Testing Genetic Test Chips
Ann Turner, co-author of the best book on DNA-based genealogy: Trace Your Roots With DNA, wrote me to say that she too has been comparing results from the two big genetic test companies, 23andMe and deCode. She wrote in response to my earlier posting comparing results between the two vendors.
The big news is that places where errors are showing up are probably not random. Here's the argument, starting with her post on ancestry.com:
The two companies overlap on 562,532 SNPs. They agreed on 560,128 calls, or 99.6%. 23andMe didn't make a call on 1,970 SNPs where deCODEme did, and deCODEme didn't make a call on 399 records where 23andMe did. That leaves a mere 35 records where they actually made different calls [see the list below]. In all of those cases, one company would make a homozygous call while the other company made a heterozygous call -- there were no cases where they made a completely discordant call.
Here's the kicker from Ann's letter to me:
Four of those (rs11149566, rs4458717, rs4660646, and rs 754499) were also found in Antonio's list. That's more than you would expect by chance.
Four out of 23 from Antonio's list and four out of 35 on Turner's list of discordant results indicates that these regions (at least) are unreliable.
This is why sharing results is so valuable and a key to great quantified self understanding.
This is a micrograph of the bead array on which these tests are conducted.
Turner's 35 SNPs with different results, if case you also have done a comparison.
rs10435795 rs1045363 rs10743414 rs10945383 rs11149566 rs11179382 rs11707159 rs11915402 rs1209171 rs1221986 rs12907462 rs1303912 rs13422439 rs161381 rs17328647 rs1961196 rs1966357 rs2016461 rs2064034 rs2290516 rs2853981 rs3952469 rs4336661 rs4423481 rs4458717 rs4572718 rs4660646 rs6531490 rs6942478 rs7102702 rs754499 rs7812884 rs845217 rs9332128 rs9476380
The Cell Phone Platform
I am envious of Jan Chipchase. He gets paid corporate wages to hopscotch from one remote exotic destination to the next, taking pictures of local lifestyle details and interviewing local residents about their technology use. He is usually described as a '"user anthropologist" or a "usability ethnographer" -- either one would be a cool job. I often crib fantastic images of street use examples from Jan's site Future Perfect. Jan has always been very generous and will openly share not only his images but his annotations.
He was recently featured in a long New York Times Magazine profile that asked the larger question of whether cell phones could help cure poverty. They will certainly be part of the solution. But as this fine article points out, they are also becoming something more. The story has a lot of good news so I've sampled from it liberally.
Cell phone repair alley in Delhi, India
Last year, the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based environmental research group, published a report with the International Finance Corporation entitled “The Next Four Billion,” an economic study that looked at, among other things, how poor people living in developing countries spent their money. One of the most remarkable findings was that even very poor families invested a significant amount of money in the I.C.T. category — information-communication technology, which, according to Al Hammond, the study’s principal author, can include money spent on computers or land-line phones, but in this segment of the population that’s almost never the case. What they’re buying, he says, are cellphones and airtime, usually in the form of prepaid cards. Even more telling is the finding that as a family’s income grows — from $1 per day to $4, for example — their spending on I.C.T. increases faster than spending in any other category, including health, education and housing. “It’s really quite striking,” Hammond says. “What people are voting for with their pocketbooks, as soon as they have more money and even before their basic needs are met, is telecommunications.”
Chipchase annotates his photo of a Village Phone set up in Uganda.
Having a call-back number, Chipchase likes to say, is having a fixed identity point, which, inside of populations that are constantly on the move — displaced by war, floods, drought or faltering economies — can be immensely valuable both as a means of keeping in touch with home communities and as a business tool. Over several years, his research team has spoken to rickshaw drivers, prostitutes, shopkeepers, day laborers and farmers, and all of them say more or less the same thing: their income gets a big boost when they have access to a cellphone.During a 2006 field study in Uganda, Chipchase and his colleagues stumbled upon an innovative use of the shared village phone, a practice called sente. Ugandans are using prepaid airtime as a way of transferring money from place to place, something that’s especially important to those who do not use banks. Someone working in Kampala, for instance, who wishes to send the equivalent of $5 back to his mother in a village will buy a $5 prepaid airtime card, but rather than entering the code into his own phone, he will call the village phone operator (“phone ladies” often run their businesses from small kiosks) and read the code to her. She then uses the airtime for her phone and completes the transaction by giving the man’s mother the money, minus a small commission. “It’s a rather ingenious practice,” Chipchase says, “an example of grass-roots innovation, in which people create new uses for technology based on need.”
Chipchase invited local residents in Ghana to design their ideal cell phone.
As a joke, Chipchase sometimes pulls out his cellphone and pretends to shave his face with it, using a buzzing ring tone for comic effect. But there’s a deeper truth embedded here, not just for people in places like Kenya or Buduburam but for all of us. As cellphone technology grows increasingly sophisticated, it has cannibalized — for better or worse — the technologies that have come before it. Carrying a full-featured cellphone lessens your needs for other things, including a watch, an alarm clock, a camera, video camera, home stereo, television, computer or, for that matter, a newspaper. With the advent of mobile banking, cellphones have begun to replace wallets as well. That a phone might someday offer a nice close shave suddenly seems not so ridiculous after all.
