Warren Ellis's Blog, page 58
May 29, 2012
When The Internet Deletes Hype
Editor and writer David Hepworth:
You can’t hide. I was talking to somebody in the record business recently who pointed out, rather mournfully, that it was no longer possible to hype people. What he meant was that it was no longer possible to convince them that something was more popular or widely adopted than it actually was. You no longer went into Radio 2 and told them that they should be playing a record because it was going to be popular among this or that demographic. You simply sent them a link to the You Tube page where they could see how many people had streamed the video. Digital is its own audit. This is something magazines are going to have to get used to.
“Digital is its own audit.” That’s really kind of interesting to me. I’m used to unique counts being obscured and lied about. But I hadn’t considered the open-count public services. And, of course, this is what Likes and RTs and +1s lead to. A world where we encourage everyone to vote on everything (an element of more than a few sf pieces).
Cultural voting, of course, leads to the triage suggested in the quote: following counts leads inexorably to media that play only the things they already know people like.
Which makes me prize things like Mary Anne Hobbs’ Saturday night show on XFM all the more: because I know that for three hours I will hear things that I have never heard before.
Still. Interesting point.
Your New Post-Apocalyptic Timeline
It took some 10 million years for Earth to recover from the greatest mass extinction of all time, latest research has revealed.
So. Yeah. That’s how long it takes a planet to recover from an apocalyptic sequence of massive physical environmental shocks.
We often see mass extinctions as entirely negative but in this most devastating case, life did recover, after many millions of years, and new groups emerged. The event had re-set evolution. However, the causes of the killing – global warming, acid rain, ocean acidification – sound eerily familiar to us today. Perhaps we can learn something from these ancient events.
STATION IDENT: Valentina vonAsh
(Station Ident images can be sent to me at warrenellis@gmail.com. Anything you like, so long as you made it and it has the words THIS IS WARREN ELLIS DOT COM on it. Tell me what link I should add for you in your credit.)
May 28, 2012
CLOSEDOWN: Echo-ES
Some Arctic ambient from Russia to close with, complete with sparkling ice winds and strange digging machinery excavating graves in the snowfields. G’night, folks.
Sometimes I Think About Reinstating The Comments System
And then, before I get insane enough to do it, something wonderful usually happens to stop me.
Poor Charlie Stross.
Much as any artefact exposed to the maw of a small child eventually becomes soggy and turns brown (after it stops working, if moving parts are involved), I am coming to the conclusion that any comment thread on this blog will, between 100 and 200 comments in, circle around to become a discussion of:
* Space colonization
* Automotive technology
* Things that go fast and explode (rockets, military aircraft)
* Alternative energy (from solar through wind/wave to nuclear)
* Libertarianism (and everything is worse with libertarians)
And then he asks his audience – which is a fair bit larger than mine, these days – if he’s doing anything wrong, and wonders aloud how to develop a new audience of commenters.
283 comments (and counting) later, he’s got people ranting about libertarianism, cheap energy (the second comment!) and whores. Oh, and “secular modern civilisation.” I get mentioned a couple of times, in regard to the old Warren Ellis Forum and the Whitechapel board (although the poster missed that I turned the latter over to Si Spurrier last year and neither read nor write there).
Charlie’s been writing at his site for a year more than WEF operated, and four years into WEF we’d pretty much mapped out the memetic genome of the self-selected participants. There comes a time when a hardcore regular attendance dismays new arrivals – as an American put it to me once, “it’s a bit like, ‘really? High school again?’” And so, even when Charlie says something there that breaks into mainstream consciousness, his commentariat is unlikely to change much. Also, they are defending that piece of virtual dirt, because they have made it into a place that is comfortable to them. Charlie’s place is where they come to talk about rockets and whores, damnit.
Which brings up another thing, and I’m not going to ascribe it to Charlie, who is a nice man, but it’s real – sometimes, your commenters, by which you often mean your audience and your readership, are really fucking annoying, and sometimes you don’t like them. Which you can’t say. Who’s going to pick up another book by a writer who says “My readers are awful pieces of shit and I can think of twenty of them, right off the bat, who should be drowned in hot pig blubber”? Nobody. “My audience are all complete pissflaps. Have you read my website comments threads? Utter inane gibberish. I would like to train a giant horse to fuck out all their eyes.” Who’s going to say that?
I guarantee you that even the sweetest and kindest writer has thought that exact thought more than once in their lives. And its corollary: “Oh god, my readers are such horrible demented shitbags, what am I doing so wrong that I attract them all to me?”
Just as I know that every writer has dropped the ball at least once and disappointed a reader. Or exposed themselves as a total prick or a frothing nutter.
The deep interaction between creator and reader that the internet has brought us is not always healthy for either side, nor does it always – or even often – bring out the best in either side.
So I do this: I have a twitter account where people can talk to me, and I have a website where I post my research material and show off interesting stuff I’ve found and talk about whatever’s in my head on any given day. I feel like, that way, we get the best sides of each other.
(Speculation. The thing about the open house that comments systems constitute is this: you accept my invitation into my house, and then I get stroppy because I want to know why you’re pissing on the floor and refusing to talk about anything other than that one sculpture on my shelf that depicts a whore riding a rocket. But just maybe you’re urinating in fear because you only came into the house to look at the sculpture and now I’m trying to fit you into the oven.)
Best of luck, Charlie.
Also, buy a bigger oven.
Bookmarks for 2012-05-28
@katelanfoisy: Maya Deren Vodou rituals: http://t.co/xQe0l8qL http://twitter.com/katelanfoisy/statu...
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@ma77er: eVolo 5 Teaser ARCHI73C7UR3 X3NOCUL7UR3 :: Act 1 SHOOT :: Nick Cave xefirotarch Perry Kulper Francois Roche… http://t.co/r9QoE3Ms http://twitter.com/ma77er/status/2067...
(tags:ifttt twitter editmytaglaterwarren! )
Greg Palast’s VULTURES’ PICNIC, London 26 June
This escaped into the world over the weekend – I’m supporting Greg Palast at ULU in London on the 26th of June. All details live at this link here.
It’s Greg’s book launch, so don’t even ask me about signing heaps of stuff.
Body Area Networking
IEEE, the world’s largest professional association advancing technology for humanity, today announced a new standard, IEEE 802.15.6™-2012, optimized to serve wireless communications needs for ultra-low power devices operating in or around the human body.
Or, put another way, a human LAN will run at 10mbps and data-processing implants can be wireless. Consumer-level reporting devices. Hook ‘em up to ifttt and have your liver email your doctor’s computer. Turn your organs into blogjects. (That’s very six-years-ago, but still amusing to me.)
The Nest
A particularly of-the-moment video for a nice piece of Poborsk:
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