have what’s best called a “safe room” where the contestants are allowed to go outside of cameras (specifically, to sleep and use bathrooms) but there’s a contractual obligation they sign where they don’t discuss strategy or have conversations except with producers if there’s an issue.

Now, either you buy into this idea or you don’t. And that’s fine if you don’t, I liked the challenge of making programming interesting and doing cool post-production and assigning teams of different people to interact, and so on. That’s part of what made the idea fun and worth mulling over.

There are two main problems with this whole idea, in terms of stopping me from going forward. I don’t mean cash or equipment issues, either, which are a different level; certainly tie-ins for prizes (win stuff from Thinkgeek! win stuff from sony or panasonic or apple!) and branded computer systems (Alienware!) would go a ways towards helping the cost. That’s just money.

The first problem is the fact that most of these shows are fake.

Now, I don’t mean fake in terms of actually pre-determining who will win and then crippling the other team until they can’t win, ever (like the quiz show scandals of the 1950s). I mean more along the lines that the most important thing, the driving force in putting together each show, is to make it compelling. And the fastest way to create compelling footage is to ensure, hell or high water, that there is as much conflict and neck-and-neck competition every step of the way.

This sounds logical, but to me if you’ve designed the show right, the compelling aspects will come out of it. If you’re of the state of mind that says that unless someone is yelling nothing is happening, that’s a different type of show. And with the type of shows that Hardcoded takes its cue from (Monster House, Monster Garage, Panic Mechanics, Junkyard Wars and so on), any multi-episode observation of how they flow show off several “tricks” being engaged.

A number of the shows sabotage. They fail to deliver what was asked for, they undo work the team has completed, and they modify the rules (occasionally drastically) to suit keeping everyone neck and neck. While nobody likes to see an absolute pulverisation of the losing team or the deadline, it’s mildly creepy to see weights piled on a team like Harrison Bergeron just to keep them from overly succeeding. And that’s the stuff we can see through the edits; that’s not even the stuff we never get to see.

Another trick is to force conflict; in cases where teams are assembled, say, Monster House, you will see a team assembled where you have 4 or 5 relatively together individuals, and then one absolutely insane fuck-up of a person. Someone who may or may not have skills, but are certainly not used to working with a team, or who don’t normally work under a short short deadline, and are brought in essentially to grit the wheels and get some nice sparks flying. Conflict arises in all things, to me; and you have compelling footage from that, but just intentionally hothousing a situation panders to the worst aspects of television and I couldn’t see myself being a party to that, to achieve the level of success these shows had.

In fact, that’s where the second part came in; I remembered what it’s like to work on a production like this, having been involved in such stuff in my past; the crew fights, the gossip, the little lies, the big ones, and all the pieces of you that this sort of project rips away from a person, until they’re only a small bit of what they used to be (although, hopefully at least, richer).

That’s kind of the reason I’ve grown to enjoy shooting leisurely (or at least lacking insane deadline pressure), generally alone, generally one-on-one. I like talking with people, getting to know them, not depending on their crying or breaking down or screaming to know compelling footage exists in them. I like the burden being on me to bring out the interesting part of a person, not just piling on bullshit over a person’s head until they squeak out protests and I film it 3 inches away from their face. I can live with it.

So into the shitcan goes Hardcoded. It would have been fun to watch. It probably wouldn’t have been as much fun to make.

8 Comments

None of the following concepts/ideas/paragraphs grew in my mind enough to warrant a decent weblog entry, so I’m grouping them together, like a lost hiking party, clinging to each other for warmth and hoping you’ll read them before the ice weasels come.

There were a number of planned ideas at the beginning of BBS: The Documentary that I had on deck but which, for various reasons, did not ultimately happen or were morphed into other aspects of the work. A few that come to mind are:

• An episode that was going to focus on just one “bbs scene”, start to finish, to show how the BBS could influence a community across decades, and to get a deeper feeling for what it was in the context of a location. I chose Worcester, Massachusetts because it was geographically close and because I thought it was just big enough to be interesting but not so big that the anonymity/population would be overwhelming. Too many people had left Worcester or were uninterested in being interviewed to make it realistic; one was semi-violent about the prospect.
• An episode was going to focus on just those tiny/fringe voices that found a place on BBSes: UFOs, alternate science, sexuality, religion, based around small businesses, and even neo-nazi. The idea was to give some insight into how the BBS gave people a voice they didn’t otherwise have. This got absorbed into SYSOPS AND USERS, because it felt like I was just trying to do a freakshow, which I was personally against being a party to.
• An episode that was going to talk about everything from Amiga MODs to Demo groups to ATASCII creators, you name it, to show the massive spectrum of art and artists that were able to express themselves over BBSes. I ended up just doing ANSI art, and American ANSI art at that (this became ARTSCENE) because just getting a grip on that story filled an hour.
• An episode about computer and communications hardware, to show the history related to the equipment, modems, and other stuff associated with a BBS. It didn’t take me long to figure out that it was much more interesting and relevant to talk about the people themselves instead of their hardware.
• An introductory short film with me (on camera) welcoming you to the world of the BBS Documentary and describing what they were. This got as far as narration and music before I shot it in the head, because while I want to think otherwise, I ain’t camera talent.