What interests me most about cell phones is how fast they are displacing PCs as the center of mediated life. And how unpredicted this overthrow was when cell phones first appeared. No one forecasted these brick-sized appliances replacing personal computers, even when one could see they would get smaller. In Star Trek, where they had cell-phone like communicators, they still had mainframe terminals on the bridge.
Spammer AI
What if spammers come up with an artificial intelligence before Google does?
An early warning signal has been detected. The Washington Post reports that spammers may have control of computers that can decypher those letter puzzles on websites called CAPTCHAs. CAPTCHAs are designed to be solved only by humans, since -- at least until now -- only humans could unravel distorted, distressed lettering. The problem with making CAPTCHAs more difficult is that humans have trouble solving them.
The computer scientists can't tell yet whether spammer bots or spammer-paid humans are solving the CAPTCHAs. That is the definition of passing the Turing test -- if humans can't tell.
VR Bubbles
A new way to shoot a film:
Use digital still cameras to take a full 360 degree panorama of a location, then stitch them together to form a VR "Bubble" which is used as a set for the action. Film action in green screen mode (not unusual by now). The movement of the camera filming the actors in the green space is coordinated with movement of the virtual camera within the bubble, so any action looks convincing. The technical term for bubbles is "spherically constructed location photography."
Since the bubbles are created beforehand, the director (but not actors) can see the action taking place in the virtual location on the green space monitor as the action is being filmed. This creates a more realistic shooting atmosphere. Spherical lighting domes confer exact lighting for the green space for any location/lighting situation.
Bubbles can be grafted and glued together to form extended locations.
There are several advantages of this way, one of them is that one can film in places where a movie crew would not be allowed to film, or manage to film. The movie Speed Race used 10,000 bubbles shot around the world -- covering far more locations than a movie crew could have afforded to go.
There's a pretty technical interview in VRMag with Dennis Martin who created the virtual locations for Speed Racer, and one with John Gaeta, special effects supervisor. He says:
We realized that we would need to create a department that had never existed inside a standard film production before, and we called this department "the world unit": its job was to basically capture thousands of these bubbles around the world. So...we set this up.
Eventually I can see a market for location bubbles developing. You want the inside of the Sistine Chapel ready to shooting? How about a location at sunset atop Machu Picchu. Either one is yours for $1,000, or $100 even - cheaper than any visit could be. Someday there'll be an istockbubbles.com.
Poptimistic
In a recent Boing Boing interview special effects guru John Gaeta dropped a fantastic new word: Poptomistic.
Poptimistic is not his coinage; it seems to be circulating in the design and style world, but I think it perfectly captures the upbeat, day-glo brightness of a technicolor future. It manages to contain many of the optimistic strands of the digiterati, and the pop masses. It says: technology that works!
The new pace-setting film Speed Racer (which Gaeta worked on) is poptomistic.
It is the opposite of the distopian Blade Runner, even though both are visually outrageous and seminal. The overlook sci-fi cult favorite Fifth Element was slightly poptimistic.
The book of Japanese street fashions called Fruits is poptimistic.
So were many of the early issues of Wired magazine.
And as far as I am concerned the entire instant city of Burning Man is poptimistic.
Poptimistic is super-saturated richness, hyper-realism, brightly lit in even the furthest corners, up tempo, and generally positive.
What else is poptimistic?
Total Personlization Needs Total Transparency
Writing in the Guardian, Seth Finklestein says:
We cannot expect that having large warehouses of data on individuals will be free from unintended consequences, especially when there are incentives to try to build highly detailed models of everyone's lives. The price of total personalisation is total surveillance.
I have a different phrasing:
The price of total personalization is total transparency.
Transparency suggests a more active role, rather than an imposed view. You have to BE transparent. And of course, it is impossible to have total personalization with perfect knowledge.
of us. 
800 CDS
Part documentary and part how-to. A struggling musician uses his PC to produce his own album and winds up with a stack of 800 CDs in his apartment. Now what? How does he get anyone to buy them? He turns his camcorder on, and records his journey into music promotion and small time marketing. He tries flyers, bar gigs, street corner handouts. Eventually he goes to a seminar for indie music promotion, and for the rest of the documentary he records the results of following what he learns at the seminar. It's a good crash course in Music Marketing 101, perfect for any indie band. You really should hear what works. I think there are enough general purpose lessons that any artist should watch this and learn. There's no formula. The film's seminar leader can't repeat too many times: it's all about tapping into the inner authentic you, doing things in a way that is appropriate for you and your creations. Following this injunction, the musician-filmmaker does sell out his 800 CDs by the end of the film. Now he has a stack of 800 DVDs of this indie film to unload, but he knows how to do that. For example, he got one to me.
