Earning Money From the Free

Earlier this year I wrote a piece about creating works in an environment where everything is copied freely and when copy protection does not work -- in other words today's digital world.

How do you make money with the free?

My answer is you offer something better than free. I gave eight examples of what I call Generatives that improve upon the free.

That post, entitled Better Than Free, got a lot of attention, garnered many comments, got Digged and Reddited, and was translated into several languages by fans.

Now it is available as a free (of course!) downloadable PDF manifesto. Published by ChangeThis, a bunch of savvy media folks who produce very short, incredibly well-designed, free PDF Manifestos pushing the skills of change. Past authors include Seth Godin, Tom Peters, Guy Kawasaki, Hugh MacLeod. I really like the smooth navigation and user interface of these PDFs. They have a few ideas worth stealing in the format alone.

My piece begins:

The Internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, and every thought we make while we ride upon it. In order to send a message from one corner of the internet to another, the protocols of communication demand that the whole message be copied along the way several times.

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.

When copies are super abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable. When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.

Well, what can't be copied?"

The whole thing can be downloaded as a small 11-page PDF from here.  You are encouraged to share it, spread it, email it to friends, and make as many copies as you want. A landing page is here. The copies are free, and free to disseminate. I'll make my money (if any) through one of the generatives.

The Next 1000 Years of Christianity

I am a follower of Christ. I find it useful in my own life to frame my spiritual experience in the language of a 2,000 year old religion.  I think this old perspective still has a lot of bite in it, even intellectual bite. There's a tendency to want to write Christianity off as ancient history and impotent ignorance, but again and again smart, sane, civil people have their lives remade by it, and the belief sticks around. I think that at its core Christianity will continue to poke and sharpen and transform people in the future. But, of course, it will have to be interpreted yet again by another era. Let's just say that its current vocabulary is not entirely up to date.

Despite the fact that Christianity is two millennia old, and often takes a longer view, it has been myopic when it comes to the future. For the past 2,000 years it has offered only one scenario for the future: the world will end tomorrow. You'd think that after getting it wrong every day for 2,000 years it would come up with at least one alternative scenario.

In my casual search for published alternative scenarios for the future of Christianity, I did not find much, even in very progressive liberal branches of the faith. Speculators are hindered by fear of sounding heretical, by the difficulty in predicting anything that far ahead, by doubt that speculations are worthwhile, and by the completely false notion that Christianity is unchanging.

I am foolish enough to dive in where saints fear to tread. I've been hanging out with the emerging generation of American Christian leaders. They are making a new vocabulary for the traditional faith. They are re-ordering some traditional priorities. They have questions. Lot's of them. Gabe Lyons, an emerging church guy, started a conference called Q (for questions). It's sort of like a Christian TED. 

At the first Q Conference two years ago I gave a talk called The Next 1000 Years of Christianity (video here). It is my attempt to describe a few positive scenarios for the next millennial. I did not bother with negative scenarios (negative for believers), such as Christianity disappears in 100 years, because they were predictable, common, and obvious. (But as one friend noted; to retain symmetry the talk should really be about the next 2,000 years to match the last 2,000. I agree but 1,000 years was already so far off the charts for this crowd that I felt no one would listen about 2,000 years.)

One idea: The circumnavigation of the "center" of Christianity, starting in Jerusalem, heading west to Europe, then to the Americas, then to Asia and finally returning to Africa and Jerusalem.

By the standards of the title, this talk failed. I did not come anywhere near outlining a 1,000-year scenario for Christianity. Rather I introduced the idea of scenarios and offered some forecasts for the near future. My main point was to confirm the continued evolution of Christianity, both in the past and into the future, and to demonstrate the value of having multiple visions of what will happen next.

In that way I think the talk succeeded. Uncountable number of people let me know that they had "never even thought about" the next 1,000 years of their faith. I got the sense they did not know they were allowed to.  Now they do. I wrote my talk up as a monograph, which the Q folks say is one of their most popular essays.

The Q conference features speakers talking both about the Christian church and the culture at large. It represents the arm of change within the American Protestant Evangelical branch of Christianity -- the strand that has been most politically active in the US in recent decades. If you'd like to have direct contact with the emerging church of the next generation, this is a good venue to touch many edges of it at once.

Eye-Cam Wanted

This is Tanya Vlach's new eyeball. She lost her real one in a car accident a few years ago. I met Tanya at a film festival recently. During our conversation she said she was looking for help in turning her artificial eye into a eye-cam.  You know, a mini web cam inside an eyeball. It would capture live video and stream it to a memory somewhere and also perhaps eventually assist her own vision in real time. She confessed that she was not technologically adept enough to hack it on her own.

I suggested that she put her request out into the web to see if anyone there has any ideas. She is serious about the project, which is half art, half medical innovation. She doesn't have any money to fund the contraption because she says, she is still trying "to figure out how to get out of my astronomical debt that I owe for the medical care that saved my life."

Her solicitation for engineering help, and a place to reply is here.

