Chapter 1 (continued)
Re: flow is inseparable from problem-solving
From The Rise of Superman:
[T]he one element that truly sets flow apart: the creative, problem-solving nature of the state. Because flow requires action—otherwise action and awareness cannot merge—there’s decision-making involved at every step.
. . . [F]low doesn’t just happen anywhere. . . . the state shows up most reliably when we’re using our skills to the utmost. It requires challenge.
Re: flow isn’t a state of mind that novices can experience
From 2012 book How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character:
You simply don’t experience flow if you aren’t good at something . . .
Re: group flow
From The Rise of Superman:
In jazz, the group has the ideas, not the individual musicians . . .
When performance peaks in groups . . . this isn’t just about individuals in flow—it’s the group entering the state together . . .
Re: often, flow via collaboration sparks romantic attraction
From 1997 book Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration, by eminent scholar Warren Bennis:
Great Groups are sexy places.
. . . [During Apple’s early years, Steve Jobs mandated that] employees share [hotel] rooms when they were at conventions and other professional meetings . . . to limit bed-hopping . . .
From the 2017 article in Wired titled “The Ins and Outs of Silicon Valley’s New Sexual Revolution”:
In Silicon Valley, love’s many splendors often take the form of, well, many lovers.
. . . Some workplaces (coughGooglecough) have quasi-official poly clubs . . .
From Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work:
[W]e crossed the country for a trip to the Googleplex. We were there to talk flow states with engineers . . .
[W]e . . . attend[ed] the opening of their new multimillion-dollar mindfulness center. . . . Google had realized that when it comes to the highly competitive tech marketplace, helping engineers get into the zone and stay there longer was an essential . . .
We’ve been collaborating with some of the top experience designers, biohackers, and performance specialists to help develop the Flow Dojo . . . a learning lab dedicated to mapping the core building blocks of optimum performance.
In the fall of 2015 we had the opportunity to bring a prototype of the Dojo to Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters and engage in a joint-learning project. For six weeks, a handpicked team of engineers, developers, and managers committed to a flow training program, and then capped that off with two weeks in a beta version of the training center.
From the chapter titled “Group Flow” in 2017 book Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration:
Patagonia was an early adopter, but soon after, Toyota, Ericsson and Microsoft made flow integral to their culture and strategy.
Re: superstar-biased technological change (SBTC)
From a 2013 article on ScientificAmerican.com:
[SciAm.com:] Exactly how is technology shifting the landscape of jobs and wealth—who wins and who loses?
[MIT economist Erik Brynjolfsson:] . . . The third change might be the most important one: It’s called superstar-biased technical change . . .
From 2014 book The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, co-authored by Brynjolfsson:
In many industries, the difference in payout between number one and second-best has widened into a canyon.
. . . Digitization creates winner-take-all markets . . .
Re: the for-free in orgies-for- . . .
— Summary (details follow) —
Order for free is a proposed law of nature, hypothesized at book length in 1993 by a MacArthur Fellow (i.e., a “genius grant” recipient). Believers in the hypothesis include Nobel-Prize winners.
One type of order—complexity [1]—results from “networks of adaptive agents” (e.g., networks of people):
being subjected to selection-pressures that are new and/or are intensifying rapidly
adapting to these pressures
Adaptation that yields/increases complexity occurs at the boundary between order and chaos (i.e., in complex adaptive systems, agents are clustered at and around said boundary).
This clustering takes shape “for free” via “self-organized criticality” [2].
All told, complexity-for-free is shorthand for ‘complexity via adaptation via clustering-for-free’ [3].
Orgies-for-free (O-F-F) is the variant of clustering-for-free that will (continue to) enable people to adapt to said particular selection-pressures.
[1] From a 2013 article on ScientificAmerican.com:
[Stephen] Hawking was asked what he thought of the common opinion that the twentieth century was that of biology and the twenty-first century would be that of physics. Hawking replied that in his opinion the twenty-first century would be the “century of complexity” [my emphasis].
Title of a 2005 book published by Harvard Business School Press:
Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics
Title of a 2014 book published by Oxford University Press:
Complexity and the Economy
[2] From 1996 book How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality:
The system had become “critical”! There were avalanches of all sizes just as there were clusters [my emphasis] of all sizes at the “critical” point for equilibrium phase transitions.
[3] From How Nature Works:
Self-organized criticality is so far the only known general mechanism to generate complexity.