-- KK
800 CDs
Chris Valenti,
2007, 84 min.
DVD, $30
Available from the 800 CDS website
Getting Paid
Making money from films
Scott Kirsner has compiled an online list of the best ways to sell your video creations online. Everyone is making video, but few figure out how to sell them. Kirsner gives you 21 different sites that pay videomakers and dissects the monetary deal each one offers. I haven't found anything as useful anywhere else. It is the equivalent of the first version of a "Writer's Market" for digital video producers. This list is free, part of a longer downloadable e-book he hopes you will buy, the Future of Web Video. I did; the rest of the book is a bargain for anyone serious about peddling a video of whatever length. I hope he keeps the list updated.
-- KK
Getting Paid: Sites that Help Filmmakers and Video Producers Make Money
Free
Available from Scott Kirsner
Related items previously reviewed in Cool Tools:
Spiderbrace Video Camera Stabilizer
The Complete Animation Course * The Animation Book
How Accurate Are Personal Genome Tests?
I've had my DNA sequenced by 2 of the 3 companies now offering this service to the paying public. I purchased the tests for 23andMe and Iceland-based deCode. I am still plodding my way through the results -- it's sort of an education. One question I had was how well do the two results matched? I give the same DNA to both companies; the results ideally should be identical. DeCode claimed to test for 1,000,000 SNPs and 23andMe for 500,000, so the problem of lining all these results up to see what differs is not trivial. Luckily another user has just done this.
Antonio Oliveira also used both 23andme and deCode. He writes in his new blog:
In order to determine the accuracy of the genome profile provided by 23andMe and deCODEme I arranged to be genotyped by both companies and wrote a computer program to compare the results. The downloaded files contains 576,105 snips in the case of 23andMe and 1,013,349 snips for deCODE. After removing the no-calls and matching the two files by SNP identification, 560,299 snips were present in both files. The comparisson revealed 23 cases in which the results do not agree.
Oliveira made a chart of his results, categorized by chromosome.
The 23 errors makes the agreement between the two sets of data about 99.995% accurate, or an error rate of .005%, which is pretty good for medicine. A better test might be to repeat the test on the same DNA, but I assume the manufactures of the chip have done that. The 23 "unequal" SNPs caught here in disagreement are not SNPs currently associated with any diseases, so these particular errors are inconsequential. I don't know if there are location biases in the errors, but presumably errors can appear in significant locations -- at that very low rate. However if your computer had the same error rate, you'd notice.
Ghost Bikes
Ghost Bikes appear in the spot where a cyclist is killed or struck.
The ghost bike above is reputed to be a photo of the first one made by Patrick Van Der Tuin, in St. Louis in October, 2003. A stripped down skeletal junk bike is painted white, chained to a post, and marked with sign, flowers and other memorial tributes. Now the ritual has spread to other cities in the US and Europe. They are sadly gaining in numbers as more cyclists are hurt or killed, usually by the body of an automobile.
Tour of World Cities at Night
Astronauts have accumulated a database of 400 photos of the world's cities at night taken from the space station. A small gallery and account of this effort reveals some interesting views. The pictures were shot from a make-shift adjustable camera holder that compensates for the rapid movement of the space station to produce sharp, clear portraits. These new images are a magnitude clearer than the oft-seen mosaic picture of the world at night. The camera tracker was cobbled from extra parts "found" in the space station. Cities on different continents have distinctive identifying signatures at night due to the local type of lighting, and the cities' cultural origins. The brightest spot on our planet at night today is the strip at Las Vegas.
Las Vegas strip, Feb. 4, 2008 with a 400 mm lens.
The cities of Jiddah and Mecca, Saudi Arabia, are connected by a well-lit pilgrim road.
This wonderful tour of world cities at night is well worth watching.
Keynoting at the SF Film Festival
I don't often get to speak at a public venue in my home turf, so I am alerting readers to an upcoming event. This Sunday I am doing the State of Cinema talk at the San Francisco Film Festival. I plan on speaking about the future that is "beyond moving pictures." That's a clumsy way to say I'll be making some wild half-baked speculations about where film, video, technology, photography, text and digital hoo-ha will all converge at some unspecified time in the future. If you'd like to see me make a fool of myself, the talk will be at 1pm at the Clay Theater on Fillmore. I think tickets are $20. Details here.
The Triumph of Experience
Here's an insight I find useful:
If you want to buy happiness you are much better off buying an experience rather than a thing. That's because a thing like a car, new clothes, or cool gadget will always wear down, break down over time, while an experience, like going to the Galapagos, or a great concert, will only improve over time. You'll always have it (Paris, bunjee jumping, that meal) forever. In the long term an experience delivers more happiness per dollar.
Oh, and warm puppies (and children) are experiences, not things.
That wisdom is my phrasing of Daniel Gilbert, of "Stumbling on Happiness", interviewed by the Times, pointed to via Mark Hurst at, naturally enough, Good Experience.
