Musician Michael Penn accurately sums up where the music business is at:

“Recorded music exists now in a netherworld between commerce and charity, dependent entirely on the ethics of strangers.”

He’s right. The economic forces, or lack thereof, around recorded music have now created a sort of pseudo-market, not bound by the rules of a true market but not completely different from a market either. This doesn’t just apply to music. Many forms of written, visual, or other kinds of media are already playing by these strange new rules or might find themselves playing by them soon.

People may argue that piracy and sharing is wrong and unethical. Media makers may long for their golden ages. Governments may try to legislate away piracy and sharing with draconian laws. Companies and industry groups may sue those who engage in file sharing. Corporate leaders may continue to run their business as if reality hasn’t changed. Artists may not be able to make the same living they did before. Journalists may lose their jobs. Newspapers may go out of business. TV budgets may get tighter. Book stores may disappear.

It doesn’t matter.

The change has happened. The best thing we can do is try to figure out how to survive, adapt, or start over. To resist this trend away from the relatively short-lived media marketplace of the 20th century is to swim against the current. Eventually you’re going to get tired and overwhelmed, at which point you’ll either be swept down the river anyway or drown.

Not fun.

Post-Scarcity Blues

What held our media businesses and marketplaces together for so long (long at least relative to the scope of our lifetimes; not long at all relative to human history) was economic scarcity. Outside of art and media that is inherently physical, such as sculpture, it was not scarcity of the actual art or media which gave it value, but scarcity of the physical container or delivery mechanism.

Physical goods are, by their nature, inherently scarce. They may be fairly abundant, but there is a limited supply of any physical good at any given time. As such, barring artificial market controls, which aren’t new, a price structure based at least somewhat on supply and demand has previously applied in our traditional media markets.

If you wanted a book, you had to buy, borrow, or steal the book. If you wanted a record you had to buy, borrow, or steal the record.

Then the Internet happened.

Well, not really.

Let’s go back further. For a long time, the only way to make copies of something was fairly manual. Someone could copy out a book by hand or re-typeset it. This is fairly involved, but with the mass production power of printing presses, book piracy did exist, especially in more remote places such as the Americas, where the supply vs. demand equation was balanced differently and different intellectual property laws and legal structures opened some opportunities. For quite some time, the United States lagged behind European intellectual property law and only granted copyright to US citizens, creating a situation where piracy of international books was rampant. The US saw maintaining this system as in their best interest since it both supported their publishing industry and also encouraged literacy—shades of modern China’s approach to IP law. ¹

As time went on and technology progressed through cameras, photocopiers, printers, cassettes, VHS, floppy discs, and writable CDs, copyright infringement became easier and impacted our media and art business models more and more. It was, naturally, met with fear and resistance every step of the way.

Then the Internet happened.

It wasn’t that there hadn’t been anything eroding the foundations of the media market’s supply and demand balance and now there suddenly was, but rather that the Internet eroded things to such an extent that it changed everything fairly suddenly. The combination of the ease of copying going way up, the cost of making copies and distributing them approaching zero, and the private nature of online sharing making it socially easier to do so created a situation where the floor collapsed underneath the physical scarcity media market business model.

On top of all that, even if we disregard online sharing, these businesses are impacted by a huge number of other sources of similar or similar-enough media flooding the marketplace at much lower costs, due to technology empowering non-traditional producers to create and share things at a low cost, for profit, or for free. Free writing online impacts the ability of others to sell theirs, even if their writing is better. Diverse news sources online cause ad prices to go down on newspaper websites relative to print prices. YouTube eats up a lot of people’s watching hours. Free music streams, YouTube, music blogs, or even super-cheap services like Spotify undermine the music-for-purchase market. Twitter reporting undermines TV news. Broadcast networks who relied on spectrum allocation restrictions (or the artificial cable TV landscape) now have to compete with the Internet where the barriers to entry are minuscule by comparison.

The Wikipedia article on scarcity tells us that:

“Goods (and services) that are scarce are called economic goods (or simply goods if their scarcity is presumed). Other goods are called free goods if they are desired but in such abundance that they are not scarce, such as air and seawater.”

In essence, we’ve gone from a situation where the physical objects we used to distribute media made the stuff on them act more like economic goods to a situation where this media now acts much more like free goods. These media products aren’t exactly like air or seawater, but they’re heading in that direction.

The problem is that these things all cost money, time, and resources to initially produce. The resulting products behave like free goods due to near-free distribution and reproduction, but we still need to find incentives and money for people to create them. People don’t need to create water (although we can pollute it).

Many have theorized about the possibility of a post-scarcity economy and written both fictional utopias and dystopias about the idea. What is a post-scarcity economy? Please enlighten us, Wikipedia:

“Post-scarcity is a hypothetical form of economy or society in which goods, services and information are free, or practically free. This would require an abundance of fundamental resources (matter, energy and intelligence), in conjunction with sophisticated automated systems capable of converting raw materials into finished goods.”

Obviously we’re not in a pure post-scarcity economy, but this aspect of it is beginning to look a little like one.² Unfortunately the rest of our lives aren’t post-scarcity and we’re still bound by scarcity rules governing our money and time. If music is relatively post-scarcity but food isn’t, we’re much more likely to be inclined to put our money towards food.

Some have proposed that attention is becoming the new valued good and theorized about an attention based economy. This doesn’t really help us in the near-term with funding of media and art, but demonstrates how much things have changed. In some areas, amount of time has passed amount of money as the controlling factor in decision-making around media.

Fascinatingly, excitingly, and frighteningly, similar challenges could soon face some types of physical goods with 3D printers increasing in quality and decreasing in price. Will the scarcity equation soon change for some physical goods and the businesses built around them? Jonathan Coulton wrote a great post that deals with this idea in its second half and has a great perspective on threats to the music industry and decreasing scarcity in general.

Capitalist Shock

All of this is is pretty scary for those of us who want to be involved in making these types of things and also for those of us enjoy these things in some form or another—that is to say, pretty much everyone. The change has been uncomfortable and it isn’t entirely clear what we’re changing to.

This lack of scarcity and the adjustment it requires feels strange to those of us who have lived most of our lives in a largely capitalist society that in many ways functions on top of scarcity and other related economic principles.

In Clay Shirky’s book Cognitive Surplus he writes about the tension that arises with this type of change:

“Because abundance can remove the trade-offs we’re used to, it can be disorienting to the people who’ve grown up with scarcity. When a resource is scarce, the people who manage it often regard it as valuable in itself, without stopping to consider how much of its value is tied to its scarcity. For years after the price of long-distance phone calls collapsed in the United States, my older relatives would still announce that a call was “long distance.” Such calls had previously been special, because they were expensive; it took people years to understand that cheap long-distance calls removed the rationale for regarding them as inherently valuable.”