— Re: order-for-free —
From 1995 book At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity, by said MacArthur Fellow (my emphases):
[T]here are compelling reasons to believe that whenever a collection of chemicals contains enough different kinds of molecules, a metabolism will crystallize from the broth. If this argument is correct, metabolic networks need not be built one component at a time; they can spring full-grown from a primordial soup. Order for free, I call it.
. . . I believe that this order for free, which has undergirded the origin of life itself, has also undergirded the order in organisms as they have evolved and has even undergirded the very capacity to evolve itself.
— Re: complexity —
From a white paper (.pdf) published by the Washington Center for Complexity & Public Policy:
Complexity science represents a growing body of interdisciplinary knowledge about the structure, behavior and dynamics of change in a specific category of complex systems known as complex adaptive systems—open evolutionary systems in which the components are strongly interrelated, self-organizing and dynamic. Rain forests, businesses, societies, our immune systems, the World Wide Web, and the rapidly globalizing world economy can be thought of as complex adaptive systems. Each of these systems evolves in relationship to the larger environment in which it operates. To survive, the system as a whole must adapt to change.
For a lengthier preview, see the Wikipedia entry titled “Complex Adaptive System”.
— More re: complexity is a type of order —
Title of the 1992 book by a MacArthur Fellow (a colleague of said Fellow):
Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity
— Re: complexity via networks of adaptive agents —
From 2012 book Signals and Boundaries: Building Blocks for Complex Adaptive Systems, published by MIT Press:
— Re: a network of adaptive agents (e.g., people) clustered at the boundary between order and chaos —
From the 2008 book by the MacArthur Fellow who hypothesized order-for-free:
I can now summarize over forty years of work on random Boolean networks . . .
Briefly, these networks exhibit three regimes of behavior: ordered, chaotic, and critical, i.e., poised at the boundary or edge between order and chaos.
— Re: adaptation at said boundary —
Title of a 1992 book:
Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos
From said 2008 book:
[T]he most complex, but organized, behavior should occur in critical networks. In the more ordered networks the behavior would be more “frozen” and less complex.
— Re: said clustering of agents takes shape “for free” via “self-organized criticality” —
From How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality:
[C]omplex behavior in nature reflects the tendency of large systems with many components to evolve into a poised, “critical” state . . . The evolution to this very delicate state occurs without design from any outside agent. The state is established solely because of the dynamical interactions among individual elements of the system: the critical state is self-organized.
Re: O-F-F would be women-FRIENDLY almost certainly
— Summary (details below) —
The link between professional success and polyamory is unlikely to favor a particular gender.
A key to popularizing Adver-ties is facilitating the build-out of complements.
OSG’s facilitating will center on advancing “hyper-specialization,” for reasons explained by complexity science (i.e., this facilitating will center on maximizing the rate at which the business ecosystem that centers on Adver-ties complexifies).
Some/many of the hyper-specialists in said ecosystem can be expected to make flowmantic orgies women-FRIENDLY (i.e., can be expected to compete to make said orgies ever more civilized, artful, etc.). This can be expected in LARGE part because:
Amazon of CE . . . via popularizing Adver-ties . . .
Women are ~60% of recent college grads in many countries (e.g., the U.S.).
Women can invest B-B-BILLION$ via crowd-investing (e.g., via equity- crowdfunding).
So Amazon of CE via making Adver-ties POPULAR with women . . .
OSG could employ/REWARD specialists who make flowmantic orgies women-FRIENDLY (e.g., employ via raising equity-crowdfunding from MANY women).
— Re: the link between professional success and polyamory is unlikely to favor a particular gender —
From Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free:
[A] 2017 study shows that among women aged twenty-five to twenty-nine, group sex and threesome experience equaled that of men the same age, and women were nearly twice as likely to have gone to a dungeon, BDSM, swingers’, or sex party.
Untrue’s author is a woman who has a PhD from Yale and a background in anthropology.
From 2013 book What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire:
[R]ecent science and women’s voices left me with pointed lessons:
That women’s desire—its inherent range and innate power—is an underestimated and constrained force, even in our times . . .
[T]his force is not, for the most part, sparked or sustained by emotional intimacy and safety . . .
[O]ne of our most comforting assumptions, . . . that female eros is much better made for monogamy than the male libido, is scarcely more than a fairy tale.
What’s author is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and the author of five books of nonfiction.
From a 2012 book:
The most patient and thorough research about the hook-up culture shows that over the long run, women benefit greatly from living in a world where they can have sexual adventure without commitment . . . and where they can enter into temporary relationships that don’t derail their careers.