Whole
Whole is a long stare at a disturbing psychological abnormality wherein the afflicted feel an extreme need to amputate a perfectly good, working limb. From childhood the subjects in this film "knew" this limb was not really part of them, and removing its alien presence becomes an obsession. Some can map the alien border on the limb down to a millimeter. Most will get the part amputated one way or the other, or die doing it, and some do die. Those who succeed in amputation (often by deceit) feel happy and whole for the first time in their lives. It's a hard film to forget. There's no gore, but a lot of exposed psyches. This is far from a perfect documentary -- too many questions are left unanswered -- but it is powerful in its simplicity. It does what I always hope a documentary will do: move you to a place you have never been before. The place in this case is the idea that amputating a good limb is a good idea. It moved me several inches closer in understanding this bizarre compulsion.
-- KK
Whole
Melody Gilbert
2007, 55 min.
DVD, $22
Rent from Netflix
Available from Amazon
The Case Against 1000 True Fans
My 1000 True Fans post provoked much discussion on other blogs. One blogger mentioned in passing that Brian Austin Whitney had suggested a very similar idea a few years ago. I had not heard Whitney, nor his proposition, and I missed this reference while researching, but I am impressed with how convergent our ideas are. Whitney organized Just Plain Folks, a community for independent artists. Writing on New Year's Eve 2004, Whitney said,
I have a notion that we're turning a corner (or experiencing a swing in the pendulum) where an artist who focuses on a smaller number of fans and serves them with a high level of direct interaction and communication will be the new model for success, even in the face of new technology and the shift in old school music business procedures. I think a new definition of success will be the artist who has 5000 passionate fans worldwide who spend 20-30 dollars a year on your creative output.
Four months later, on tax day, blogging musician Scott Andrew picked up Whitney's notion and expanded on it under the title of 5000 Fans.
Brian pointed out that an artist who has 5000 hardcore fans to give him or her $20 each year — be if from CDs, ticket sales, merchandise, donations, whatever — stands to make $100K per year, more than enough to quit the day job and still have health insurance and a decent car.
Now, 5000 is a big number, but not that big. That’s like, what, one-eighth of an average baseball stadium? And you might not even need that many. Here’s an exercise: take your own salary, pre-taxes, and divide it by 20. If you were to quit your job right now and start living as a full-time musician, poet or author, that’s how many fans you’d need, spending $20 each year to support your art. So, if you’re making $30K yearly, you’d need 1500 paying fans each year to replace your salary. And it gets better if you’re willing to take a pay cut. In Washington state, where I live, a person working for minimum wage would only need around 700 paying fans.
The attraction of 5000 Fans Theory is that the numbers, while still large, are very much attainable. You really don’t need millions of fans across the globe to be a career artist, just a few thousand who actually care. And: the committment to find them.
Like Whitney and Andrew, I think there is something important and liberating in seeking a finite attainable number of passionate fans rather than hoping for a rare best-selling career backed by millions of folks who have just heard about you. The problem is that while investigating the data for my thesis, I was unable to find much that could convince me that anyone is actually supporting themselves with 1000 or even 5000 True Fans now. I did get hard financial information from seven creators, in various arts, who are currently supporting themselves in some manner, and to some degree, with True Fans. I got a lot of partial information from about 2 dozen other artists, but these incomplete profiles were difficult to evaluate consistently, so I have not plotted them. The results are displayed in this table:
Going left to right, the chart lists the type of artist, how many True Fans they think they have, how much each fan spends on the artist in a year, the total annual yield of the True Fans, the percentage of their total income the artist estimates this is, the number of years they have been relying on True Fans, and what they actually sell to the fans.
What my research tells me: there are very few artists making their entire living selling directly to True Fans. The few that are, are selling high-priced goods, like paintings, rather than low-priced goods like CDs. But there are many that partially fund their livelihood with direct True Fans. However, most of these artists make it very clear in their notes to me: It takes a lot of time to find, nurture, manage, and service True Fans yourself. And, many artists don't have the skills or inclination to do so. The fact that very few creators wholly sustain themselves with direct True Fans may be because it is a job few want to do for very long.
True-fan-dom is also certainly not a goal that very many creators have life-long yearnings for, which may be another reason few are doing it. Who dreams of having only 1000 True Fans instead of making a record that goes platinum, or penning a best-seller? Nobody. At not yet.
But ever the optimist, I am heartened that with some work, it is possible to find partial support from direct True Fans. Micro patronage has always been an option, and indeed a part of, most artist's livelihood. What is different now is the reach and power of technology, which makes it much easier to match up an artist with the right passionate micro patrons, keep them connected, serve them up created works, get payment from them directly, and nurture their interest and love. In previous generations the hefty transaction costs of doing all this made living off of True Fans impossible in practice. My chart shows that it is now possible in practice, though very few are doing it extensively. I think as role models emerge, as business models shift, and as technology continues to lower the transaction costs, more artists will avail themselves of this path. Time will tell.