Not only do people not know how to deal with and adapt to this disorienting change in how we value things, but I think media and art producers tend to not fully grasp this change and in turn don’t make changes to their business models in order to best fit the new reality and the new incentives and disincentives it brings. We often try to shove old market capitalism economics on top of digital mediums lacking in scarcity without an understanding of how it has all fundamentally changed.

This often doesn’t end up working very well. These systems (song/movie/TV sales online, newspaper paywalls, most tablet magazines, etc.) work somewhat, but not nearly to the same scale or consistency that the old models they were based off of worked. They work somewhat in part because they happen to hit on some other incentives that make people want to give money (more on that later) and because some people are willing to play along with these systems. It is a variation on a model they are used to and so it feels comfortable and right. They are familiar with this type of system and they think that they should behave this way.

Make no mistake though, these systems are based in old attitudes and resting on shaky economic foundations. It’s a sort of voluntary capitalism. By structuring our businesses this way, we’re asking everyone to cover their eyes and ears, ignore personal self-interest, and pretend that the old market forces still apply.

In his excellent article Subcompact Publishing, Craig Mod refers to this practice of transplanting old business models onto new realities as “skeuomorphic³ business models”:

“Business skeuomorphism happens when we take business decisions explicitly tied to one medium, and bring them to another medium — no questions asked. Business skeuomorphism is rampant in the publishing industry.”

In response to this changed market dynamic, many of our major media companies have tried to impose restrictions that produce a situation that behaves much like the old physical scarcity model without there actually being any physical scarcity. These restrictions are either technical, such as the use of DRM (Digital Rights Management) to lock down how people can use and share digital media, or legal, such as lobbying for stronger copyright laws with harsher penalties for copying and for cracking DRM.

These tactics create a host of big problems for society, our laws, freedom, fair competition for smaller media, and more. Moreover, they don’t really work that well and are only likely to put off the inevitable. It’s swimming against the current and making potential customers who might be inclined to help you dislike you instead. If you’re struggling in a raging river, it’s best not to give the finger to all those on the banks who could possibly save you.

Is legislating scarcity really what we should be trying to do? How sustainable is this? Legislating against human behaviour rarely works and requires massive resources, commitment, and a willingness to make painful societal and legal trade-offs if you want to try. See the war on drugs as an example of this.

Yes, scarcity has been artificially controlled in the past by both governments and businesses. Government controlled agricultural supply management is used here in Canada to limit the supply of products such as milk in order to keep the market steady and guarantee income to farmers. This practice has its defenders and many opponents. Privately, monopolies often have an ability to artificially control markets such as the De Beers diamond cartel which is generally regarded as very bad.

While this can be done in some areas, that doesn’t mean that it is a reasonable possibility with digital media. Sure, you can control the price and supply of milk, but people can’t really pirate milk. There are only so many dairy farmers and the physical nature of the market allows it to be easily controlled. In contrast, anybody can produce digital media and the distribution of digital media is incredibly easy, cheap, and massively distributed among many peers. The laws or technical restrictions required to control digital distribution would need to be far more draconian than those required to control milk distribution.

Even if we could theoretically control digital distribution legally or technically and we decided that this goal was worth the trade-offs, would such a system even last when faced with other pressures? There would still not be much stopping new upstarts from operating under the new realities and creating appealing media that takes away attention from the old through being good, cheap, easy to access, and easy to share. Even if trying to work in the new system is more difficult, I’d rather be working there than trying to prop up the old one.

Craig Mod writes that “the more difficult exercise is to reconsider the product in the context of now. A now which may be very different from the then in which the product was originally conceived.”

I’d like to put my efforts into working within the context of now by developing new media or modifying the old to work.

To be very clear, all this that I’ve said is not to say that capitalism is bad or markets are bad. Rather, I think that it’s in the best interests of creators and businesses to acknowledge when something isn’t really a market as we are used to it and when our traditional market-based approaches don’t necessarily work that well anymore. Market based approaches are the hammer that we’re trying to use on this screw. We should acknowledge when something isn’t a true market so that we know how to treat it. It’s no use treating a non-market like a market and then throwing up our hands when our market-based approaches aren’t working. Stop hammering the screw.

Patronage!

After all that about how we need to do things differently than in the past, you might expect me to say something along the lines of “don’t look back”. I can’t say that. As is usually the case, there are lessons to be learned from our past that we can apply with modifications to our present. If our market-based media economies are becoming less viable, what can we look to in order to fund things that people like and that benefit society?

What about patronage? Before physical materials were used to hold recorded media, one of the primary tools used to support the arts and other pursuits was patronage.

Patronage can take many forms. Religious institutions—in the western artistic tradition the Catholic Church especially (Big Christianity preceded Big Business)—provided the support for a lot of art that we now see as a major part of our cultural history. The Medici family in Florence used their power and wealth derived from politics and banking to provide patronage to art and science. Notable individuals who counted Medicis as their patrons include Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Galileo Galilei, and many others. The cultural significance of Florence is due in large part to Medici influence. Support of science and philosophy through patronage has also been quite significant, from the Medicis to England’s Royal Society which was massively influential in early science (then called natural philosophy) to NASA. The list of notable fellows of the Royal Society reads as a who’s who of early scientific and philosophical thought. More modest artists such as musicians and playing companies⁴ of actors also have a long history of support from patrons.

These are mostly old examples, but patronage hasn’t ever really gone away. While the proportion of cultural works backed by patronage systems may have decreased relatively compared to commercial market funded works, patronage has existed throughout our cultural history. Not only do wealthy individuals, families, and groups still support various endeavours, but we frequently see institutionalized patronage in the form of government-funded public broadcasting or grants. Other institutions such as NPR rely on donations from supporters to do what they do. The New Yorker, part of privately-owned Condé Nast, is rumoured to be frequently unprofitable but supported by its private owner regardless.

Most notably we see a great deal of media sponsored by companies in unrelated fields. Even though it might not frequently be thought of in this way, I see corporate sponsorship as half advertising and half patronage. The company is supporting other pursuits which they feel will bring awareness and status to their company and brand by association. This is not very different from the reasons many other patrons have for supporting various ventures. The Medicis were patrons for status, power, money, and to make themselves feel important. There may have been a touch of benevolence in there too. Redbull Medici.

Clay Shirky argues that some forms of media such as journalism have never really been directly funded by market models, but have been subsidized by other areas:

“Journalism written for that fraction of the population that follows the news closely has always been subsidized. For the last century, newspaper journalism had direct subsidy from advertisement and cross-subsidy from sports fans and coupon clippers who never really cared about the city council or the coup in Madagascar. The packages containing news have been so bundled and cross-funded that we’ve never really known precisely the size of the audience for actual civic-minded reporting, or how much direct fees from that audience would amount to. We do know, however, that the rough answers are ”Small“ and ”Not much,“ answers that suggest radical transformation, now that the media environment in which those subsidies flourished is gone.”

That sounds a little ominous, but Shirky is optimistic, saying that we are entering a “second great age of patronage”. While he says patronage models have always existed in journalism and “were always viewed as oddities”, he predicts that we will see more broad success from patronage models due to the declining cost of media production.