To put it crudely, now feminist progress is largely dependent on hook-up culture. To a surprising degree, it is women—not men—who are perpetuating the culture . . .
The book’s author is Hanna Rosin, then a national correspondent for The Atlantic.
From What Do Women Want?:
Terri Fisher, a psychologist at Ohio State University . . . asked two hundred female and male undergraduates to complete a questionnaire dealing with masturbation and the use of porn. The subjects were split into groups and wrote their answers under three different conditions: either they were instructed to hand the finished questionnaire to a fellow college student, who waited just beyond an open door and was able to watch the subjects work; or they were given explicit assurances that their answers would be kept anonymous; or they were hooked up to a fake polygraph machine, with bogus electrodes taped to their hands, forearms, and necks.
The male replies were about the same under each of the three conditions, but for the females the circumstances were crucial. Many of the women in the first group—the ones who could well have worried that another student would see their answers—said they’d never masturbated, never checked out anything X-rated. The women who were told they would have strict confidentiality answered yes a lot more. And the women who thought they were wired to a lie detector replied almost identically to the men.
. . . When Fisher employed the same three conditions and asked women how many sexual partners they’d had, subjects in the first group gave answers 70 percent lower than women wearing the phony electrodes. Diligently, she ran this part of the experiment a second time, with three hundred new participants. The women who thought they were being polygraphed not only reported more partners than the rest of the female subjects, they also . . . gave numbers a good deal higher than the men.
From 2011 book Chick Lit and Postfeminism, published by the University of Virginia Press:
“The overwhelming popularity of chick lit . . . can be traced to the social reality of its readership with regard to work . . . [Via chick lit’s] attempts at synthesis of work and love it shows the challenges of straddling both realms.”
“One of chick lit’s contributions as a genre is the production of what we might call a sexual theory of late capitalism . . .”
“The high number of sexual partners the chick lit protagonist experiences parallels the romance’s pattern of the questing hero’s confronting false or impostor versions of his eventual beloved.”
“Though an offshoot of popular romance, chick lit transforms it significantly, virtually jettisoning the figure of the heterosexual [male] hero . . .
Men are not really valued as individuals as much as means to a lifestyle . . .
Even texts that end with marital happiness present a predominantly depressing take on marriage.
. . . Chick lit heroines’ preoccupation with money . . . is normative with recent real-life social science findings: researchers . . . have found that the worst fear for single women . . . is having no money.”
— Re: hyper-specialization —
From a 2011 article in Harvard Business Review:
Much of the prosperity our world now enjoys comes from the productivity gains of dividing work into ever smaller tasks performed by ever more specialized workers. Today, thanks to the rise of knowledge work and communications technology, this subdivision of labor has advanced to a point where the next difference in degree will constitute a difference in kind. We are entering an era of hyper-specialization . . .
. . . [W]e will now see knowledge-worker jobs—salesperson, secretary, engineer—atomize into complex networks of people [my emphasis] all over the world performing highly specialized tasks . . .
— Re: Adver-ties can be expected to advance hyper-specialization —
Activity in a market generates new kinds of knowledge. This knowledge typically increases specialization.
From 2017 book Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future, co-authored by MIT economist Erik Brynjolfsson:
The Magic of Markets, the Purest Crowds of All
Large collections of information like libraries and the web are obviously valuable because we can consult and learn from them. Many crowd-created collections have another benefit: as they accumulate the contributions of many people, they spontaneously generate new kinds of knowledge. This is a kind of magic that actually happens, all the time.
From 2014 book Complexity: A Very Short Introduction:
Niche formation through co-evolution
. . . When we look at realistic niches, whether they be market niches . . . we see a complicated recirculation of resources and signals [e.g., price signals] . . .
How did this complex network of interactions evolve?
The short answer is co-evolution through recombination of building blocks . . . Cascades of increasingly specialized agents result [my emphasis]. As is nicely described by Samuelson in his classic text Economics, there is a multiplier effect in cascades . . . The multiplier effect in a typical cascade may be 4 (or more), indicating that the initial payment has the effect of four separate injections of cash . . .
The multiplier effect that accompanies the re-use of resources in a cascade typically drives the occupants of a niche to increasing specialization.
From Machine, Platform, Crowd (my emphases):
The first person to clearly point out this benefit [i.e., new knowledge via activity in markets], and thus to become a kind of patron saint of the crowd, was the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek in his 1945 article “The Uses of Knowledge in Society.”