I am attempting to recreate my eye with the help of a miniature camera implant in my prosthetic / artificial eye. The intraocular installation of an eye-cam will substitute for the field of vision of my left eye that I lost in 2005 from a car accident. While my prosthetic is an excellent aesthetic replacement, I am interested in capitalizing on the current advancement of technology to enhance the abilities of my prosthesis for an augmented reality.

Specifications for the eyeball:
    * DVR
    * MPEG-4? Recording
    * Built in SD mini Card Slot
    * 4 GB SD mini Card
    * Mini A/V out
    * Firewire / USB drive
    * Optical 3X
    * Remote trigger
    * Bluetooth wireless method
    * Inductors: (Firewire/USB, power source)

Flag of Earth

This is the first flag I feel I could fly with unalloyed pride.  Now all I need is a lapel pin version.

The flag was designed by James Cadle. Prior to the US landing on the moon, there was hope a flag for humanity, rather than the American flag, would be erected on the moon. Some hoped the UN flag would fly, but that never happened.

Some time later, James Cadle, who lived on a farm in rural Illinois, was inspired by this debate to create the Flag of Earth. It is intended to be used for ANY purpose that is representative of Humankind as a whole, and not connected to any country, organization, or individual. James made it his life's work to promote and distribute this flag everywhere. He and his wife made the flags on their kitchen table, and sold them for what it cost to make and distribute them.

The Flag of Earth is often flown at locations doing SETI work in order to indicate that the search is the "work of humanity and not a specific country or organization." Cadle died in 2004, but he left the design in the public domain, bless him.

At the Flag of Earth website there are templates for printing them out or purchasing ready-to-fly sown ones.

Long Clock, Big Gear

Remember that awesome 10,000-year clock the crazies at Long Now Foundation were constructing? The one that will be erected *inside* a mountain in Nevada? Powered by the changes in daily temperature a the top of the mountain (situated among the oldest living things on earth, Bristlecone pines), the Clock will serve to remind humanity of the long-term.

Well, here is the first completed part for the full-size clock. It's an 8-foot Geneva gear, with custom roller bearings later to be replaced by ones made of ceramic. (Because the wheels of the clock move so slowly metal-to- metal contact will corrode over the hundreds of years the wheel will take to move.)

More, including videos of the mechanism in motion, coming soon on the Long Now blog.

The Whole Earth Blogalog

Three recent books (From Counterculture to Cyberculture, What the Doormouse Said and Counterculture Green) plus a slew of newspaper articles have examined the influence of the Whole Earth Catalogs and periodicals upon on our culture. I am not the first to notice that the style of the Whole Earth Catalogs can be seen in the style of blogs and fan web sites. An article billed as the "oral history" of Whole Earth Catalogs just appeared in Plenty magazine. It says:

How did a publication with just a four-year run help shape a community so prolific that it went on to inspire Google, Craigslist, and the blogosphere; save six American rivers; and shape sustainable business practices as we know them today? Forty years after the first issue of the Whole Earth Catalog, this oral history of the publication, as told by those who made it and those who read it, tracks the long-lasting impact of a short-lived journal that altered the course of the world. 

As the former editor-in-chief at Whole Earth, I spoke at length with the author. A few comments survived:

Kevin Kelly: For this new countercultural movement, information was a precious commodity. In the ’60s, there was no Internet; no 500 cable channels. Bookstores were usually small and bad; libraries, worse. The WEC not only gave you permission to invent your life, it gave you the reasoning and the tools to do just that. And you believed you could do it, because on every page of the catalog were other people doing it. This was a great example of user-generated content, without advertising, before the Internet. Basically, Brand invented the blogosphere long before there was any such thing as a blog.

I really mean that. This past week I had occasion to dip into the Updated Last Whole Earth Catalog. In my opinion, this was the apogee of all the many Whole Earth Catalogs. (And it was not the last one by a long shot.)

Geodesic Domes, in the Updated Last Whole Earth Catalog, 1975

As I read the dense, long reviews and letters explaining the merits of this or that tool, it all seemed comfortably familiar. Then I realized why. These missives in the Catalog were blog postings. Except rather than being published individually on home pages, they were handwritten and mailed into the merry band of Whole Earth editors who would typeset them with almost no editing (just the binary editing of print or not-print) and quickly "post" them on cheap newsprint to the millions of readers who tuned in to the Catalog's publishing stream. No topic was too esoteric, no degree of enthusiasm too ardent, no amateur expertise too uncertified to be included. The opportunity of the catalog's 400 pages of how-to-do it information attracted not only millions of readers but thousands of Makers of the world, the proto-alpha geeks, the true fans, the nerds, the DIYers, the avid know-it-alls, and the tens of thousands wannabe bloggers who had no where else to inform the world of their passions and knowledge.  So they wrote Whole Earth in that intense conversational style, looking the reader right in the eye and holding nothing back: "Here's the straight dope, kid."  New York was not publishing this stuff. The Catalog editors (like myself) would sort through this surplus of enthusiasm, try to index it, and make it useful without the benefit of hyperlinks or tags. Using analog personal publishing technology as close to the instant power of InDesign and html as one could get in the 1970s and 80s (IBM Selectric, Polaroids, Lettraset) we slapped the postings down on the wide screens of newsprint, and hit the publish button.

