Tag Archives: culture

Bastille’s Bad Blood and Friendship

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I really enjoy the song Bad Blood by Bastille. It’s not the most amazing song out there but for some reason it really strikes a cord with me. I think it has to do with the course about how tightly things in our past bind us together. It reminds me of some of the stuff that ended up happening when I was younger. Things that when you have a meet up of those people that you end up talking about. One of them is a time when a friend and I were standing outside of Sheetz early in College. We were bullshitting with the woman working and she was really tired of working complaining about work. Well, my friend has a bit of an anarchist bent (or at least did) and said, yea we should just blow it the fuck up. He and she finished their cigarettes and we drove off thinking nothing more of it. A few days later I get a phone call asking about the terroristic threats. Which obviously didn’t happen.

Aside from events like that it also reminds me of all the people that I’ve lost through stupid things. One kid we wrote off after he didn’t show up for a bachelor party or the afterwedding party at the Cabin – he was the best man. We were pretty upset about it. However, some times you lose friends because of other friend’s disagreements. I’m thinking about two of the best buddies I knew in highschool and up through their argument. I’m not even sure of the details because it happened while I was in Europe and no one really talked to me about it other than saying not to talk to either of them about it.

This sucks. Our lives are both too short and too long to leave things things festering. We only have one life and we need to make the best of it. So in the case where a fight ruptures a friendship like that and impacts all relationships with each other, that’s something that needs to be dealt with. It’s one of those things that could very likely lead to a great deal of regret as we get older. When we’re in our 50s or 60s do we want some squabble to have ruined a great friendship? I don’t know.

Song just makes me really think about how our lives are bound together through collective stupidity in youth and how those are the strongest bonds you have. How, bad blood can poison a group of friends, and how some times we really do just need time to heal.

Video Games, not just for Kids

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So, today was one of those days where I had a few different topics that I wanted to write about. I had a request to write about video games. I’ve written one or two blogs about video games in the past. However, I think that there’s always more to be said about them.

I think it’s fair to say that video games are a bit of the red headed step child in the entertainment industry. They aren’t taken as seriously as movies and it’s not as culturally acceptable to geek out over video games as it is to geek out over movies (some movies) or television shows. However, I think that this is going to change and it’s not because of the video game designers and publishers.

I think that Twitch is going to drive to make video games more acceptable and shift video games location in culture. Through events like Intel’s championship series or DreamHack which is a collection of tournaments for games like DOTA 2, League of Legends, Star Craft, and many more, I believe that there is an opportunity for video games to reach an acceptance level akin to golf. For the most part these games are multiplayer and very team based. There are leagues, trading of players and everything else you would expect in a major league “sport.”

It’s not just these events, it’s the personalities that drive watching live streaming. As I’ve mentioned in the past I have a few friends that stream and there is a community that has sprung up around watching these guys play. It’s pretty awesome.

Through these streamers, I’ve been able to experience many more interesting games than I can actually play or even afford to play. This allows me to keep abreast of the video game landscape without having to really play (I play Civ V, Binding of Isaac, Super Meat Boy mostly). In the case where the streamers are playing single player games it’s similar to watching a movie with someone guiding the movie. It’s a lot of fun, especially since you’re able to have a conversation with the star and his fans all at the same time.

Furthermore, I think that video games have not been given enough credit for pushing the boundaries of technology. Game designers and players for PC together drive companies like Intel, AMD, and Nvidia to keep designing newer and more powerful products. Intel is able to make a massive profit on their platforms designed for gaming – they know it, they’ve changed their strategy a few times in regard to selling stand alone chips because of gamer’s demands. We should be praising the hardcore gamer because they are helping us continue to advance in one of the few bright spots in our economy.

Each video game community has it’s own quirks and idiosyncrasies, which can be seen in how new games are developed as well as in business practices for the developer. For example, Valve has several economists studying the naturally occurring economy around trading in games like TF2, I believe that through controlled economic settings like TF2 where there is no central control (Blizzard I’m looking at you!) unique economic conditions can emerge that will shape how the designers develop future releases in the game. This has been clearly shown in how Valve continually releases new hats (yes, hats).

Compared to Eve (a massive multiplayer online role playing space video game) TF2’s economic system is rudementary. In Eve you can buy, build, trade and develop true economic systems. Furthermore, it’s possible to see the effect of war and diplomatic missteps on the economy. Recently nearly $200k worth of money was wiped out because someone missed a monthly payment. It’s possible to see how various factions have recovered after a serious economic, material, and military shock hit the entire game.