I’m not sure that I’d go quite so far as to say we’re in a second great age of patronage yet, but I do think that there is a lot of potential for patronage models to play a much bigger role. The aforementioned corporate sponsorship patronage is obviously quite substantial, although it is not a super new model.

What about new models of patronage that aren’t corporate sponsorship or traditional fund-drives? How are those doing?

New patronage has a standard bearer and its name is Kickstarter. Kickstarter is high profile, and deservedly so. It is a new model for funding things in a distributed way which is very successful. Kickstarter of course isn’t limited to providing funding for just media, but funding for many different product categories including a variety of successful physical products. Others such as Indiegogo are providing a similar platform for creators to use.

One of the most successful media Kickstarters (or at least most high profile) is Amanda Palmer’s Kickstarter for what became her album Theatre is Evil and the tour and art book that supported it. Her Kickstarter raised $1,192,793, stomping her original $100,000 goal. While this is definitely an outlier at this point, and that amount of money only goes so far when you have big ideas (as Amanda Palmer broke down in a blog post responding to some, in my opinion, mostly unwarranted criticism), it is certainly encouraging.

Essentially patronage breaks down into two broad categories: top-down patronage (Shirky: “the ‘one rich person’ model”) or bottom-up (Shirky: “the NPR Fund Drive model”). Both have their strengths, both have their challenges, and both likely have a role to play.

Top-down patronage has the benefit of potential scale, reach, and availability of significant funding up-front without a lot of required hustling—if you can get a patron, that is. While there are some good examples of this type of patronage and a fair bit of corporate sponsorship around, I’d be interested to see this model expand more into direct-sponsorship for the creation of new media. I’d also be interested to see big rich patron sponsors of digital-first media properties. The New Yorker is possibly bankrolled by a patron that wants it to continue and will withstand a bit of a financial loss to see that happen. What would a digital-first online journalism outlet with a patron like this look like? With the new low-production costs of digital media and some clever thinking how far could that kind of money go? ProPublica is somewhat in this sphere, as a “non-profit, independent newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest”.

Top-down patronage comes with its share of risks and limitations. With money coming from one concentrated source that isn’t the eventual intended audience, there isn’t a direct relationship with the audience and the creator is more dependant and thus accountable to the patron and what they want instead. How does the creator keep these moneyed interests sufficiently at bay in order to properly execute on their vision and protect what they think is important and/or right? This is especially significant with some types of art and journalism. It requires some degree of benevolence on the part of the patron and an alignment of interests between what the creator and the patron want to accomplish in order for this to work out. For those watching or listening or reading or experiencing the media, there also needs to be an awareness of the biases and interests behind the funding. How do we navigate the treacherous waters of art and the money that supports it? Of course, patronage was never pure or lacking these complexities. The patron always has to be pleased. Sometimes things will be too controversial for a sponsor or a patron. The Medicis gave Galileo protection for a long time, but eventually abandoned him when the Inquisition came knocking.

Some types of art or media might be completely unsuitable for sponsorship or funding by top-down patronage. Some artists may feel that this type of model compromises their work and everything they stand for. That’s okay. There will hopefully be other viable options!

Bottom up patronage outside of some of the more established fund drive models done by institutions with an already established audience is both very exciting and very uncertain. The Internet and the campaigns to fund projects that we’ve built on top of it allow smaller scale creators to reach out more broadly without corporate support. Can this provide a much more direct path to success without having to go through traditional channels that could hinder you or take away control? Is this a possible path for those whose works otherwise wouldn’t go over well with mainstream media institutions or are too controversial?

Similarly, is this kind of model healthier for some kinds of creative works with the creator accountable to what the audience wants and enjoys rather than being more accountable to what a label or corporate sponsor or advertisers want? Maybe for some! This is certainly an exciting opportunity to explore, especially if you feel you are on the fringes of what might otherwise be funded through more traditional means or have something you feel is very appealing and easy to sell by yourself. On the other side of the success spectrum, this kind of model can also be very successful for those who have already gained some level of success and recognition and want to use their notoriety in order to transition to this kind of system and gain control over their work, who owns it, how it’s funded, how it’s produced, and how it’s distributed.

While these kinds of models might not yet be the best way to make it big, there do seem to be some success stories. These types of methods also offer other benefits such as control, ownership, and connection with your audience. On Episode 1 of The New Disruptors, a podcast about the “profound changes in the economy for making things”, filmmakers Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky talk about how funding their movie Indie Game: The Movie through Kickstarter and distributing it themselves gave them a connection to their audience that allowed them to build a community of support around their movie and themselves.

This all sounds very promising, but it’s all far from easy. There’s lots of details to be ironed out and potential road blocks on the creator level and on the broader systemic level.

On the creator level, this type of fundraising for your own work can be great but can also be a huge amount of work. Ask Amanda Palmer. She pours herself entirely into promoting her work and herself in a way that many artists would be unable or unwilling to do. How will those who can’t manage this type of self-promotion and business-wrangling be able to navigate this new world? Can they? Not everyone can be Amanda Palmer. Let’s hope that there is a middle ground.

On the systemic level there are a lot of problems around scaling this type of model to impact more of our culture. Can this be scaled to generating really big successes and hits? If the lack of scarcity kills the systems that generate our really big budget media, is it possible to fund similar things this way? We’ve seen Amanda Palmer and others be very successful, but by the scale of pop culture that’s still a relative blip. Radiohead was already huge when they tried their pay what you can model, but how do new artists get huge if they didn’t start in the big-money old model? Veronica Mars was previously a relatively popular TV show. How do we Kickstart new shows, back big-budget blockbuster movies, and make new stars?

As a driver of culture, how does this all come together and become organized? How can you convince people to contribute to a project when there’s no guarantee that it will be good and they can just pirate it for free somewhere else instead or enjoy something else that they’re more confident about. How will these types of crowd-funded media be discovered by the public at large? Will they be limited to niches? Will this contribute to an even less cohesive mass culture? How do you avoid a tragedy of the commons effect where people avoid contributing because they think others will instead?

There are lots of questions.

Mixing it up. Using the right tools

Maybe some of these questions are intractable problems. Maybe we will just have to accept the downsides of the unclear system that we’re moving towards. That may be the case in some ways, but I’d like to explore what I think are some of the best ways to deal with some of these problems in a post-market, post-scarcity, digital-native, free-information-native way.

If we can’t rely on market forces to give structure to help us make money in media and art anymore, what can we look to? The same incentives we relied on before aren’t as strong or no longer exist, but there are still incentives we can use in order to build businesses and support our art.

So what are the incentives and reasons people have to pay for your media product?

1. They aren’t aware of another option.
2. They feel that they should.
3. It’s convenient.
4. They want to.

Let’s go through these.

They aren’t aware of another option

Sure, people may not know that they can get stuff for free, or how to do that. Some may not know about all the other free or cheap media online. Can we count on that group to remain substantial enough to anchor and sustain a business? I wouldn’t.

