Push Things Forward

We're at a cultural standstill that started sometime in the late 1990s. The web has more potential than any other medium in human history, and here we are chuckling at ten second blurry videos of imbeciles getting smashed on the head with a cantaloupe. Television is the opposite of plumbing: a service that pumps shit into your house. The web is the ultimate timewaster. Nobody is asking for anything better, but in the back of our heads we all know we deserve better than these two systems.

To be specific, today's problem is "user generated content". Not because it is user-generated, but because it's completely disorganized. In old media, you have editors who say, "This is good, people should see it.". Now, we have "Most Viewed" pages. If you remove human intervention from focus group studies and market research, you get "Most Viewed" -- a system where the lowest common denominator of human interests are celebrated automatically; where the aggregated whims of an uncoordinated mob dictate our cultural touchstones; where the mindlessness of strangers is rebranded as "collective intelligence."

It's time to introduce a simple idea to the world: user generated editorial. Allow the people to organize the videos they create. This is so obviously necessary yet no one has done it -- probably because the people who run web video companies are would-be opportunists who do not create videos and therefore don't understand the needs of the creators -- the people who we rely on to make the videos we watch.

Vimeo is the only exception and we release Channels early next week.

Today, at the gym, I realized that we are all hanging down from the ground. People are tiny magnets strongly attracted by the Earth.

... This would mean: People and people have the same polarity, so they cannot be closely together. But what they do is try again and again.

(Mareen wrote that)