. . . Hayek’s paper, which anticipated many of the ideas of what would coalesce into complexity theory later in the twentieth century . . .
— Precedent re: specialists who’d make O-F-F women-FRIENDLY —
Cover of a 2007 book:
Re: Adver-tease
Again, decentralized sugar-dating (DSD) could yield the first killer-dapp (KD1).
Re: “could yield”:
Sugar-babies conceal their identity on sugar-dating sites/apps (i.e., babies’ user-names are pseudonyms).
Said sites/apps maintain computerized records that link each pseudonym to a baby’s true identity.
Hackers can steal user-data MUCH more easily from online offerings that are centralized (e.g., Facebook) than they can from decentralized offerings.
Again, the most popular sugar-dating site is used by 8 million babies, all of whom could be “outed” by hackers.
Precedent for such outing: 2015 hack of AshleyMadison.com, then a site for married people seeking to have an affair. The hack outed millions of users, led to suicides, etc.
Re: KD1 interesting many software developers, via a 2018 issue of The Economist (my emphases):
[A] sense of a new beginning is also in the air. The buzz at technology conferences today is reminiscent of 1995, shortly after the birth of the world wide web, when a new piece of software called a browser took the web mainstream, and the internet with it. At today’s events startups are pushing ambitious plans, often based on blockchain technology (immutable distributed ledgers of the sort that underlie Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies), promising to “re-decentralise” the online world.
. . . To achieve their objective, they will have to overthrow an existing digital regime, called Web 2.0 . . . the new world of Web 3.0 . . .
Four criteria for a DSD app:
must allow names of users to be pseudonyms
will work best when:
each user pays for each user-account s/he sets up (i.e., each user is disincentivized from misleading other users by creating multiple accounts)
each user pays each time s/he uses the app to interact with other users (i.e., each user is disincentivized from mistreating other users via the app)
the app enables an/the ideal kind of peer-to-peer policing (i.e., enables users to police each other, which users will have to in the absence of a Facebook-like “central authority” that can ban users, etc.)
These criteria can be satisfied by using Web 3.0 technologies to implement Adver-tease.
Note: Centralized sugar-dating imposes many fees on users.
Re: XXX-camming: In combination with Adver-ties, Adver-tease could yield a decentralized alternative to centralized camming portals. This alternative might increase models’ earnings by 45%.
BONUS motivation for OSG to provide Adver-tease
BigCos that are likeliest to clone Adver-ties are vulnerable to disruption via the combination of Adver-ties and Web 3.0.
From 2018 book Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy, by a technology analyst who has a track record of “moving markets”:
“Companies are abandoning hierarchy and pursuing heterarchy [i.e., a system of organization where the elements of the organization are unranked (non-hierarchical) or where they possess the potential to be ranked a number of different ways] because, as the Tapscotts put it, ‘blockchain technology offers a credible and effective means not only of cutting out intermediaries, but also of radically lowering transaction costs, turning firms into networks [my emphasis], distributing economic power, and enabling both wealth creation and a more prosperous future.’”
“Disaggregated will be all the GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft conglomerates)—the clouds of concentrated computing and commerce.”
“Content promises to escape its confinement in the giant silos of Google, Amazon, and their rivals and distribute itself across the Net again, with digital rights management incorporated in the blockchain.”
Re: OSG will provide the most valuable sub-system of said excerpt-recommender
The rest of the recommendation engine could be produced via crowdsourcing and hyper-specialization that are facilitated by Adver-ties.
From the 2009 article on Wired.com titled “How the Netflix Prize Was Won”:
[T]he contest’s goal [was] to improve the Netflix movie recommendation algorithm by 10 percent.
. . . [The] competition has proffered hard proof of a basic crowdsourcing concept: Better solutions come from unorganized people who are allowed to organize organically.
From Machine, Platform, Crowd:
For the crowd, the counterpart is the core: the knowledge, processes, expertise, and capabilities that companies have built up internally and across their supply chains . . .
From the Wired.com article:
[T]he most outlying approaches—the ones farthest away from the mainstream way to solve a given problem—proved most helpful towards the end of the contest . . .
Bonus motivations for OSG to provide said sub-system
Via inputs of additional data, the excerpt-recommender could HELP bloggers who use Adver-ties.
Via inputs from Adver-ties, the recommender can help OSG leverage its comedies to showcase users of Adver-ties.