This is the nature of a project, especially a documentary, which I described recently as “a film where you shoot the footage and then find out what the plot is”. If there’s one thing I’d want people to know who were taking an interest in the process, it’s this: you have to be flexible. Just because in your mind the most important shot is a crying baby, if you don’t get your crying baby, suck it up and keep shooting and you’ll probably find something even more compelling than the crying baby. You can’t just go ripping stuff apart because the reality you’re filming doesn’t conform to your vague mental shooting script. You keep going and make the best of it; this happened to me all the time. It’s a shame some of these ideas never saw the light, but many more ideas saw the light that I never even fathomed would show up during filming.

Let’s switch gears. Far and away, the most complaints I get about the BBS Documentary series, in terms of content, is ARTSCENE. I get some nice accolades for it too, but I have gotten nearly a year of rips and insults for that specific episode.

The reason for this is because it is so highly focused, and so intensely US-centric in content. I get a lot of petulant “I guess [my thing] wasn’t good enough for you” and “too bad you didn’t tell the real story”, and a bunch of stuff along those lines. It brings up an interesting perception, which both interests and confounds me: a lot of folks are pretty convinced I’m it, in terms of documentary exploration of this subject. That is, if the BBS Documentary didn’t cover it, we’re screwed, it’s over, it won’t be covered, dust in the wind, all we are is dust in the wind. I appreciate the unwarranted belief that I’m the canonical arbiter of history and permanence, but in point of fact that’s pretty much crap. I’m just the most recent attempt to tell online history and the story of computers from a specific position. In my case, I’m going to flood the market with dozens of hours of interviews about the subject, but that’s not the final word either. There is nothing stopping anyone from doing another film with a different core country in the center of the story; and in fact, there are documentaries that I have seen myself that take place in other countries and tell stories of “scenes” and computer-based social groups. Some are really good. Some are not really good. But they exist and are being made. No need to park the waaah-mbulance in front of my door.

Switching gears again, I am asked by people if I will be doing a documentary on X, where X is some relatively recent concept or social group. Here’s some of the suggestions I can remember off the top of my head:

• Viruses/Virus Writers/Virus Companies
• IRC
• Warez Groups (Modern Version)
• Wardriving
• Hacker Conventions
• Hacking/”The Underground”
• “The Internet” (Modern Version)

I don’t mind dropping all those ideas on you, because I have no plans to do anything with them. The fundamental reasons are pretty much the same: modern “scenes” don’t trust guys like me. I am asked why the BBS documentary doesn’t go too much into “the current scene” in the context of the present. And besides my focus being on what was because of the danger of it disappearing, another trivia fact was that with very few exceptions (thank you Rob Swindell, thank you Leif Bloomquist), most people doing anything relatively in the “present” treated me like a litterbox.

People don’t trust someone who says “I’m going to come in an quantify your life on video”. They trust it even less if we’re talking about their current life, and not something 10-20 years ago that they can reflect upon or consider with some distance. Trust me, I got the message: stay out of the present, stick with what happened. I don’t need the pain.

Additionally, and I don’t know why this shouldn’t be obvious, the number of people willing to speak on camera about ongoing quasi-legal acts are few and far between, and mostly consist of you (the filmmaker/journalist) being the latest con or challenge. This is part of why HPAC is not HPVAC in the series: people who wrote or who did anything with viruses assume (and it’s a good assumption) that going on camera saying “Yeah, I write/wrote viruses” is a one-way ticket to sucksville. So there you go.

(Like I said, these are all half-developed ideas, huddled together for warmth. I’m sure if people need greater context, they can catch me at notacon in a few months. Bring Pocky.)

Finally, some commentary on length/breadth. I get two main complaints about the current size of the BBS Documentary DVD set:

• It is way too long and burdensome.
• It is way too short and fluffy.

The second one is easy to answer: imagine me holding the box in front of my face and me yelling “IT’S FIVE AND A HALF FUCKIN’ HOURS!!!!!”

I found, ultimately, that lengthening the work (and make no mistake, I would have made it 10 hours long if it made sense) just found me kind of telling the same story in slightly different ground. For example, FIDONET, which covers that network pretty well, does not discuss Alternet and about a thousand other networks that used Fidonet or Fidonet-like technology to communicate in groups and lines that might never intersect with the larger Fidonet. I got ribbing about this from some of the groups or people who motivated the networks, but cinematically, how do you say “And also, there was something almost entirely like Fidonet but not quite like Fidonet but with many of the same issues and situations we’ve just discussed” and not be clunky? I couldn’t find a way in the editing room. Same for a lot of stuff which people have criticized me for not including. Like I said, for a lot of people, I didn’t go into the subject enough. While I understand this in a vague sense, the harsh reality of the concept stuns me. “You mean it should have been longer!!?”

As for “It’s too damn long” or “it goes into crap I couldn’t care less about”, this I can understand more. I certainly didn’t create the film in a way that really lets you watch 15 minutes and “get the point” while you go out to the bathroom until minute 30 and catch up immediately again. This stuff is deep, wide, and all over the place. It’s like one of those 1,200 page books the author spent years on, and you’re just staring at it, stunned, going ‘Well, I’ll bet it covers the story of Robert Moses pretty damn well.” But that’s not what you specifically wanted.

And on that note, I’ll say: I’d rather have people who loved the subject/film so much they wanted it twice as long, or people who so completely didn’t relate to the film that they couldn’t hack 10 minutes of it, than a million people who could watch my film for the purpose of having something on the TV while they fix the numbers in their cell phone memory. I didn’t make it to be a background, or a screen saver, or another piece of crap flying down the pipe. I made it what it was to the best extent I could. This cuts down the potential audience greatly, but the audience it’s cut down to tends to be very happy indeed.

Oh, crap! Ice weasels! See you!

4 Comments