That’s just the short list; also discussed were the outright crimes of big Pharma, health care, the energy industry, the military industrial complex, corporate media, and the new industries and agencies built around creating a surveillance state. As is typically the case in discussions like this, the sources of information being discussed were referenced a lot. Toward the end of our “How To Fix The World Conference” of 2013, someone mentioned the last episode in Oliver Stone’s recent “Untold History” series (also available as a book), in which he talked about how all these insane things had happened in business and government since the year 2000, and how the public seemed utterly indifferent, apparently easily distracted by increasingly bizarre “reality” TV shows. And that’s when it hit me; that’s when I realized why everyone is really so apathetic.

I had recently watched the 1976 film Network for the first time in ages, and had been struck by how much the fictional network UBS – which at the time probably seemed like a preposterous and absurd notion – had in fact actually come into existence, in the form of Fox News. Why aren’t people picking up their torches and pitchforks? Perhaps it’s because they’ve found their Howard Beale . If you haven’t seen this gem written by Sidney Lumet, Beale – the guy who tells America to lean out their windows and yell “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take it!” – is described as “an angry prophet denouncing the hypocrisies of our times” who is “articulating the popular rage”. If you’ve ever seen Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, or their mellower liberal counterparts, the Beale character would not come across as nearly as insane as he did when the film came out. And that’s when I remembered the epic monologue (clip below) by the network executive Arthur Jensen, which he gave in order to get Meade back in line after his rants had disrupted a multibillion dollar deal the network was making. And that’s when I remembered why we may as well just leave our torches and pitchforks in the shed. The world’s a business, and if you don’t like your job, you better get a new one. Or shut up, order a pizza, and flip on the TV.

VOICE OVER

This wasn’t in the Sundance collection on YouTube, but is awesome. To say more would ruin the reward of taking the few minutes to watch it, ideally in full screen.

THE APOCALYPSE

Don’t let this one give you any clever ideas.

CATNIP: EGRESS TO OBLIVION?

It’s probably about time we took a look at this troubling abuse issue.

My girlfriend sent me a letter.
So I tested and graded it.

It’s been a long time since we did the Monday Demotivators; as we pointed out when we stopped, with so many people unemployed, it didn’t seem there was anyone to demotivate on Mondays any more!  But the other day my girlfriend sent me a letter that inspired me. I mean literally sent me a letter. It was the letter “B”, and she needed to know what typeface it was. And before I go on, let’s just clarify the difference between typeface and font, so the more graphically inclined in your life don’t cringe every time you say “font”. Anyway, since my girlfriend had so little character – or only one character anyway – I couldn’t use the easiest cheat, the What The Font tool at MyFonts.com. So in the process, I learned that – like any normal person – she couldn’t tell Palatino from Times, Ariel from Helvetica, or Futura from Avant Garde. I also learned that in spite of hundreds of hours of yearning, searching, and kerning, I’m a bit of a typetard myself. Are YOU a font of typeface wisdom? Let’s find out. First, a super easy test, especially if you’re hipster enough to have seen the film Helvetica. If you can’t pass the So you think you can tell Arial from Helvetica? quiz, you’re a total noob. Your next logical choice if you failed that one would be Sara Newton’s Fontastic Quiz, which provides some verbal cues for the fontographically impaired. Bumping it up a notch, we have the iFont game , which is still multiple choice, but a little challenging. Which is why the original version was called The Rather Difficult Font Game. And if you’re more interested in knowing what type YOU are, rather than the other way around, you may want to try the What Type Are You (has audio) from the design firm Pentagram. Happy Monday!

This video will totally be worth the 20 minutes it steals from your life, and might change your day. View it below, or better yet,  right on Vimeo  in fullscreen HD.

Not only did they use a hashtag on the cover of the final print edition, probably the only way you can get a copy of the thing is on the Kindle.

I’ve been saying that the internet is dead for a while now, but apparently people only listen when you say this kind of thing if you’re Anil Dash. If you visit that link, please note the irony of the fact that his comment section is handled by a Facebook widget. But really, let’s face it. The web is dead. Google has turned search into an SEO-poisoned gutter of desperate web marketers paying to rank in Google so that Google will pay them for ranking. eBay is a shark-infested cesspool of hustlers and bidbots. And social networking? Puh-LEEZE. No one ever read your tweets anyway, and Facebook has served its only useful purpose, which was letting you re-connect with that long lost flame that previously you could only “Guilt Google” (when you weren’t busy Googlewanking) so you could either hook up, or finally remember why you lost track of each other in the first place. Why am I so adamant that social is dead? Well, about five years ago, while doing a little work I cringeingly called “Social Network Consulting”, I ran into a friend who actually had that printed on her business card! I asked her: “So what does that mean? You charge people to tell them to use Facebook and Twitter?” Our pockets – bulging with consulting fees – bounced as we had a belly laugh. Well guess what. There are now over 180,000 Social Media Experts on Twitter! Presumably, they’re all telling you how great Twitter is. At least they don’t waste entire paragraphs doing it, right? The last possible hope of the web getting interesting again was dangled before us not too long ago with the exciting label user generated content. I have a FEW things to say about THAT one. First of all, all you “users” have proven not only that you’re not capable of producing content worth reading, you don’t even stick to it! Just Google “I haven’t posted in a while”, and not only do you get 820 million results, Google conveniently suggests the more useful “sorry I haven’t posted in a while”. People also became disheartened quickly when they finally produced that book on Blurb or someplace, and even their FRIENDS didn’t by copies. Likewise when their Kickstarter campaign generated 200 bucks instead of the ten grand they had hoped for. Even the website you’re reading this article on sucks! It’s poorly-coded for mobile devices, the articles are too long, and thanks to the content scrapers – who prefer to call themselves “curators” so they don’t feel badly for building entire websites with other people’s original content – it ranks infinitely lower in search engines than it did even a year ago. (Insider secret: we’re shutting down to move to a new platform in the coming months)