— Re: excerpt-rich narratives —
The popularity of 2010 book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto has primed many (influential) readers to favor such narratives.
From Reality Hunger:
My intent is to write the ars poetica for a burgeoning group of interrelated but unconnected artists in a multitude of forms and media—lyric essay, prose poem, collage novel [my emphasis], visual art, film, television, radio, performance art, rap, stand-up comedy, graffiti—who are breaking larger and larger chunks of “reality” into their work.
. . . Method of this project: literary montage.
. . . Most of the passages in this book are taken from other sources.
From a 2014 article in The New Yorker:
“Reality Hunger” galvanized many critics and novelists alike.
. . . Shields’s belief that the traditional novel is dated and that the way forward—aesthetically, if not commercially—lies in non-novels or at least non-traditional novels now represents the fashionable position in the literary world.
From Reality Hunger:
The mimetic function in art hasn’t so much declined as mutated. The tools of metaphor have expanded. As the culture becomes more saturated by different media, artists can use larger and larger chunks of the culture to communicate. . . . In collage, writing is stripped of the pretense of originality and appears as a practice of mediation, of selection and contextualization, a practice, almost, of reading.
— Re: excerpts are an IDEAL literary device for OfF and its spin-offs —
Excerpt-rich narrative is a/the literary embodiment of O-F-F.
Precedent for literary embodiment via collage and intertextuality
From 2013 book Distant Reading, for which the author received the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism (my emphases):
At the turn of the [20th] century, the entire planet is channeled into the Western metropolis (Cosmopolis, as some decide to call it) and the truly epic, world-historical scope of many modernist works is indeed dependent on Europe’s world domination.
Unpleasant but true, imperialism plays for modernism the same role played by the French Revolution for the realist novel; it poses the basic problem—how can such a heterogeneous and growing wealth be perceived? how can it be mastered?—addressed by collage, intertextuality, or the stream of consciousness. Without imperialism, in other words, we would have no modernism; its raw materials would be lacking, and also the challenge that animated many of its inventions.
— Re: the value to OSG of narrative/rhetorical devices that embody O-F-F —
Lessons from the history of the novel:
A genre’s exemplary works (i.e., masterpieces) are often/typically produced (very) soon after the genre takes shape [1].
A key to producing an exemplary work is originating narrative/rhetorical devices that become conventions of that genre [2].
Again, OfF blends two new genres: startup comedy and flowmantic comedy. But it’s likely that OfF will also be the first of m-m-many serial novels that center on O-F-F (i.e., OfF may be the first O-F-F novel, en route to OSG spinning-off O-F-F novels . . . and the Spin-offCos spinning-off . . . and OSG’s competitors . . .).
So I’m always ALERT to the possibilities re: a new narrative/rhetorical device that embodies O-F-F.
[1] From Distant Reading:
In twenty years, with a striking rapidity, all the forms that will dominate Western narrative for over a century find their masterpiece. The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794, for the Gothic; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 1796, for the Bildungsroman; Elective Affinities, 1809, for the novel of adultery; Waverley, 1814, for the historical novel. In another fifteen years, with Austen and Stendhal, Mary Shelley and Pushkin, Balzac and Manzoni, almost all the main variations on the basic forms are also in place.
lt’s a spiral of novelties—but of lasting novelties, with long-term consequences . . .
. . . [I]n the course of the nineteenth century, the urban audience has split. Poe, Balzac, Dickens are still appealing both to Baudelaire and to his philistine double. But the synthesis does not last, and in France and England (always there) a handful of new narrative forms—melodrama, feuilleton, detective fiction, science fiction—quickly capture millions of readers, preparing the way for the industry of sound and image. Is it a betrayal of literature, as cultivated critics have long maintained? Not at all; it is rather the coming to light of the limits of realism [i.e., of the “realist novel”]; at its ease in a solid, well-regulated world, which it makes even more so, the realistic temper doesn’t know how to deal with those extreme situations, and terrible simplifications, that at times history forces one to face. Realism does not know how to represent the Other of Europe, nor yet—which is perhaps even worse—the Other in Europe: and so, mass literature takes over the task. Class struggle and the death of God, the ambiguities of language and the second industrial revolution; it is because it deals with all these phenomena that mass literature succeeds.
