Google Plus Grim

If I were to hazard a guess, 100% of the people who have seen Craigslist Joe and know me well have suggested I give something similar a go.

I would kind of make the argument that I already have/am, but that's not what I'm trying to write about right now :)

I've seen about half of the actual movie, and it's great for a documentary. My take away thus far, however, has been this:  It's because of the camera. It's the power of the panopticon at play.

So - my recommendation to you, should you become homeless - is to find a partner and a video camera. I'd take this further if I had the pull, and start a campaign to donate Google Glass to the homeless - though I'm not sure how such a project would be negatively impacted by the tradition of 'rolling the homeless' (as depicted in 'The Warriors' video game for the PS2.

As for Google Plus Grim - I'm trying to do it without the day-to-day uncertainty, in my own special way. I'm documenting without making a documentary.

Full Moon Rant

Imagine, if you will - that right here you can click to play the scene from Game of Thrones where Tyrion and the Varys play "who has the power". You can thank your precious intellectual property trumps the first amendment for me not being able to conveniently share that experience with you.
Bottom Line - Current Intellectual Property laws hinder my ability to communicate and it pisses me off.

Wrapping the Truth in Fiction
That's another thing that sucks about trying to communicate with people. To avoid triggering your cognitive dissonance avoidance, writers have to wrap the truth in fiction and hope the seed of truth hidden within takes root. I used to want to do that, be a writer - an author. Things have gotten too bad for that though, so I'm just going to call it like I see it.

Power is where we believe it lies. I'll paraphrase the Game of Thrones reference since I can't just play it for you.

Say you have the president, the pope, and a guy and his boss in the same room. The guy has a gun, and the other 3 all tell him to shoot the other 2. Who gets shot depends completely on what the guy with the gun believes. For the Pope's sake, let's hope the guy is Catholic.

This is how it is. This is why perfectly nice people are flying robot planes and launching explosives at children. Because of what the guy behind the joystick believes. This is why obedience and following orders is so stressed in the military (that, and if the other guys are obedient and your team isn't, it gets messy).

Point is, whatever you believe defines your reality. It really irritates me to no end that so many of you choose to live in a world where making a sex tape gets you a TV show.

Unwrapped
We live in a world where we believe in property. Think of the world as a big house, and you're getting the Cinderella treatment. People use up all the hot water while having you shovel coal into the furnace for them. This is because you believe what's necessary for this to be possible. Basically, that if you stop shoveling coal, you'll be made to suffer. Can't really blame you though, you were born into it.

You live in a world where people who are technically equivalent to you - awareness inside a bag of meat - get to decide how much money there is in the world. Then, they loan it to the people playing Government, who then does all sorts of bullshit with it. Through a series of groups of people playing pretend - I'll play the CEO, you play the wage-slave you get to do the work and they get to reap the benefits. 

What the hell is wrong with everyone? The way things work now, we end up with Child Pornography, and Kids getting blown up by robot airplanes. WTF?

The game you're playing is stupid. I was born into it though, and quitting early is poor sportsmanship - but come on people, let's play a game that's less shitty.

The Evolution of the Blogosphere

And who are you, the proud lord said,

that I must bow so low?

Only a cat of a different coat,

that's all the truth I know.

In a coat of gold or a coat of red,

a lion still has claws,

And mine are long and sharp, my lord,

as long and sharp as yours.  - source:  http://goo.gl/Dpf5vt

+Demian Farnworth is apparently having a go at +Mike Elgan 's stance on blogging on Google+ versus the traditional blog.

This breaks down to the traditional either/or scenario - which some old guy in a youtube video says are a great opportunity to answer with both. So - how the hell can we get to the point where we can do both?

We apparently can't do both now, so let's look to the future. To look to the future, let's look at the evolution so far and try to predict the direction in which it is evolving. Where 'it' is the way content creators distribute their content (and how others redistribute it).

The blogosphere was a manifestation of the network's ability to eliminate publishing middle-men. This trend has continued. Google+ has created a means of closing the gap between creator and consumer, while at the same time limiting the creators means of monetizing his or her own content. Meanwhile, they profit from data collection - whether or not they use it to sell product to advertisers or to aid the government for other benefits is somewhat irrelevant.

Google is just another middleman that will be replaced as the evolution progresses. As both creators and consumers, we desire the ability to customize experiences. Do we really want to go to different social networks? I don't see why a single open-sourced portal can't display all of my content as I prefer it to be displayed.

At some point, we'll realize that the value in our collective data is valuable. The content we create and the sharing of content are statistically significant data. If Google can sell that information, then shouldn't we be getting a cut?

So, an open-sourced hub for all content that sells the aggregate data and partitions the proceeds to the participants of the hub.

How far are we really from the point when the average joe can render the movies in his head to a digital format he can share on the network? 5 years? 10?