They feel that they should

This is the underlying incentive underneath what I earlier referred to as voluntary capitalism. While I wouldn’t want to rely on this as the main underpinning of a model intended to support the equivalent of the modern music or TV industries with all their costs, for instance, I don’t think it is without any sort of value as a component alongside another incentives.

People feel like they should do something due to an internal sense of what’s right or due to a fear of being judged by other people. While it is fairly normal in some groups, there is currently some feeling of shame about online downloading in others. This could be a component in a broader strategy, but I think it’s very risky to rely on this as attitudes change.

It’s convenient

Now we’re getting into some really powerful incentives! I wrote earlier that some online services that operate like markets succeed because they hit on other incentives. iTunes, as an example, hits on people feeling like they should pay and especially on it being convenient to pay. It is certainly much more convenient and easy for most people to buy something through iTunes than to find it from a torrent site, comb through the frequently obscene ads and links designed to deceive you, try to figure out if it’s good quality, download it with confusing torrent software, and then play it. Along the way you sacrifice quality assurance, reliably attached artwork, ability to re-download your purchase elsewhere, and more. This works for smaller media makers too in a slightly different way. It is often more convenient to buy an album from an artist on iTunes or Bandcamp than it is for me to try and find it shared online if they aren’t very popular!

Adding convenience is much easier right now in other media categories besides music. Unfortunately music sharing is very easy and very entrenched. Sharing ebooks, for instance, isn’t nearly as common. They tend to be much more difficult to find, making the convenience threshold much easier to pass. Netflix and other video services have convenience working for them even more since you can start playing a movie or show right away without having to do all the awkward downloading steps with even more hassle due to large file sizes and getting those files to your TV or device you use to watch them.

Gabe Newell, CEO of Valve, the makers of online game store/service Steam, argues that “Piracy is almost always a service problem”, explaining that their goal “is to create greater service value than pirates, and this has been successful enough for us that piracy is basically a non-issue for our company.”

Think about what problems you can solve for potential customers/fans to make them want to go through your channel and give you money. It’s unfortunate, yes, that people wont just give money all the time, but given that, it’s best to be practical.

They Want To

Here we go!

When people back a Kickstarter project, give money to a street performer, pay money at a pay what you can show, or buy media they could otherwise download for free, a big part of why they do that is because they want to.

In Amanda Palmer’s recent excellent TED talk she says that we’re asking the wrong question when we ask “How do we make people pay for music?” and suggests that we ask “how do we let people pay for music?” instead. For her, a big part of enabling this is connecting with people. She says that “when you connect with them, people want to help you”. While this could be exhausting and wouldn’t work for some (an artist like David Bowie relies on some distance and mystique, for instance) the personal connection is powerful.

Yes, in some ways this is charity, but is that bad? We do not see charity as incompatible with capitalism and markets. In fact, we leave a lot of important things to charity. Why not art and media as well to some extent? Yes, it might not be 100% reliable, but could it get us some of the way there? If we’re worried that donations wont be enough to give us the media and art we want, what does that say about donations as a system for supporting big social issues? Perhaps we need to re-examine ourselves further.

Maybe it can work, though.

Bandcamp, an online music store that aims to make purchases very convenient, takes a number of user and fan friendly measures. Music can be streamed for free, sometimes downloaded for free if the artist wants it to be, and is available in a wide range of formats. They also give a great deal to the artist selling the music and provide tools for the artist to make the store their own and give it their personality. When someone buys music on Bandcamp they have the option to pay the list price or more. The result? Fans pay more than the list price 40% of the time, resulting in the average price paid going up by almost 50%! I’m generally bullish on this whole idea, but even I was shocked at how high that figure is when I read it!

Practically-speaking, what kinds of things can we do to encourage people to want to give us money?

Making things convenient like Bandcamp makes it easy for people, but is also a sign of good will towards your fans and users. Where others lock things down, opening things up and trusting people might be a good way to engender good feelings which hopefully lead to support.

Using language that conveys positive feelings can also be helpful. For instance, Bandcamp now shows a “supported by” list on artist pages. Kickstarter uses fund drive style language like “pledge” and “back this project” as well as presenting the idea of a funding goal. All this conveys the message that the artist or producer is depending on support and pledges and requires a team to come together to help them reach a goal.

Amanda Palmer stresses making human connections with people as important in encouraging people to want to give you money. Not everyone can put Amanda Palmer levels of sweat and work into this kind of venture, but the principle can be applied in smaller ways as well. Treating your fans as other humans and with respect is a good first step. Bandcamp discourages artists from making their prices end in 99 cents, saying:

“Though it may be an effective tactic for selling waterbeds, cell phone plans, and Angry Birds 34, when we see that sort of pricing on an artist’s own website, we do not think “gosh, this is a good deal” but rather “what we previously thought was a person/band is actually a marketing department, and they’re subtly telling us they think we’re idiots.” Present a straightforward price, let fans pay more if they want, and they’ll reward you.”

Act like a person or group who wants to share their creation, not a penny-pinching, faceless entity.

A lot of successful projects give other incentives that signal appreciation and sweeten the deal. Kickstarter uses rewards to encourage different pledge levels. Often these are substantial products worth the value given, but frequently they are worth much less than the price paid and people pledge that much because they want to. The reward serves as a token of thanks rather than an object that is paid for as a pure economic transaction. T-Shirts are often the form this token of gratitude takes.

People will want to give you money for your media if you can also include something else they feel is worthwhile to pay for. There is still some love for the tangible in the world, and while some formats like CDs don’t have substantial advantages and charm, others like vinyl records and paper books have distinct advantages and charms that some might be more inclined to purchase. Real world time and place bound experiences such as concerts, conferences, cruises, meet-ups, or other special events are also still bound by market forces and scarcity and can be used by some to support media creation.

I’m sure there are many other areas that would encourage people to want to give you money. Think about what would make you want to help someone.

Swim With the Current

Let’s stop fighting it. We can’t go back in time, even if it was better. We should stop trying to remake our world in order to make it fit how we want it to work, and instead work on remaking how we do things in order to fit the changed world best. Jonathan Coulton sees this changed world as both inevitable and, in many ways, positive:

“Our laws and ethics already fail to match up with our behaviors, and for my money, those are the things we should be trying to fix. The change is already happening to us, and it’s a change that WE ARE CHOOSING. It’s too late to stop it, because we actually kind of like a lot of the things that we’re getting out of it.”

The world changed because of things that people did. Not everything is inevitable, nor is it necessarily for the best, but things changed because we make choices based on emotion and self-interest. The whole idea of market forces and economic idea of the invisible hand of the market is based on self-interest! To do business in media we need to recognize where self-interest now lies so that we can use it, but also recognize the now even more powerful role that emotion plays.

I’ll see you downstream.