Games are vital to our culture. We’ve always had both physical (sports) and mental (chess) games. I believe that video games are simply a new extension to both of those. Many games require you to think quickly and have quick moving fingers (Star Craft) while others are almost as passive as watching TV. Understanding the value of video games and the culture about them is important to understand how our culture can grow and develop in new ways.

Book Review: The People’s Platform: Taking back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

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I just finished reading “The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age” by Astra Taylor  I really found this book to be interesting. I believe it offered a very different critique on the digital age than Evegny Morozov’s “Click here to Save everything” where he focused on the arrogance of the algorithm and total solutionism of the movement, Taylor focused on the cultural cost of our digital economy. I think combined the philosophizing of Morozov with Taylor’s discussion of the value of culture and the economic forces behind these changes is an extremely powerful argument. Alone they are both excellent, but I think they offer balancing points that compliment each other well.

First of all, I don’t think everyone will like this book. I don’t think a lot of my readers will like large portions of the book. However, even the most libertarian will agree with some portions of it. I think that’s the power of this book. It’s not really fair to one side or the other, although is really obvious she has a bias – which she wears pretty proudly. Knowing this bias is there allows the reader to decide which portion is Occupy Wall street dreaming or which is really a problem (of course one can go too far either direction).

Taylor’s cultural argument is powerful because we are all part of that economy. We all consume cultural artifacts or perhaps, like myself, make them. The fact that these have been commoditzed to a cost of nothing while still valuable is something we deal with daily. The choice between pirating a movie, renting, streaming it on Netflix, or buying it all are choices we decide on a regular basis. I think that even the most hardcore pirate buys a lot of cultural goods.

Many of us, even if we don’t produce cultural goods, know someone that does. You might watch a video game streamer, you might have a friend or two that are in various bands, you might read my blog or another friend’s blog. All of these people want to use these artifacts to either live on or perhaps enhance their career in some fashion.

However, in the digital space most of the companies that share or distribute cultural activities are funded by ads. Twitch makes most of it money from ads, Google makes $50 billion/year on ads, Facebook makes the most money on an ad whenever a friend “Sponsors” that ad with or without our active agreement to “sponsor” the ad.

Taylor argues that we need to help develop a cultural public space that helps create value for other cultural goods that you may not actually consume (which is why I wrote this blog).

Many of the ideas in the book are anti-corporation, but not because they make money. Instead, it’s because they make money in ways that aren’t obviously ads and that control our cultural destiny. She is pro-net neutrality, she supports companies making profits from ads, but she argues for more transparency that an article is actually sponsored.

Her argument isn’t that we should tear down companies, but instead that we pull back some of the power that these companies have simply taken without any real conversation. We need to look at the ethics behind the algorithms they are using and understand their biases. We need to enable true conversations about these topics. Ad driven content leads to self-censorship and lower quality products.

Is this book perfect? Not by a long shot, but it really made me think about some topics and I think that we need to have more conversations about not just ads, but also about why companies behave the way they do. We need to find a better balance than we currently have.

I rate the book 5/5 for making me really think about topics

A retrospective, 250 posts and counting

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I’m on my 250th post. Quite the milestone, I haven’t done a retrospective post in a while about the history of my writing. I’ve tried a few different tact from the beginning and I’m happy to say that I’ve managed to gather a bit of a following on twitter, largely driven by my association with KBMOD, but I’ve found a decent number of my own through tweets and retweets.

My initial goal with this blog was to write about a lot of different highly technical topics that I felt that would have some sort of impact on people I know that might not really understand what’s going on. I’ve gotten a bit farther away from that as I’ve changed life situations. When I first started blogging I was in my master’s degree in the Netherlands, which really lent my writing a bit more of a scientific perspective. During the first year or so of my blogging (I’m on year 3 now), I frequently sited the scientific articles that I was reading for class. The important piece wasn’t that I was citing these writings, which I did at the time feel lent some weight to my writing, but was that I was actively and continually applying my education to real world situations.

I was hoping that this blog, along with my education, would help me find a policy position either in the Netherlands or in the US. This turned out not to have happened, which after about 6 months of looking for a job, while still living in the Netherlands, I quickly realized I needed to switch to looking for a job in my field of Business Process Improvement and/or Lean Six Sigma. This impacted my writing, because I got a job at AMD, where I tried to applied what I had learned from the University to a corporate position. I believe my writing reflected this to some extent. It was a frustrating year. My writing suffered, I reduced my blogging and tended to focus on writing more about how internet things rather than some of the other things I used to write.