From 1987 book The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, by the author of Distant Reading:
[T]he metamorphosis of the [literary] image of youth in our century is by now a familiar fact. Less familiar is its rapidity . . . Marlow and Kroger will be among the last novelistic heroes to grow up and achieve maturity. Which is to say that Conrad’s and Mann’s Bildungsromane are morphologically closer to Goethe’s than, say, to Kafka’s or Joyce’s: or also, turning the matter around, that [after Europe’s youth were TRAUMATIZED by World War I] there were more structural novelties in a decade than in an entire century [my emphasis]. . .
From the description on Amazon.com of 2002 book Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945-1970, published by Harvard University Press:
The twenty-five years after the Second World War were a lively and fertile period for the American novel and an era of momentous transformation in American society. . . . [Author] Morris Dickstein shows how a daring band of outsiders reshaped the American novel and went on to dominate American fiction for the rest of the century.
[2] From 2005 book Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History, by the author of Distant Reading:
[I]f language evolves by diverging, why not literature too?
For Darwin, ‘divergence of character’ interacts throughout history with ‘natural selection and extinction’: as variations grow apart from each other, selection intervenes, allowing only a few to survive. In a seminar of a few years ago, I addressed the analogous problem of literary survival, using as a test case the early stages of British detective fiction. We chose clues as the trait whose transformations were likely to be most revealing for the history of the genre, and proceeded to chart the relationships between Arthur Conan Doyle and some of his contemporaries as a series of branchings, which added up to the (modest) tree of figure 30 [see below].
Here, from the very first branching at the bottom of the tree (whether clues were present or not) two things were immediately clear, the ‘formal’ fact that several of Doyle’s rivals (those on the left) did not use clues—and the ‘historical’ fact that they were all forgotten. It is a good illustration of what the literary market is like: ruthless competition—hinging on form. Readers discover that they like a certain device, and if a story doesn’t seem to include it, they simply don’t read it (and the story becomes extinct). This pressure of cultural selection probably explains the second branching of the tree, where clues are present, but serve no real function: as in ‘Race with the Sun’, for instance, where a clue reveals to the hero that the drug is in the third cup of coffee, and then, when he is offered the third cup, he actually drinks it. Which is indeed ‘perplexing & unintelligible’, and the only possible explanation is that these writers realized that clues were popular, and tried to smuggle them into their stories—but hadn’t really understood how clues worked, and so didn’t use them very well.
. . . Third branching: clues are present, they have a function, but are not visible: the detective mentions them in his final explanation, but we have never ‘seen’ them in the course of the story. Here we lose the last of Doyle’s rivals (which is exactly what, sooner or later, we had expected to see), but we also lose half of the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which we hadn’t expected at all; and the next branching—clues must be not just visible, but decodable by the reader: soon to become a key ‘technical law’ of the genre . . .
— Re: independent of O-F-F, excerpt-rich narratives can be expected to proliferate as a result of societal change being rapid and accelerating rapidly —
From 2011 book I’ll Have What She’s Having: Mapping Social Behavior, published by MIT Press:
For dynamic social landscapes, the take-home message . . . is clear: . . . copy those who succeed and act quickly, so you don’t fall behind the other copiers.
From 2009 book On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction, published by Harvard University Press:
As both tellers and listeners, we use narrative strategically [e.g., collage novelists demonstrate their copying chops by excerpting from texts that are authoritative, exemplary, etc.].
— Re: if you’re still anti-excerpts, give it some time —
From 1977 book Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties, by eminent literary scholar Morris Dickstein:
[T]he aesthetics of ugliness . . . [is] one key to every modern avant-garde since Wordsworth and Coleridge(—who were also condemned by critics for artlessness and banality, according to eighteenth-century standards of poetic “beauty”). Every modern movement at first looks ugly and inartistic to the extent that it dislocates existing norms. Only later does it create its own norm . . .
From 1994 book Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez, by the author of Distant Reading:
[P]lans and poetics function (perhaps) when inside a stable formal paradigm: in times of normal literature, so to speak. But if paradigms are shifting . . . [p]oetics plod along behind this, often far behind. They certainly do not guide it, and usually do not even really understand it.
Re: Sexcerpts and the City: the Making of “Girl Groups” (first spin-off from OfF)
— Re: Girl Groups (GG) —
Fictional series (e.g., originates as a serial novel that incorporates images, video, etc.)
Set initially in 1959, at and around the Brill Building in New York City
From 2005 book Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era (my emphases):
[A] remarkable group of songwriters . . . in the late 1950s and early ’60s . . . pioneered a distaff doo-wop, the girl-group sound of the Shirelles, the Crystals, the Ronettes, and the Shangri-Las.