Beyond the physical pleasures of fall, I find it to be the most emotionally resonant time of year. The oppressive heat of summer recedes and I feel like I can mentally and physically breathe again. The winter looms, but for a short time we’re given a pleasant balance and an opportunity to reflect on change and inevitable endings.

See the Leaves

Before I get to the serious heavy stuff though, I want to give the physical and simpler pleasures of fall a moment.

Fall is a treat for the senses. The rich colours of fall trees and the leaves they send out onto the ground and elsewhere is the prettiest this area of the world gets, in my opinion. The feel of crisp air and the lack of awful humidity and heat is an absolute pleasure after summer. While it can be a little too cold or rainy or dark at times, the chill brings the reward of a comfortable warm sweater, a hot cup of tea, or time by a warm fire. Even my ears get a treat with the sound of the rustling leaves. The presence of Thanksgiving and its delicious feast gives fall one of the best taste experiences of the year too. I know many feel differently, but from me, you get top marks here, Fall.

New Ways Of Living

Beyond the physical pleasures of the season, which are many and are truly fantastic, fall holds emotional weight for me. For most of my life fall has been associated with new experiences, new projects, and new life trajectories. Going back to school or starting at a new one was the new fall thing for most of my life. Working in the TV industry, I now have fall newness every year due to the fall TV season and the work that is required around that.

I’ve always enjoyed the new beginnings that come with the fall. Summer is great, but the fall brings a new sense of purpose and new opportunities. With new schools or social groups that would come from these new fall starts, I have also come to associate fall with semi-fresh starts and an opportunity for some forms of self re-invention. I like starting at a new school or new job for the freedom it gives me to re-invent or at least adjust my public self and hit a bit of a reset on personal and social patterns I was stuck in that weren’t working out that well.

The promise of change that fall brings even seems to be represented by the weather. The crisp, cooler air and colourfully different landscape often feels very sudden. This dramatic change is a bit of a shock to the system that can help me give myself a little kick. Fall’s sense of productivity and change are also somewhat reflected by its harvest associations. The harvest is necessary change required to prepare for the oncoming winter and has associations both with prudent productivity and enjoyable feasting. While the reality of the need to prepare for the oncoming winter doesn’t touch my urban grocery-store life very much, it reflects fall’s brief nature as a short window of beautiful weather and opportunity before the winter arrives. Fall demands to be noticed, and brings a sense of urgency with it.

All Things Must Pass

Fall represents not only just change, but change moving towards an end. Winter, while not an absolute end, is the end of hospitable weather for us and much other life outside. We will have to hunker down soon and push our way through the dark and cold winter. Lucky us to have modern conveniences to make that so much easier! Fall, as a period of twilight between the day of summer and the night of winter, can be a melancholy time. The changing of the seasons, and especially change heading towards winter, can be a reminder of death. We’re moving towards a dark winter, but also an end for our lives. We only have so many of each season. Just as thoughts of death are more likely to spring up at night, I imagine (without any stats to back me up) that similar thoughts are also more likely in winter and in the twilight that precedes it.¹

As much as it is sad to think about, it is this finite nature of life and the inevitability of death that defines our lives and our time. We, as living people, are driven by endings and are fascinated by them. They are often painful or sad, but they are always necessary in some form to give us motivation and help us understand things. I think this proximity to and association with endings is a big reason why, for me at least, fall carries so much emotional weight. It is a representation of the inevitable march of change that brings a mix of feelings—happy and sad; hope and fear. Fall brings melancholy but it is not exclusively melancholy for me. It evokes powerful emotions in general and, on the whole, I experience it as bittersweet, one of the most powerful emotions of all.

Not every end is a goal. The end of a melody is not its goal: but nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable.

– Friedrich Nietzsche

Thanks, Nietzsche. That made me feel better.

Fall does have hope mixed in. It does make me feel energized. There is potential. Perhaps it is the oncoming darkness that makes these contrasting feelings stand out so much. Fall is a reminder that life is finite and life is cyclical, but change can happen and we don’t have to be stuck in one place as the world passes us by.

The brisk air and the prospect of winter is a reminder to take action while you can, to remake yourself as you wish, and to make the most of your time. The world is moving. Are you?

From This Position

Of course, all this is only relevant to those of us in a part of the northern hemisphere who experience this sort of weather and seasonal pattern. Not only that, but a lot of the factors at play here are also cultural. School starts at different times in different places. I imagine that TV seasons do too. Winter also coincides with the end of our calendar year. I’m sure that this arbitrary division of time also plays a role psychologically. This bittersweet nature is fairly specific and is also possibly fairly specific to me and some others like me. I know some who do not find much pleasure in fall and their experience is decidedly more melancholy. I know others (fewer) who love winter. Is their fall experience less melancholy on the whole?

In general, I love distinct seasons. Having lived with them for my whole life, I would be somewhat wary of moving to a place that doesn’t have them or has far milder variations. Seasons give a sense of things moving and also ground us within time. They divide the year into more manageable chunks that we can do things with and feel things about. Does living in a place without seasons feel more like a continuous flow of time similar to living in a room where you can’t see the sun rising and setting? I’m not sure I’d like it, but I’m glad those places exist for me to travel to if I can’t handle the current season!

I don’t think I’ll have many people outside of my general geographic area reading this, but if so, and you have experience living in places where the seasons are very different or where they barely exist and you have thoughts on it, I’d love to hear what you think on Twitter.

Oh, I almost forgot one thing: it’s decorative gourd season. (I read that every year.)

Further Listening

Here are some songs barely or substantially related to the subject at hand. This is basically just opportunity for me to share music that I like! I hope you like these songs too.

• See the Leaves – The Flaming Lips, Embryonic — This is appropriately dark and spooky for October. This album blows my mind. It’s heavy, relentless, and amazing.
• New Ways Of Living – Destroyer, Notorious Lightning & Other Works — Dan Bejar (Destroyer) is awesome. This version of the song with Frog Eyes as his backing band is great and full of energy. The original version features cheesy MIDI instruments, for some reason, but it’s still enjoyable in that weird not-quite-sure-if-it’s-a-joke-or-not Destroyer way, though.
• All Things Must Pass – George Harrison, All Things Must Pass — A stunning song from his stunning album of the same name. This is my favourite Beatles solo album by a long shot. In addition to having built up a bunch of unused songs over the Beatles period, George was peaking creatively as the Beatles were ending, and this album is evidence of that. Amazingly George demoed this song for The Beatles (among other great songs) and they never used it. It appeared on The Beatles’ Anthology 3 and this demo is my favourite version of the song.
• Pow Pow – LCD Soundsystem, This Is Happening — If this article made you feel a little sad, put on this song, turn it up, listen to James Murphy ramble about various things “from this position”, and then enjoy yourself when the bass finally and gloriously comes in.

It isn’t.

I still find inspiration in it, though. When I experience being knocked down a bit (or a lot) I gain perspective and a new fresh outlook on things. We often take things that we have for granted and don’t realize our good fortune or how it could be worse until we no longer have them. At least that’s what Joni Mitchell told me.