Now I’m at yet another company and I’m struggling to figure out what I want to consistently write about. I’ve bounced around a bit – I tried a consistent schedule but quickly fell off the wagon. I’ve tried keeping up with current events, but I’ve found my interest in many of the topics to have waned. This has made writing much more difficult and caused me to bounce back and forth between topics and to be focusing more on cultural aspects rather than other technology, innovation, or science topics.

I’m not sure what that means for me or for the future of my writing. I’d love to have my readers to contribute suggestions or topics that they’d like me to write about. I think that’s a lot of fun and really helps direct my writing to topics my readers enjoy and are hoping to understand better.

I plan on writing about some topics related to two books I’m in the process of reading, People’s Platform and then Capital in the 21st Century. I’m hoping to help people understand the impact of the internet more and an economics book that a lot of policy makers are talking about. If you have any book recommendations shoot those at me too!

The Value of Culture

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A friend of mine sent me a link about the variety of dialects found in Pennsylvania, it’s a pretty cool read. The article basically argues that because of the number of dialects, 5 in total, Pennsylvania is one of the most interesting states in the US for linguists. It reminded me of whenever I first moved to the Netherlands. I made a few friends and they were always making fun of the Limburgians because Limburgese sounds really funny. It’s has a mixture of Dutch, German, Spanish, and other stuff, plus they say the Dutch words really funny. So I decided to play them a PIttsburghese song, they couldn’t understand a word in the song. They actually asked me if it was English.

Which brings me to my next point, the Netherlands, which is roughly half the size of PA, has 2 languages at least 5 dialects (Limburgese is on it’s way to being a third language). Sure the country has a lot more people 18 million vs. 12 million, but there’s a lot more diversity in their language than in PA. Which is pretty interesting – especially considering that they’ve kept this variety whenever they also know somewhere between 3-5 languages (Dutch, English, German, Spanish, French for example). One of the concerns of the Slate article about PA is that the folks that leave decide to lose their accents which isn’t the case in the Netherlands.

These are all part of the local culture and language is one of the best representations of a culture. The words that people use to describe things really influences the way they want to live. For example the Dutch word “Gezellig” (link explains how to say the word) doesn’t really have an English translation the closest being “warm and cozy” for a room, but can be used in many different contexts (most beyond my understanding of the application). This word kind of represents a goal of a gathering, house, or anything. I think it strongly influences who the Dutch are and who they want to be their friends. It’s embedded in their culture.

I’m currently reading a book called “People’s Platform” which has a huge emphasis on culture and the cultural enablers of the internet. The internet is both the best thing and worst thing that has ever happened to our culture. It’s fantastic because I can still find out about awesome bands from friends all over the world, but it’s also extremely isolating because of algorithms that shape how we find content from 3rd parties. It’s one of the reasons why I’ve heard people express the thoughts that people are the best at recommending a new band compared to Pandora.

We have the opportunity to expand our culture a little bit if we put forth the effort. However, that’s a lot of effort. It’s hard to find people you have things in common with on some platforms and it’s easier to just find the popular people and follow them. I’ve made the effort to keep Dutch connects on my twitter feed because I loved living there. I have intentionally followed many women because I want to see their opinions as well as a few minorities. However, for the most part they are fairly under represented. It’s tough, because you want things that interest you on your twitter feed and a lot of people are into very different things than I am.

Which begs the question, how do we ensure a robust culture in an environment where we and our algorithms are actively trying to homogenize the cultural goods we interact with? This isn’t an easy problem to answer especially since we like free goods on the internet. I stream Pandora for free (ads on my phone), I haven’t bought an actual song or album in years. I want to support bands, but I know so little goes to the actual band these days. For Twitch I support 2 people (kbmod and nipnops) because I know the money goes to them to help produce the content I love. However, even with all the people paying, it’s not enough to allow nipnops to live solely on this income.

I think that we should seriously consider a living wage for artists and entertainers. I believe there is a need to support content I don’t like because we need to make sure that people see it. If the Dutch don’t understand all aspects of Americans (they’d never heard of Pittsburghese) how can we ever hope to understand other cultures if we don’t help enable them to reach us?

 

What are your thoughts?