Jaron Lanier at the piano at a house concert, a choice venue for True Fans.
Let me leave this topic with one last challenge. This comes from my friend Jaron Lanier, himself a musician (and inventor of virtual reality). Jaron has been researching a similar space as True Fans, and as I have, he is also seeking actual cases of "them that is doing it." He did not find many claiming to be doing it. In fact Jaron concludes that at this moment, most of those musicians making a living in the new direct-fan environments are musicians who made a name first in the traditional mediums of labels, CDs, contracts, or TV, commercial sponsorship. Jaron is investigating only musicians, and his definition of the type of emerging musician he is looking for goes like this:
The musician’s career is not a legacy of the old system (such as Radiohead). The musician has not merely gotten a lot of exposure, but is earning a living wage. I’ll define a living wage as a predictable income sufficient to raise a child. Finally, most of the musician’s income derives from sources that would still be robust in an “open” world that is highly friendly to massive, unregulated file sharing. These include live performances, paid ads on the musician’s website, merchandising, and paid downloads (like iTunes), but does not include label contracts, movie soundtrack placement, and other revenue streams that rely on old, declining media.
Jaron claims that he has not found a single musician that meets this definition. In other words, he claims that there are no musicians who have risen to a successful livelihood within the new media environment. None. No musician who is succeeding solely on the generatives I outline in Better Than Free. No musician born digital, and making a living in the new media.
I bet Jaron there might be three musicians (or bands) out there who meet his definition, but I did not know who they were.
To prove Jaron wrong, simply submit a candidate in the comments: a musician with no ties to old media models, now making 100% of their living in the open media environment.
If none are offered, I surrender the case to Jaron.
McLuhan, Web 2.0 Master
Marshal McLuhan was a remarkable soothsayer. He could spout off the most amazing proverbs, riddles, one-liners and contemporary koans. In a moment of zanity, I designated McLuhan as Wired's Patron Saint on the masthead of the first issue, and the moniker stuck. The nickname is somewhat an inside joke because McLuhan was very Catholic. And he worked much like an anointed oracle. He'd lay on a couch and recite ideas while his disciples recorded what he said.
I recently came across a perceptive McLuhan quote via Andrew Keen's Cult of the Amateur:
In the 1950's Marshall McLuhan proposed a reality television show in which corporations would present their major problems to a mass audience. "For every expert idea that arises inside an organization," McLuhan advised executives, "the public has a thousand better ideas than you ever heard of."
This eerily parallels the current dogma of Web 2.0. In fact, McLuhan's statement is almost the canonical definition of crowdsourcing. The key difference, is that in McLuhan's day, the thousand of better ideas from people you never heard of were unattainable in practice. They were out there, but there was not efficient way to harness them.
As Clay Shirky explains in his brilliant book new "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations", published 50 years after McLuhan, this is what the new social media of Web 2.0 changes. It lowers the costs of finding, matching and exploiting those McLuhan-ish loose ideas out in the marketplace, and makes them actionable. Shirky writes:
Because of transaction costs, organizations cannot afford to hire employees who only make one important contribution -- they need to hire people who have good ideas [for them] day after day. Yet as we know, most people are not so prolific, and in any given field many people have only one or a few good ideas, just as most contributors [on Flickr] documenting the Mermaid Parade or Hurricane Katrina contribute only one photo each. .. As a result, many good ideas (or good photos or good music) are simply inaccessible in an institutional framework...As Bill Joy, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, once put it, "No matter who you are, most of the smart people work for someone else." What the open source model does is to allow those people to work together.
Shirky's book is filled with more succinctly argued points like this. I recommend it. And there's always more McLuhan. He's usually right and wrong at the same time. This is from a 1965 New York article by Tom Wolfe called "What If He is Right?"
For that matter-the drop-out generations will even get rid of the cars, says McLuhan. They will work at home, connected to the corporation, the boss, not by roads or railroads, but by television. They will relay information by closed-circuit two-way TV and by computer systems. The great massive American rush-hour flow over all that asphalt surface, going to and from work every day, will be over. The hell with all that driving. Even shopping will be done via TV. All those grinding work-a-daddy cars will disappear. The only cars left will be playthings, sports cars. They'll be just like horses are today, a sport. Somebody over at General Motors is saying -- What if he is right?
Self-Generating Money vs. Productive Wealth
Steve Talbot, a wise neo-Amish philosopher and author of Netfuture, asks a very insightful question in his latest issue:
Why does a certain obvious distinction not figure more centrally in economic theorizing - namely, the distinction between the application of capital in order to increase that capital itself, and its application in order to achieve something worthwhile in the world? Or, more simply: why do we not distinguish between using money to make money, or using it to do meaningful work?