It isn’t actually really the being sick part of things that makes me feel good, but rather the getting better part. The change back to normal is important. Without the prospect of getting better or if the sickness goes on too long I don’t think there is much good at all to be taken from sickness. I am lucky enough to be in generally good health and able to take good things out of feeling bad. I fully recognize my privilege here.

I’ve had this subject on my list of things to write about, and having been sick last week and feeling mostly better now, I figured it was the best time to write it!

New Feeling

The first and most obvious part of how being sick makes me feel good is the pure physical sensation of feeling better. What a relief! How good it feels to wake up in the morning after an awful day prior and feel better or most of the way there. I get a lot of headaches (some fairly bad), and while I often have to sleep them off, they occasionally go away while I’m conscious. That feeling—or lack of feeling if you look at it that way— is one of the best feelings around.

It’s really just going back to “normal”, but comparatively it feels like pure pleasure to me. I feel refreshed, I feel physically lighter, and I feel unburdened both physically and mentally. I feel right.

Time Out Of Mind

It goes beyond feeling physically and mentally “normal” though. Feeling unburdened after being sick gives me a sense of freedom and possibility. Being sick is often a forced break from living life, and when you don’t have the option to take a break from the things you need to do, being sick can be pretty unpleasant (that was me last week). When I’m sick, most of my physical and mental energy gets diverted towards just getting through things. I’m not one to accomplish much when I’m sick. I can manage competence at the things I need to do, but not much more. Some are lucky enough to occasionally use sickness as a time to do certain things or create things from a different perspective. Neil Young wrote three of his most famous and best songs (“Cinnamon Girl”, “Cowgirl in the Sand”, and “Down by the River”) all in one day while he had a high fever from the flu. So far I haven’t been able to harness this kind of creativity.

This kind of time away from my mind, thinking, doing things I want to do, and living feels very frustrating. When I break free of it I’m filled with desire to do things, to go out and have fun, to make things, to stop procrastinating, and to live in the best way I can. I find that I can often harness this invigoration and get myself on a productive streak and shift my habits to some extent.

Hang On To Your Ego

Being sick puts us in our place a bit and I think can give us better perspective, humility, and a sense of our strengths and weaknesses and how to properly work with them in our lives. In the conclusion of his only somewhat related but very very interesting book The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive, Brian Christian writes:

If there’s one thing I think the human race has been guilty of for a long time—since antiquity at least—it’s a kind of complacency, a kind of entitlement. This is why, for instance, I find it oddly invigorating to catch a cold, come down from my high horse of believing myself a member of evolutions crowning achievement, and get whupped for a couple days by a single-celled organism

Christian talks about this in a different and somewhat specific context, but I think this is generally applicable. He argues that feeling complacent and entitled can open you up to losing what you have “to someone who is fighting harder.” He says that, in general, “a loss, and the reality check to follow, might do us a world of good.”

We can be brought down by a single-celled organism and sometimes it’s not just a cold, but something more serious that can bring us down a level permanently or even end us completely. Getting a cold, or some other relatively minor sickness acts as a kind of shot across the bow of my worldview. We don’t have a lot of time and it is important to take advantage of the time we have. In this limited time, having good health is very fortunate and it isn’t something I want to waste. I want to use my time and good health wisely for both productivity and enjoyment (they bleed together a bit). I obviously wont be perfect and follow through on this all the time, but the occasional bout of sickness is a useful, though unpleasant, way of teaching me this lesson, or reaffirming it again if needed.

There are other ways to learn this, and I’m not sure I’d go as far as to say that I want to get sick in order to learn this, or that it would be good for other people, but when it does happen I try to take the best things I can away from the experience. Unfortunately, someone who is sick frequently, chronically, or permanently will likely not have this kind of experience. I hope that in addition to helping me push myself towards living better, this understanding of how health impacts my life, how fragile it is, and how lucky I am also gives me more empathy for those who struggle with their health on an ongoing basis.

(Canadian) Thanksgiving is coming up soon. While some may find it trite, I’ve always thought that its message is a really great one. Taking some time to actively acknowledge what you have and what you should be very thankful for is very good for keeping things in perspective. In the spirit of that, I am thankful for my health, aware of how lucky I am to have it, and I very much don’t want to take it for granted.

Further Listening

Here are some songs barely or substantially related to the subject at hand. This is basically just opportunity for me to share music I like! I hope you like these songs too.

• New Feeling – Talking Heads, The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads — Talking Heads is my current musical obsession. I enjoy their studio recordings, but I’m drawn most the the frantic energy of their live recordings.
• Not Dark Yet – Bob Dylan, Time Out Of Mind — Possibly my favourite Dylan song from the last couple decades, though I haven’t heard them all.
• Hang on to Your Ego – The Beach Boys, Pet Sounds (sort of) — “Hang on to Your Ego” was the title of the first recording of what would go on to be “I Know There’s an Answer” on Pet Sounds. Brian Wilson changed the title and the lyrics after Mike Love objected to the LSD-related lyrics. Brian Wilson wrote the song during his second time using LSD. On this version Brian Wilson also sings lead the whole time instead of just on the choruses.
• Cowgirl in the Sand – Neil Young, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere — One of Neil Young’s three fever-induced greats. There are countless amazing live versions, but I picked the album version for its amazing hazy atmosphere. I’m not sure that this album would be as good as it is without all the hiss that’s on the tracks.

The ever-increasing dominance of media in our lives is possibly the most defining aspect of human existence and development over the last [insert vague and historically unsubstantiated number here] years or so.¹ Media is everywhere; media is everything. We keep adding forms, increasing our consumption of it and interaction with it, and it is increasingly becoming the dominant part of most of our days. Media development has accelerated and now we have the Internet, a sort of everything medium that consumes them all and breaks down their restrictions.

Media has grown so much and so quickly that I think most people would have a hard time fully defining the idea of what it is and what it is not. What was a hard question to answer before is now even more vague and difficult.

As media has taken on a life of its own, our understanding of the role it plays in our lives has become foggier and more complex. Not only do we struggle with the place it has in our lives, but we now lack a steady understanding of how best to create it, use it, profit from it (or simply sustain it economically), and pursue societal goals with it. Where once media theorists or experts in the field might have been able to have a pretty thorough and accurate understanding of how media can be produced and how it interacts with society, it now feels like people don’t really have a solid grasp on it these days. Perhaps I’m overstating the grasp that those in the past had on understanding the media of their time, but I think that there is definitely less of an understanding now than there has previously been when forms were more solid and the economics of production were steadier and more reliable.

I think our lack of media understanding breaks down broadly into three categories: how to produce economically successful media in a drastically changed marketplace, how to best use our new media and systems to create quality media, and how best to address the relationship between media and our lives and keep it from being detrimental to ourselves and our society.

