Mozilla went all tribal

This post is a reminder to use the Zen TV experiment more often.

I just ran part of this experiment (watching without sound) by accident on the video below. The messaging in this video (we are a tribe, take the land, shape the world) gets a somewhat odd twist in this video. This may have well appeared on an episode of Lost, but then the staring  eyes would have communicated a dangerous sect gathering their power.

The worst thing is: that’s exactly what Mozilla wanted to communicate.

I find it a bit scary, to say the least.

Firefox: Choose Independent – YouTube.

The Zen TV Experiment

1) Watch TV for 10 minutes and count the technical events.

What is a technical event? We’ve all seen TV cameras in banks and jewelry stores. A stationary video camera simply recording what’s in front of it is what I will call “pure TV.” Anything other than pure TV is a technical event: the camera zooms up, that’s a technical event; you are watching someone’s profile talking and suddenly you are switched to another person responding, that’s a technical event; a car is driving down the road and you also hear music playing, that’s a technical event. Simply count the number of times there is a cut, zoom, superimposition, voice-over, appearance of words on the screen, fade in/out, etc.

2) Watch any TV show for 15 minutes without turning on the sound.

For this, I simply muted the volume on the same show and watched the remainder.

3) Watch any news program for 15 minutes without turning on the sound.

4) Watch television for one half hour without turning it on.

 

This experiment was first proposed by Adam Shand who seems to have taken down or buried the article.

Why nerd culture must die

Thank you Pete Warden for the article Why nerd culture must die

As a musician/composer heavily reliant on copyright as a means of at least some form of power in relationship to my clients (tv production companies and tv stations mostly) and as a tech lover (since my days on the C64 who never really went into science, coding or engineering because music was the bigger love for me) for the past 10 years I’ve experienced the “wrath of the internet” first hand and in painful personal attacks. And what hurts most was, that I felt the dreams painted by the geeks where my dreams (open culture, removing the middle men, direct access) but then the geeks started to actively destroy my professional field (the one that lets me provide for my family) and at the same time ignored the writings on the wall (the steady decline in revenue and the loss of the middle class musician/composer due to piracy).

There was mockery, victim blaming, talk of a “new business model” that nobody really defined. Not even the really smart people in tech managed to come up with a “new model” that actually works for the lower and middle class musicians. For them, the best solution is still to sell an album (digital or physical) for roughly ten bucks.

Throughout those last 10 years the “ignoring outsiders and believing in ourselves” that I deeply admire and that I feel I`m a part of in my field has built up such a high barrier between otherwise like minded people (nerds and musicians are always visionaries, they recognize things that most people don’t). Even though I have built up a strong resistance for it, it still hurts the sensitive side in me.

Let us work on bridging that gap.

 

 

Rogerio Marques – Whole Lotta Love

a) who is that guy????

b) it makes me sad we no longer have a culture where playing music reflects a state of being and makes a statement in relation to the world. You can now just “perform” the breaking out of the norms on a nightly talk show for a minute, get the claps, laughs and wows but it leaves emptiness.

To add insult to injury the uploader (some Russian dude now raking in clicks and making money on top of a performance he had absolutely nothing to do with, but that`s a whole other discussion) filed this video under Comedy.

c) Not sorry for being a downer, I had to say it.

Rogerio Marques – YouTube.

Drugs and prostitution to be included in UK national accounts | Society | theguardian.com

Drugs and prostitution to be included in UK national accounts | Society | theguardian.com.

Are you kidding me with this stupidity? Who checks these numbers? Who reports their drug sale? How accurate are prostitution reports?

This can be used as a number to just get the GDP to where it looks good and the bonds don’t loose their value. A gigantic scam if you ask me.

Italy announced this as well recently.

A recipe for disaster and I’m mortified.