But I’m not here to tell you how horrible life will be because of all this, I’m here to tell you how COOL it will be. A few interesting things happened last year. One was that while physical retail sales were soft, increasing by 2-4%, online sales were through the roof, growing by about 14%  . You don’t need fancy market surveys to figure this out; you could see tumbleweeds in the malls this last holiday season, but it was common to run into a FEDEX or UPS driver at 7pm during that time, and if you did, they were sweating, panting, and on the verge of collapse. And you know one thing that was likely to be in those parcels they were delivering? A tablet. Sales were up ONE THOUSAND PERCENT last year. That means someone was buying a tablet EVERY SINGLE SECOND during the holidays. I can confirm this flurry of sales; I can’t tell you how many weird messages I received over the holidays until friends learned to turn off Spell Check on their Kindle Fire.

If you haven’t pieced together how these factors are going to converge to kick the last breath out of the web as we know it, you obviously haven’t struggled to get your tablet to show web pages in their non-mobile version. And you haven’t noticed that Microsoft not only ditched the desktop (something some users couldn’t handle) in their new operating system, but for the first time ever, they built their own hardware to deliver it, and it’s basically a tablet. And maybe you haven’t noticed (as my pal Nick pointed out to me the other day) that it’s been over a year since eBook sales on Amazon outstripped book sales . You also probably haven’t been reading something on your tablet, gotten curious about a book that is mentioned, and experienced the bizarre exhilaration of OWNING AND READING that book five minutes later. Here’s an example of one of the ways you may end up doing this. Below is a Beta version of a tool that displays the preview of a Kindle book, right in a web page. In this case it’s MY book. Tell me that – especially if you’re on a Kindle – this won’t lead you to buy a book eventually, pulling you off the web to actually READ something. Especially when print institutions like Newsweek are going digital only. Soon, the trick is going to be getting you back ON the web.

Check out the preview of our book. Then BUY it!

(Also, let us know if this widget isn’t visible, we’re still testing)

For the record, the trailer doesn’t BEGIN to do the film justice, probably for commercial reasons, it focuses on dialogue and erotica. And although there’s a lot of unerotic “erotica” in the film, it’s hardly the core of the story.

An aerial view of the “set” of Problema

What would happen if you rounded up thought-provoking questions from people all over the world, then gathered about a hundred thoughtful people together in a huge circle, pointed cameras at them, and asked the questions one by one? Well, a cacophonous murmur would probably ensue, until you edited the results into some kind of cohesive whole, as director Ralf Schmerberg did with his epic film project Problema. The project was inspired by the Dropping Knowledge project, a global information sharing and media project founded in 2003. On a single day in September, 2006, over a hundred individuals – artists, scientists, writers, business people, and other thinkers – took their place around a huge circle in Berlin’s Bebelplatz. This was a powerfully symbolic choice – the Bebelplatz was the location of the infamous Nazi book burnings of 1933. With digital cameras pointed at each guest, hosts Willem Dafoe and Hafsat Abiola (founder of Nigeria’s Kudirat Initiative for Democracy) asked 17 of 100 questions that had been selected from the thousands that were submitted worldwide via the Dropping Knowledge project. The guests then responded in their own time, with the cameras all running continuously, all framing the guests in a tight headshot. Guest Wim Wenders – director of the film Wings of Desire – astutely pointed out the similarity between the resulting murmur and the way the angels in his film had no choice but to hear the thoughts of humans everywhere, which created much of the lush sonic backdrop of Wings of Desire. Schmerberg – Problema’s director – managed to capture much of this live feeling of the event by interspersing compelling, sometimes tear-inducing images with a lively mixture of both concise, eyes-at-the-camera answers, and almost out-take-like moments of verité in which the attendees fumbled with their thoughts or spoke in asides to the guests sitting next to them. The result is a thought-provoking documentary unlike any you’ve seen before. If you’re a caring person who lives in the so-called “First World”, a question like “Does our wealth depend on the Third World being poor?” might make you think “Well of course, and it’s a shameful tragedy”.  But you’ll suddenly be forced to ponder things like what a bogus concept the “Third World” is in the first place, or how much freedom you have if you live in a powerful western capitalist country, when a sophisticated, educated person from Colombia points out that he for instance is only able to visit a place like Berlin because of a four day visa connected with the making of the film. He otherwise is barred from our “first world” as a second-rate global citizen who “has no right to enter our paradise” as he puts it. Although you may find Problema quite watchable on your own, you might find it a lot more interesting if you watch it with some intelligent friends, so you can discuss the world of questions it is likely to raise in your heart and your head. To view the film as a particapatory event, the Problema website offers a screening  page that allows you to publicize the event, but you can just download it and watch it with friends if you like – it’s free, provided in multiple file formats, and can be downloaded by bittorrent or as a direct file.