— Re: the business case for GG (part 1 of 4) —
The sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s is a precedent for O-F-F.
From 2001 book Make Love, Not War: The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History:
This book is . . . about the social and cultural transformations of the 1960s and ’70s.
. . . Developed in 1957 and licensed by the Food and Drug Administration in 1960, the birth control pill—which quickly became known simply as “the pill”—gave women a greater sense of sexual freedom than any contraceptive device that had come before.
— Re: the business case for GG (part 2 of 4) —
As seen above, a key to preventing a next-gen poverty trap is political activism.
Activism PRECEDENT: 1960s. Keywords: music as catalyst.
From 1987 book The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage:
[T]he Fifties’ teenage culture marked the territory for the far larger youth upheaval . . . Rock and roll and its dances were the opening wedge.
From Always Magic in the Air:
Expressing the optimism . . . of the early civil rights movement, it [i.e., the music of the Brill Building Era] amalgamated black, white and Latino sounds before multiculturalism became a concept . . . and integrated audiences before American desegregated its schools.
From Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties:
To many [people] . . . what mattered most about the sixties . . . was the emergence of a mass politics of student protest and moral outrage, first against the threat of nuclear war and the mistreatment of blacks in the south, then against the escalating war in Vietnam.
— Precedent for pro-social outcomes via startup camedy —
From 2009 book Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America, published by Oxford University Press:
“Playboy tied the pursuit of pleasure to national purpose.”
“Changes in sexual morality were also linked to developments in the consumer society. Policymakers and captains of industry after World War II upheld economic growth as the fount of national well-being. . . . Americans had to come to believe that indulging in all the unnecessary items made possible by mass production was a positive endeavor, even a moral one. The widespread adoption of an ethical framework that sanctioned pleasure-seeking . . . helped sustain the nation’s consumer society.”
From 2003 book Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s:
These rebel forces were heavily backed by Hugh Hefner, whose Playboy magazine and nightclub circuit made him a major comedy power broker of the time. Playboy’s panels and interviews showcased all the rising, new, socially relevant wits . . .
— Re: Sexcerpts and the City (SATC) —
SATC will be women-FRIENDLY. In particular, three of the four lead characters in SATC will be women. Details in chapter 2 of TBS.
— Re: the business case for GG (part 3 of 4) —
The setting of GG may help OSG attract crowd-PLEASING writers to the staffs of OfF and SATC.
From The Bestseller Code (my emphases):
“[Fifty Shades of Grey author E.L.] James writes emotional turns with such a regularity of beat that the reader feels the thrum of her words in their bodies like the effect of club music. Only twenty-five other best-selling novels share James’s rhythm, and only one other novel we could find has mastered the same measured beat. That other novel happens to be the other highest-selling book for adults of the past thirty years. It is the only novel in our research corpus that not only enjoyed the same massive and controversial response right from publication, but also (to date) outsold Fifty Shades of Grey. That novel is Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.”
“Using a computer model that can read, recognize and sift through thousands of features in thousands of books, we discovered that there are fascinating patterns inherent to the books that are most likely to succeed . . .”
— Re: SATC will be women-FRIENDLY —
Summary (details follow)
Crowd-PLEASING writers often/typically have a background in journalism.
From a 2017 article published by a journalism school:
Each year, women comprise more than two-thirds of graduates with degrees in journalism or mass communications . . .
Precedent suggests that OSG should hire (ex-)journalists (along with comedy writers, etc.).
Re: crowd-PLEASING writers
From The Bestseller Code:
When we took our entire corpus of bestsellers and ranked the books based solely on the criterion of style, we found, quite to our surprise, that the overwhelming majority of the books at the top of the list were by women.
. . . The more we studied the biographies, the more we began to see that gendered style might just be a false signal.
. . . [W]hat did the top three women share? . . . [A]ll worked in or received degrees in journalism. This trend went deep into the list.
Re: precedent suggests that OSG should hire (ex-)journalists
From 1988 book The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era:
Few eastern writers [e.g., novelists, playwrights] made it as screenwriters. The most successful transition was made by journalists . . . who were accustomed to deadlines and copy editors . . . [Journalists-turned-screenwriters] rarely considered what they wrote their own, and put little stock in creative control . . . They understood the movie business—and that it was a business.
— Re: the business case for GG (part 4 of 4) —
Much of the promise of (group) flow is prefigured by the spirit of the 1950s and ’60s.