This I am sure about: it is no coincidence that the Whole Earth Catalogs disappeared as soon as the web and blogs arrived. Everything the Whole Earth Catalogs did, the web does better.

But by the same equation, much of what the web is doing now, Whole Earth was doing then. Those folks who subscribed to the "feed" of CoEvolution Quarterly, the Whole Earth Review, and the WELL, got the blogosphere and user-created content 30 years early.

Living on the web decades before the internet was born; now that was a strange trip.

Pranksters 2.0

A clear emerging trend is nicely named and featured in the WSJ article,  New Pranksters.

Pranks have gone from legendary spoofs in college fraternaties in the 1950s, to subversive happenings by political activists in the 60s and 70s, to conceptual art pieces by maniacal artists into the 90s. Now they are errupting online as a social media web 2.0 event.

Examples of the new pranksterism can be found in the wonderful pranks by Improv Everywhere. (And they do seem everywhere; you can sign up for your local Improv Everywhere chapter, and you'll get email or Facebook notices when a prank in your neighborhood is about to hatch.)

My favorite IE happening is the Food Court Musical.

The Human Mirror -- a dozen sets of twins mirror each other on the subway -- is short but good, too.

The new pranksters are new in this way:

1) New pranks are entertainment. Rather than being politically subversive, they aim for a wow!
2) New pranks are social. Rather than relying on a lone jokester, or even small band, these may involve hundreds or more instigators. The more the merrier.
3) New pranks are broadcasted. The audience is not primarily those who are present but those who are not.

The WSJ article does a swell job of rounding up some great examples and even showcases a few prank groups that are in the inevitable process of becoming commercialized.  Including being filmed for commercials -- a sure sign of their mainstreaming.

Hi-Tech Ocean Row Boats

I didn't know anything about fancy trans-ocean row boats. Apparently a lot of people row across oceans. There is even an Association of Ocean Rowers. The typical ocean row boat has two humps, with sealable hatches, so the whole thing is a floating bubble. They are crammed with navigational gear, as well as the usual marine necessities: cooking, sleeping, working tools. They also are loaded with batteries, solar panels, wind generators, and so on. Used ones go for about $50,000.

Roz Savage (pictured above) rowed one of these hi-tech row boats across the Atlantic and is now rowing across the Pacific -- San Francisco to Australia -- solo.  Her floating shack is stuffed with expensive gear.

"I will be taking about $80,000 of electronic equipment with me on the Brocade, so that I can send back video blogs, podcasts, data, photos and text blogs to my website."  The complete list of her electronic gear is here.

With all this sea-hardened equipment she is blogging and podcasting from a row boat in the middle of the Pacific, which is pretty cool.

Heinlein's Fan Mail Solution

I found this letter in a folder of old correspondence from my days when I was editing at the Whole Earth Catalog. It is from the science fiction master Robert Heinlein.

Heinlein engineered his own nerdy solution to a problem common to famous authors: how to deal with fan mail.  In the days before the internet, Heinlein's solution was fabulous. He created a one page FAQ answer sheet --  minus the questions. Then he, or rather his wife Ginny, checked off the appropriate answer and mailed it back.  While getting a form letter back might be thought rude, it was much better than being ignored, and besides, the other questions you did not ask were also answered! Indeed, it is both remarkable and heartwarming that Heinlein replied at all to most mail. Can you imagine other great authors doing the same -- even with a form letter? Heinlein's form is very entertaining to read because you are forced to reconstruct the missing requests.

Click on the image to see enlarged version.

But progress marches on, even in science fiction author's households. Ginny Heinlein said that by 1984, "with the advent of computerization in our household, we no long use the form letter to answer fan mail. I find that it is possible now, with the computer, to write individual letters in reply to fan mail faster than I could check off the answer on the form."

Truman Show Delusion

This caught my eye: In a NYT piece on the rise of patients pleading that they are stuck inside a very sophisticated reality-TV show -- no, really -- and they want to get out, just like Jim Carrey did in the Truman Show.

Another patient traveled to New York Cit and showed up at a federal building in downtown Manhattan seeking asylum so he could get off his reality show, Dr. Gold said.  The patient reported that he also came to New York to see if the Twin Towers were still standing, because he believed that seeing their destruction on Sept. 11 on television was part of his reality show. If they were still standing, he said, then he would know that the terrorist attack was all part of the script.

I like the falsifiability of his ground-truthing test. Ground-truthing, that is examining a reported fact (yes, videos can be faked) yourself in first person, is not a bad practice.

Wanting to get out of, or "off your own reality show" makes total sense to me. I can see it becoming common.