This might have SOMETHING to do with it.

Me and eBooks go way back. Not quite as far back as the first time I used the wrong first-person pronoun on purpose, but at least back to about 1992, when I worked in one of the coolest bookstores ever: AfterWords, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It was a store that mostly sold remainders, quality reprints, and small press stuff that was hard to find. One day while pricing a huge stack of of the hardcover version of I’m Only One Man, Regis Philbin’s biography, I casually mentioned something about how I’d just read in Wired magazine about the still-only-imagined eBook, and what a cool idea I thought it was. It took me a moment to notice the sudden silence around me. I looked up to find myself being stabbed through with a dagger-like look in the five eyes of my co-workers (one had just injured their eye and was wearing an eye-patch). The look in their eyes made it clear that they were collectively pondering the idea of paper-cutting me to death. “What, what, WHAT?”, I said. But I knew that it was just the book lover in them all that was causing this reaction. It was like suddenly I was the fireman from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and I was there to burn all their books. As much as I agreed with them about the feel and smell of a comforting bound book, they really just didn’t seem to care about the number of trees left in the world, the idea that you could carry every book you’ve ever owned in a notebook-size device, or the idea that it would never wear out, and could be highlighted repeatedly without devaluing it. Well, we’ve come a long way since then. So far that not only is AfterWords long-since defunct, but even the corporate monsters that destroyed them are dying. This has not impacted my reading habits a lot, in spite of the fact that I don’t own a Kindle or an iPad. Although I have to say the Kindle Fire is very tempting, and who doesn’t want an iPad? Well, me, for the moment. But in any case, if I really want to read a particular book, I buy it or get it from the library. And far and away I do more short-form reading on the web. But this whole traditional book vs. eBook issue just became of critical importance to me. Why? Because I have a more or less finished book that I’m getting ready to peddle, and I just co-authored another book with a development partner. We’re developing a series of personal transformation products (we also maintain a sort of sandbox site called TheWellnessAddict.com) which will include a variety of books. So we submitted this first co-authored book to a publisher where my partner has been published before, and as we did so, we seriously researched all the new self-publishing options available. It’s a mind-numbing world of options out there, but we did our research. Which was a good thing; we pretty quickly got a very positive rejection notice. The book really just didn’t suit the publisher’s catalog, which we sort of knew already. So we’ve narrowed it down to a few choices. The obvious go-to distributors are CreateSpace and Lulu, but you find pretty quickly that once you realize you not only don’t have to spend months waiting around for rejection letters, but don’t have to live on the paltry royalties of the world’s publishing giants either, you get GREEDY. Both CreateSpace and Lulu take a hefty percentage, and it’s a balancing act between their distribution reach vs what you give up in profits. Plus, a lot of retail stores simply don’t stock self-published books. So we pretty quickly realized that since we’re authors without a publisher, hell, why not become publishers, too? Which opens up options like Lightning Source. We haven’t made our final decision, but the question I asked at the top – Why Am I Writing eBooks? – has a pretty obvious answer once you start looking at ideas for marketing schemes. Although I was a big fan of the Free concept a couple of years ago, I think that model has seen its day. But CHEAP will always be popular, and attention spans are getting shorter daily. I mean, I’m amazed you’re still reading this. This all means – since we’re not creating massive runs of books by two unheard of authors – that we can repackage these books in as many ways as we like. And sell them as cheaply as 99 cents if we like. And if that sounds like a vanity-paved road to poverty, just check out these numbers shamelessly shared by author Joe Konrath of Chicago. The basic idea? He’s not the only author that has realized that the common breakdown is that if you sell less than 1,000 books at ten bucks, you’ll probably sell over 5,000 at two or three bucks. Plus, you’re getting more titles in more places and on more devices. Like that Kindle I don’t own. And this is becoming a huge market. Although Amazon won’t confirm that they’ve sold over 3 million Kindles, it was leaked that pre-orders for the Kindle Fire were coming in at a rate of exceeding 2,000 per hour. And Apple is quite happy to let us know that they’ve sold over 7 million iPads. That’s over 10 million customers needing content for their fun new device, and we think we have the perfect stuff. I mean, I can barely carry an idea for more than three sentences, let alone a 200 PAGE BOOK.  I’ll be following up with another piece soon, as we take the dive. If nothing else, maybe we’ll end up creating an insightful eBook about how to market eBooks. Stay tuned.