Technology has continued to accelerate and push ahead without regard for whether our understanding of the situation has yet caught up to reality. This has resulted in a substantial amount of uncertainty and unpleasant consequences for many individuals and businesses. Though many of the personal and societal consequences of this transition are unfortunate, this uncertainty and change has also created an environment in which there is a great deal of potential opportunity to go along with the problems. The general trend I have observed among those talking about the future of media in most of its forms is that people really have no idea what’s going to happen or how best to adapt. That is not to disparage anyone though, as pretty much everyone is in this lack of understanding together. I know I’m in that group for the most part as well. That’s pretty scary, but the potential it creates is also pretty exciting. For me, the idea of getting a handle on media and producing solid systems and quality products seems like trying to hold back the ocean with one hand and then trying build an island with the other. It seems impossible, but if you can pull it off, it would be quite the feat.

You Never Give Me Your Money

At this point I’m not sure that there’s a media industry, distribution system, or financial model that has been unaffected by the changing landscape precipitated by the Internet and various new devices (and in some cases likely exacerbated by a struggling economy in general). Music, movies, TV, newspapers, magazines, novels, books, and more are all experiencing substantial pressures on their businesses. Some industries such as a the music industry have been substantially impacted already and are beginning to come out the other side with new models. Others, such as newspapers, are in a very precarious position with a lot of uncertainty and potential unpleasantness ahead.

Some industries such as TV and movies have been able to sustain themselves and largely maintain their models in spite of a decent amount of piracy and desire for change. While these industries are still threatened and could possibly face a collapse at some point soon (or not-so-soon), I think there are some unique circumstances that are holding off a collapse at this point. For both TV and movies the medium of video has more inherent technical deterrents against piracy at this point, such difficulty of transmitting such large files in high quality and poor options for viewing those files (especially with others on a big screen). The movie industry has the advantage that people seem to generally still enjoy going to theatres for the social experience and the big screen, though, in my opinion, they risk compromising this experience with excessively high prices and too many advertisements surrounding the movie. For television, there are institutional factors that make TV more sticky. Most people are used to paying for cable TV and it provides what amounts to a more convenient service at times, especially if you are a sports fan or enjoy flipping channels.

Overall though, there are worrying signs all across the media industry that there aren’t solid plans for how to replace the current systems with ones that customers would like and ones that would also generate enough revenue to maintain the level of funding for programming that is currently available and “needed” for it to be created. Meanwhile, new online models that are independent of the old guard are far from succeeding with flying colours and lack many of the benefits and scalability that the old models have given us. Systems are collapsing faster than we can put them together again or build new ones. Clay Shirky, writing about the collapsing newspaper business and referencing Elizabeth Eisenstein’s research into the early days of the printing press notes that the revolution to print was “chaotic” and “that is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place.”

In a different article on the collapse of complex business models, Shirky—who is incredibly adept at scaring the shit out of media industry types—references Joseph Tainter’s 1988 book The Collapse of Complex Socities and compares how Tainter explains collapsing societies to our current collapsing media industries:

Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.

[…]

In such systems, there is no way to make things a little bit simpler – the whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily amenable to change. Tainter doesn’t regard the sudden decoherence of these societies as either a tragedy or a mistake—”[U]nder a situation of declining marginal returns collapse may be the most appropriate response”

It’s tempting, at least for the people benefitting from the old complexity, to imagine that if things used to be complex, and they’re going to be complex, then everything can just stay complex in the meantime. That’s not how it works, however.

In “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable”, Shirky turns his nightmare-inducing prognostication powers on newspaper executives and explains how a lot of the wishful thinking around transitioning old/current business models to the future rests on incorrect assumptions and the practical realities of yesterday:

The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!” The details differed, but the core assumption behind all imagined outcomes (save the unthinkable one) was that the organizational form of the newspaper, as a general-purpose vehicle for publishing a variety of news and opinion, was basically sound, and only needed a digital facelift.

Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

I’ve quoted Shirky at length here because I think that everyone in big media companies should be issued Shirky’s somewhat doom and gloom writing to read in order to give them a better idea of the problems they are facing and the potential for complete collapse. I also recommend that big media companies then offer counselling sessions afterwards with a large supply of various comfort foods. Even if Shirky is wrong, I think it’s good to understand the possibilities so you can prepare to face those problems.

Personally, I think that Shirky’s ideas and predictions are very possible outcomes for these medium transitions, but I don’t think that they are necessarily how things will go. I tend towards agreeing with him most of the time, but just because some complex systems collapse doesn’t mean that they all necessarily will in the near term or that they cannot transition somewhat more smoothly into a new system. Not all changes need to be revolutions.

I often waver between thinking that a collapse followed by a fresh start would be the best thing for the future and thinking that a more orderly transition would strike the right balance between minimizing damage and building for the future. Part of me would prefer to be unburdened by old systems and escape unnecessary constraints born out of historic factors such as geofencing or DRM or other misguided attempts to control online distribution and institutionalized cruft such as contracts and legal constraints designed for the past. Through the kicking and screaming obstinance of many of these companies and their lobbying groups, we have seen and will likely continue to see our laws and rights be compromised in favour of protecting outdated copyright laws at all cost. This is very unfortunate and could have serious long-term consequences in other areas. With that said, a more orderly transition could have a lot of substantial benefits as well such as preserving jobs and not contributing to further economic unrest (which is obviously really important), possibly being able to continue funding big budget projects that would be currently impossible with a completely new system, and maintaining many of our current media properties which provide value and entertainment.

It’s hard to predict which way will prove best or even viable, but it isn’t necessarily a zero sum game. In this chaotic transition some people are going to try to save and adapt the old systems and some are going to try and create new systems. I think it’s prudent to explore both options and in time we’ll see what ends up succeeding.

The Great Curve

It’s one thing to have systems that can economically sustain themselves and produce various types of media. It’s another thing entirely to have systems that are successful enough and place emphasis on the right kinds of things required to create great media (or art, if we want to use that word). Let’s forget about the uncertain project of trying to adapt the old systems (which currently do produce some great stuff) and focus for now on creating new systems and using new technologies and processes to create great works.

While some new ventures like Netflix’s investment in original programming feature big budgets like those of the old systems, much of what people are creating under new models is being created on shoestring budgets, relatively speaking. While new models may feature bigger budgets in time, that will be difficult and is probably a little or a long ways off. We’ll have to build up to that. In addition to the economic constraints, technical and social factors have come together to encourage the use of the Internet for the creation and consumption of media that is generally short, cheap, and quick and not nearly as substantial as we have seen and generally enjoyed through other old media. This kind of short, cheap, and quick media isn’t inherently bad, but too much of it is not necessarily the best. While it’s theoretically possible that this kind of material is the only kind that can be produced for the Internet and it is all people really want anyway, I don’t think that’s the fully story. I think there is potential for exploring and experimenting with different forms that are possibly just not super economically convenient or easy at this point in time.

I don’t have rock-solid solutions to these problems (otherwise I’d probably be pursuing them right now), but I have a few general conceptual ideas on how to approach them.