Yes, it requires a little subtlety to sustain the distinction between the pursuit of monetary gain and a striving to accomplish something worthwhile. But economists are nothing if not subtle, and the task is hardly beyond them. And in this matter the underlying difference at issue, however subtle its playing out in particular circumstances, is in principle as dramatic as it could possibly be. Everyone can immediately recognize the incompatibility of the two stances.
Moreover, money chasing its own tail sounds rather like the very definition of an economic bubble. Untethered to reality, such money will follow any scheme that is, for the time being, profitable. It matters little whether the scheme involves subprime mortgages or an investment plan based on the monthly, weekly, or even daily upslopes and downslopes of a stock market graph. When the immediate connection between money and useful work is in this way severed, we lose the means to distinguish a sound enterprise from a bubble - as in fact virtually all economists failed to foresee the current crisis. This is not so much a failure of foresight as acquiescence in economic realities that make foresight impossible. No matter how assiduously regulators seek to address previous excesses by strapping safeguards around the economic balloon of our economy, the money-seeking investor will be driven to invent ever new strategies and the balloon will simply bulge outward in new and novel places.
Somehow the fiction that profit automatically translates into real accomplishment, into real value for society, prevails no matter how evident its fallacy - no matter how evident the truth that, for example, one can make at least as much money selling cocaine as selling penicillin. Moreover, bubbles, which economists have never found any agreed-upon way to explain, continue to occur, and they always involve the disastrous absence of real value in favor of vacuous, mathematical profit (to which investors easily become addicted). It's about time we faced this fact squarely, and explored the significance of the inevitable disconnect between the mere drive for return on investment and the effort to accomplish something substantial in the world. And then we will need to ask ourselves further: how can we as a society discourage this disconnect rather than strive to maximize it as we have now been doing for many years.
Talbot is doing more than asking a rhetorical question about making a distinction between these two modes of money making. He would like ways to diminish, if not eliminate, the cycles of wealth by wealth, or what we might call derivative wealth, vs. productive wealth.
I don't know enough economics to know whether there are technical terms for this distinction, or whether anyone else has thought about it. Pointers welcomed.
One Gate, Multiple Locks
What do you do if you have a locked gate but more than one person is permitted to open it? You don’t want multiple keys, in case one is lost/stolen. Then all the keys may need replacing. Instead you can have multiple locks, chained into one long lock. Open any lock to open the gate. This way each person needs to manage their key (and lock). I’ve seen various installations on this solution in different parks in the Bay Area.
Your Eternal Webpage
Who will care for your data when you are gone? I received this note from reader Ed Sona:
I've been thinking for quite a while about how much data I will have when I die. I'm 38 now and have about 1TB. I can only image how much I will have in, say, 40 years. How much of this data will be preserved and how will it be preserved? Who will have access to it? Those in the limelight will have plans made, but what about your average person in rural Indiana? Certainly every lifetime has value.
It's a good question. (That's an ancient Philippinio burial urn above; perfect for your digital coffin.)
Since I just finished digitizing my small stock of home movies (on analog tape), I filled up a 1 terabyte disc in a matter of one week. I have another 2 TBs of storage and backup of my Mac running on spinning discs in my studio. They are filled with photos and music and email and InDesign files. I have another set of backups in DVD format sitting on shelves somewhere else, in case my studio blows up.
In our home we have long rows of DVD movies and a whole archive of movies on VHS tape. Imagine if all of them were on my computer, in at least under my name in a data storage center. All this storage could easily reach a petabyte at the end of one's life.
But I am guessing that in the long run, few of us will store commercial works, such as movies, TV, music on our own machines. I mean who is storing YouTube videos on their hard discs? We don't because it's always there, so why bother? Eventually we'll subscribe (pay modestly) to the Jukebox in Sky, which will have EVERY movie made, all music of the world, and any video we'd want to see. We dip into it whenever we want, for as long as we want. Making your own copies will seem as senseless as making copies of YouTube (with some very few exceptions).
So how much data can one person GENERATE in a life?
If you are lifelogging -- recording everything you do -- quite a lot. Still, it is a finite amount. I guess it will settle out to some pocketable size. Then what?
Do you bury a copy with your body? Or burn both? Or do you leave it to your descendents to manage and keep online?
I have never thought about it before -- do I want this website to outlast me? Should my webpage keep shining in the Machine, down through the ages?
Why not?
I'd love to hear what others' plans are. (kk at kk dot org)
BTW, when Google et al cross the point of offering free life-time storage, there may be a market then for paid beyond-this-life-time storage.
The Reality of Depending on True Fans
I have been researching new business models for artists working in the low end of the long tail. How can one make a living in a micro-niche? Is it even possible, particularly in this realm of no-cost copies? I proposed the idea of artists directly cultivating 1000 True Fans, which I wrote up in a previous post. It was a nice thesis that got a lot of blog-attention, but it was short on actual data. I solicited real numbers from those who wrote me, and I also sought out others who had a reputation for thriving on a dedicated fan base, and asked them to share their experiences.