From The Rise of Superman:
“Surfers [experiencing flow] frequently report becoming one with the waves; snowboarders become one with the mountain. ‘It was like I reached a place where clarity and intuition and effort and focus all came together to bring me to the highest level of consciousness,’ says professional kayaker Sam Drevo. ‘A level where I was no longer me; I was part of the river.’
. . . It was Jefferson University neuroscientist Andrew Newberg and University of Pennsylvania neuropsychologist Eugene D’Aquili who gave us our first real insight into this experience. Back in 1991, they were investigating a different kind of oneness . . . In deep contemplative states, Tibetan Buddhists report ‘absolute unitary being,’ or the feeling of becoming one with everything, while Franciscan nuns experience unia mysica, or oneness with God’s love.”
“Flow feels like the meaning of life for good reason.”
From Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties:
“We Shall Overcome” was a Baptist hymn which became the anthem of a social movement. The spirit of the sixties witnessed the transformation of utopian religion into terms of secular humanism. Just as Hegel and Marx turned Christian eschatology—the faith in the progress of history toward a specific goal—into secular theories of social change, so the sixties translated the Edenic impulse once again into political terms.
. . . Rock [music] was the organized religion of the sixties—the nexus not only of music and language but also of dance, sex and dope, which all came together into a single ritual of self-expression and spiritual tripping.
. . . The gates of Eden, which beckoned to a whole generation in many guises, still glimmer in the distance . . .
Also prefigured by the spirit of the ’50s and ’60s: much of the promise of Adver-ties and startup comedy.
From the chapter titled “Bearing ‘The Gospel of Freedom’: The Mass Meeting” in 1995 book The Preacher King: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Word that Moved America, published by Oxford University Press:
The meetings represented the ripening of a people’s social and spiritual preparation for freedom. If the slogan in pre-Revolution France was “the bread is rising,” in Montgomery, Selma, Albany, Greenwood, and countless other southern towns, it might have been a lyric from one of the most popular meeting songs, “I see freedom in the air.” . . . [The meetings] also possessed the squandered potential for influencing the whole society. One night Jackie Robinson told the packed Sixth Avenue Church in Birmingham, “The inspiration in this church tonight should be shown throughout the world.”
Reporter Pat Watters, [a white Southerner] who more than any other professional observer of the Movement recognized the genius of the mass meetings, expressed his frustration at their elusiveness to historians:
I sit and lament anew that the movement did not reach southern whites, lament the southern proscriptions that made it impossible for whites to enter such churches, hear such eloquence, feel the southernness of those meetings, and lament as much the forces, the compulsions of American culture that prevented any serious attempt by the media (television being surely the most appropriate) to present what was said and felt by the Negro people in those meetings. Back then, even then, I knew enough to say that if ever they would just put one mass meeting on television, for however long it might take, it would all be over.
Video excerpts follow that:
SUPPORT Watters’s claim that TV’s impact would’ve been decisive
center on Sam Cooke’s tenure “as a kind of teen idol of spiritual music” during the early 1950s (representative reminiscence: “To this day I’m astonished by how Sam Cooke would turn the church OUT”)
(2:26-4:03)
(7:18-9:06)
https://www.dailymotion.com/embed/video/xaqywk?start=438
(2:04-2:53)
Notes re: the video excerpts:
In the second excerpt, Bobby Womack’s likening of Sam Cooke to Elvis Presley is misleading: Womack’s phrasing—Cooke “brought Elvis Presley to the black side of town”—suggests that Cooke was influenced by Presley; Cooke joined the Soul Stirrers in 1950 and was an innovative performer years before Presley was first heard on the radio in 1954. (Presley became a nationwide sensation in 1956.)
In the third excerpt, the woman interviewed is Candi Staton, a singer who toured with Cooke when he was a member of The Soul Stirrers. #GREATlaugh
Martin Luther King Jr.: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
Addendum
Re: writing-errors in TBS (e.g., wrong verb tense, misplaced punctuation)
From 2012 book APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur — How to Publish a Book, co-authored by Guy Kawasaki, a former chief evangelist at Apple:
Every time I turn in the “final” copy of a book [Kawasaki has (co-)authored twelve books], I believe that it’s perfect. In APE’s case, upward of seventy-five people reviewed the manuscript, and [co-author] Shawn [Welch] and I read it until we were sick of it. Take a wild guess at how many errors our copy editor found. The answer is 1,500. [APE is 410 pages.]