One of the artists I contacted was musician Robert Rich, whom I knew only as a fan (but not a True Fan). Rich was an early pioneer in ambient music, and a force in the Bay Area new age music scene in the early 1980s. He's prolific, issuing about 40 albums in the past 20 years, many in collaboration with other ambient musicians. Among his earliest albums was "Numena", which made his reputation, and among his latest is "Eleven Questions", which was recorded with colleagues in a seven day burst at his home studio.
Robert Rich was one of the first professional musicians to start dealing directly with his fans via his own website, which is why I contacted him. He wrote an extremely candid, insightful and thorough reply to my query. He tempers my enthusiasm for 1000 True Fans with a cautionary realism borne from actually trying the idea. The summary of his experience is so pertinent and detailed that I felt was worth posting in full. With his permission, it follows, slightly edited.
I agree strongly with your basic thesis [of a thousand True Fans], that artists can survive on the cusp of the long tail by nurturing the help of dedicated fans; but perhaps I can modulate your welcome optimism with a light dose of realism, tempered by some personal reflections.
I have operated on a premise similar to yours for almost 30 years now, before the internet made the idea more feasible. I wanted to make the sort of uncompromising quiet introspective music that moved me deeply when I first heard others do it back in the mid '70's. Because of the lingering aftermath of the popularization of psychedelic culture, certain memes leaked out from the avant garde into pop culture, and publishers from the old model were willing to try marketing experimental art-forms to the mainstream. Thus, into the mind of a suburban adolescent growing up in Silicon Valley, merged the unlikely combination of European space-music, minimalism, baroque, world music and industrial/punk, most of which received the benefits of worldwide distribution and marketing - even though we all considered it "underground" at the time.
That means, I grew up as a benefactor of the old system, before demographic marketing analysis helped to cripple the spread of radical thought across subcultural boundaries. I realized from this leakage of experimental culture into the mainstream, that I wanted to be an artist like the ones that moved me deeply. I wanted to speak my personal truth, regardless of the cost. I wanted to serve the role of a modern shaman, while embracing the complexities and ironies of our modern world.
When one sets a course like this, one quickly ponders the financial realities of obscurity. I remember telling myself when I was about 15, "If I can move one person deeply, that's better than entertaining thousands of people but leaving nothing meaningful behind." That's the long tail talking. I suppose when you multiply this idea by a thousand, you have your thesis.
I began self-publishing my music in 1981, struggling to get paid from slippery distributors, trying to keep track of all the shops where I had my albums on consignment. I was relieved over the years when a couple small labels showed interest in helping me, and I could avail myself of their infrastructure. I think I benefitted immensely from this exposure, through labels like Hearts of Space and smaller ones in Europe. I feel in retrospect like I snuck in under the collapsing framework of independent distribution, at a time where small companies could cast a medium-sized fishing net, to catch the interest of listeners who would otherwise never have known they liked this type of music.
If it weren't for that brief window of exposure, I doubt I would have my "1,000 True Fans" and I would probably have kept my day job. If I hadn't also developed skills in audio engineering and mastering, I would be hungry indeed. If it weren't for the expansion of the internet and new means of distribution and promotion, I would have given up a long time ago. In this sense, I agree wholeheartedly that new technologies have opened the door for artists like me to survive. But it's a constant struggle.
The sort of artist who survives at the long tail is the sort who would be happy doing nothing else, who willingly sacrifices security and comfort for the chance to communicate something meaningful, hoping to catch the attention of those few in the world who seek what they also find meaningful. It's a somewhat solitary existence, a bit like a lighthouse keeper throwing a beam out into the darkness, in faith that this action might help someone unseen.
Now in my mid-forties, I still drive myself around the country for a few months every year or so, playing small concerts that range in audience from 30 to 300 people. I'm my own booking agent, my own manager, my own contract attorney, my own driver, my own roadie. I sleep on people's couches, or occasionally enjoy the luxuries of Motel 6.
In your article you quote the term "microcelebrities" which rings ironically true to me. I suppose I experience a bit of that, when some of the 600 people whom I see on tour come up to me after a show and tell me that my music is very important to them, that it saved their life, that they can't imagine why I'm not performing in posh 3,000 seat theaters rather than this art gallery or that planetarium or library.
In reality the life of a "microcelebrity" resembles more the fate of Sisyphus, whose boulder rolls back down the mountain every time he reaches the summit. After every tour I feel exhausted but empowered by the thought that a few people really care a lot about this music. Yet, a few months later all is quiet again and CD/downoad sales slow down again. If I take the time to concentrate for a year on what I hope to be a breakthrough album, that time of silence widens out into a gaping hole and interest seems to fade. When I finally do release something that I feel to be a bold new direction, I manage only to sell it to the same 1,000 True Fans. The boulder sits back at the bottom of the mountain and it's time to start rolling it up again.
So let's look a bit at the finances. If I can make about $5-$10 per download or directly sold CD, and I sell 1000, I clear a maximum of $10,000 for that year's effort. That's not a living. Let's say, after 20 concerts I net about $10,000 for three to four months worth of full time effort. That's not a living.
In my case I'm lucky. I can can augment that paltry income through some of the added benefits of "microcelebrity" including licensing fees for sample clearance and film use rights, sound design libraries, and supplemental income from studio mastering and engineering fees. So, I make about as much money as our local garbage man; and I don't smell as bad after a day of work. (Note that if copyright laws vanished then much of that trickle of supplemental income would dry up, so you might imagine I have mixed feelings about both sides of the free-information debate.)
Thanks to the internet, I am making more money now, selling directly to 1000 True Fans, than I was during the days on Hearts of Space selling 20,000 - 50,000 copies. But had I not benefitted from the immense promotional effort that it took for HOS to sell those albums, I probably wouldn't be surviving today as a full time artist.
I have about 600 "true fans" and 2000 seriously following listeners... more on the fringe perhaps. My database has about 3,000 names but I only hear from most of these people every few years. Occasionally someone new shows up and buys everything I ever made. It's not a simple answer. For example I know I have at least 500+ serious fans in Russia who never paid me for anything, because they get it all as bootlegs. My 4 or 5 "True Fans" in Russia inform me of these things. Many "fans" don't feel compelled to pay for the art that moves them, or perhaps they cannot pay because of economic circumstances or the inverse laws of convenience.
The number of incoming new "fans" roughly matches attrition, perhaps. I am certainly able to communicate more directly with each individual, but that also means I have less time in the day to actually create new art (half the day doing email is not unusual.) Digital distribution seems to lower perceived value and desirability. Ease of access reduces any sense that it's special or personal. Compressed audio quality and lack of physical artwork create the sense of a lowering in collectible value. I try hard to counteract these forces with high quality audio and informing listeners about the importance of the source... but people don't always think about the details.
A further caveat: it's easy to get trapped into the expectations of these True Fans, and with such a tenuous income stream, an artist risks poverty by pushing too far beyond the boundaries of style or preconceptions. I suppose I have a bit of a reputation for being one of those divergent - perhaps unpredictable - artists, and from that perspective I see a bit of a Catch 22 between ignoring those expectations or pandering to them. If we play to the same 1000 people, and keep doing the same basic thing, eventually the Fans become sated and don't feel a need to purchase this year's model, when it's almost identical to last year's but in a slightly different shade of black. Yet when the Fans' Favorite Artist starts pushing past the comfort zone of what made them True Fans to begin with, they are just as likely to move their attention onwards within the box that makes them comfortable. Damned if you do or don't.
I don't want to be a tadpole in a shrinking puddle. When the audience is so small, one consequence of specialization is extinction. I'll try to explain.
Evolutionary biology shows us one metaphor for this trap of stylistic boundaries, in terms of species diversity and inbreeding (ref. E.O. Wilson). When a species sub-population becomes isolated, its traits start to diverge from the larger group to eventually form a new species. Yet under these conditions of isolation, genetic diversity can decrease and the new environmentally specialized species becomes more easily threatened by environmental changes. The larger the population, the less risk it faces of inbreeding. If that population stays connected to the main group of its species, it has the least chance of overspecialization and the most chance for survival in multiple environments.
This metaphor becomes relevant to Artists and True Fans because our culture can get obsessed with ideas of style and demographic. When an artist relies on such intense personal commitmen from such a small population, it's like an animal that relies solely upon the fruit of one tree to survive. This is a recipe for extinction. Distinctions between demographics resemble mountain ranges set up to divide one population from another. I prefer a world where no barriers exist between audiences as they define themselves and the art they love. I want a world of mutts and cross-polinators. I would feel more comfortable if I thought I had a broader base of people interested in my work, not just preaching to the choir.
Indeed the internet is a tool that allows artists to broaden their audience, and allows individuals in the audience to broaden their tastes, to explore new styles, to seek that which surprises them - if they want surprise, that is. The internet can also give us tools more narrowly to target specific demographics and to strengthen those assumptions that prevent acceptance of new ideas, nudging people towards algorithmically determined tastes or styles. Companies can use demographic models and track people's search patterns to pander to their initial tastes and to strengthen those tastes, rather than broaden their horizons. This problem doesn't lie within the technology of the internet, but within the realities of capitalism and human psychology.
Like most technologies, the internet is morally neutral and we can better use its powers to assist the broadening of artistic expression, to assist minority artists to make a better living by communicating directly with their audience, to create tools that help people discover the surprising and iconoclastic, rather than to reinforce only that which supports their existing inclinations. Starving artists will probably remain starving, although perhaps with new tools to dig themselves a humble shelter; and as in the past, some of these artists will use those tools to build sand castles or works of great art.
-- Robert Rich
I am deeply grateful to Robert for his generous and courageous disclosure of his real-life finances. Very few of us are willing to do that. But the truth about money is powerful. In the coming days, I will report in summary the real-life True Fan economics that other willing artists have shared with me.