Understand the medium

I think that the best creative works are often produced when the author or team is well acquainted with their medium and they understand its constraints and opportunities. This expertise allows the creator to tailor their work specifically towards the medium and the way in which the viewer or reader or listener will experience it. The Internet, as I noted before, is an everything medium where all sorts of different kinds of media can exist and provide a wide range of technical possibilities and differences in experience. It’s not very easy to master the everything medium.

The Internet as a distribution/viewing/creation system has very few absolute constraints, especially since it is used on a wide and ever-increasing variety of devices. Due to that, it is difficult to target the Internet as a medium in a similar way to how someone would target traditional TV. Specific targeting to what people see as the Internet’s inherent features can also sometimes slip into the just create short, cheap, and quick school of thought. There are very likely some general defining characteristics of this medium or characteristics that are frequently present depending on the circumstances. Maybe some of these tend to favour short, cheap, and quick on the whole, but I think it’s more important to focus on understanding the nature of the sub-medium that you are operating in—or the new one you’re trying to create! Just like a novel is a sub-medium of a book, a blog is a sub-medium of written material online. A novel has a specific nature (though that can be changed and pushed around) and so does a blog (likewise). There is lots of room for many different sub-media that exist and that have yet to be created.

I think that thinking about the different constraints and opportunities presented by the different devices that use the medium can also be helpful. Using a tablet is different form using a phone and is very different from using a TV-style screen up on the wall. These different types of experiences provide different opportunities for different kinds of material to succeed. To make it a little more complicated, you should also be aware that people won’t necessarily experience your work in the context that you see as best. That’s okay. I watch TV shows and movies on my computer, and while it has a smaller screen than a traditional television and I’m often sitting upright and close to it, I still enjoy them. Of course there hasn’t previously been strict control of how past media are experienced and so allowing for different experiences isn’t something entirely new. Watching a movie in a theatre is a very different experience than watching it at home on DVD or even more so on pan and scan VHS transfers. With all that in mind, think about how your media can be uniquely benefited by certain contexts, but know that people will try to experience it in many different ways. Try to make that work best for them too if you can, and certainly don’t try to restrict such behaviour. If there’s one thing the media industry should learn it’s that you can’t stop people on the Internet from doing what they want with your stuff.

Shake off old solutions and explore the new

Do you have a strong sense of the organizational structure required to produce a television show? Are you an expert at laying out a magazine and getting it to print? If so, try to think a little bit outside of that box. Certainly don’t disregard the knowledge and methods that come from other media and systems, though. There are definitely valuable lessons there, but try to balance learning from the past with looking towards the future. Don’t get too caught up in how it was done before. Consider looking at methods and practices in other industries such as software development that may be more grounded in new production realities and economics.

Ask yourself whether what you’re doing can be done cheaper if done in a different way (provided you can still maintain some important level of quality). Can it be done differently? Can different kinds of technology be used to produce something in a similar way? Try to put yourself in the shoes and mindset of an old film director. Lots of special effects and camerawork in old films was achieved with minimal technology and minimal money using a bit of creativity to work with what they had or could afford to make something convincing and great. Part of the reason that old media distribution methods are being disrupted is that distribution costs have fallen through the floor. That can help. Technology has enabled amazing production feats at unprecedented low costs and low investment of time. Granted, standards have gone up too, but there are opportunities here.

On the whole, try to think about how things can be done more simply. As Clay Shirky and Joseph Tainter illustrated, complex systems are inflexible and prone to failure. Simple systems unburdened by the past, while not aways possible given the goals and constraints, are likely to have a better chance of weathering storms and thriving.

Accept constraints but don’t stop reaching higher

Okay, here’s the deal. I’m going to give it to your straight because I think you can handle it. You’re probably not going to be able to Kickstart a project to film a hypothetical equivalent of Lawrence of Arabia. That is, at least not quite yet. (Feel free to surprise me though.) That’s kind of a shame, because such grand projects can be amazing, but it’s unfortunately the reality at this point. Hopefully the old systems will stick around/adapt in some way or we can build up new systems over time that make enough money to make projects like that possible. In the meanwhile, I say let’s not waste time moping about what we can’t do, accept it, and move on.

I’m not saying don’t dream, though! Dream big and reach for the dreams if you think it’s at all possible. Who knows, you might be wildly successful and I’ll end up watching your Lawrence of Arabia musing at how wonderfully wrong I was. Or you might fail. That’s okay. Sure, it will hurt a bit, but maybe you or someone else will learn from that mistake and figure out where the current upper limit is, or what can be achieved with a little tweaking of the model. Don’t be resigned to the conventional wisdom about what works. Push the boundaries, believe in your work, and see what people will like.

Try to embrace the constraints placed upon you as a potentially helpful part of the creative process. When you’re not presented with infinite options, money, and established methods you aren’t likely to be as creative as when you’re constrained in some ways. Since many people have covered this subject (including Dara Skolnick (who is my favourite, for no particular reason, of course) recently from a somewhat different perspective), I don’t think I need to get into too much detail on this point, but I think the constraints of this media transition could lead to some amazing creative work.

While we’re on the subject, have a listen to The White Stripes’ song Little Room, which I think can function as a manifesto on the value of constraints for the band, Jack White, and creative people everywhere.

Get It Together

Related to the problem of creating quality media is how to create media that works for our lives and the new social realities that we face due to accelerating technological change. This is, in a way, a subset of the quality problem but I think it is notable and distinct enough to give it a separate focus. This is a challenge for both creators and the audience. Creators should try to be aware of the social impact of the kinds of media they are creating and encouraging, and audiences, in turn, should be aware of the way their relationship with media is impacting their life.

This is, of course, just my personal opinion, but I think that the fundamental problem we now face with media is having too many inputs and not enough focus. We’re constantly facing a barrage of different types of media (and personal communications) coming at us. Moreover, it is a barrage that we welcome and let hit us. Focus has become an alien concept for many of us. Focusing even on a long article (is anyone still reading this?) or a medium sized video online without checking other inputs is something that I know I personally often have to force myself to do. That is not to say that the Internet, our modern media, and how we use it is entirely bad or can’t be used well. I love Twitter, and it may be the busiest, most fire-hose-like medium we have. Above all else, I think that it is most important as creators and as audiences to be aware of how our new media/technical/social reality is impacting us. With that awareness, it will hopefully become easier to strike the right balance.

These kinds of discussions generally break down into strong camps with people often finding those with different opinions to be extreme, pessimistic, complacent, or naive, depending on the position. Writing for The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik aptly describes the different groups and their positions on these ideas:

[…] call them the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers. The Never-Betters believe that we’re on the brink of a new utopia, where information will be free and democratic, news will be made from the bottom up, love will reign, and cookies will bake themselves. The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off if the whole thing had never happened, that the world that is coming to an end is superior to the one that is taking its place, and that, at a minimum, books and magazines create private space for minds in ways that twenty-second bursts of information don’t. The Ever-Wasers insist that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on, and that a new way of organizing data and connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others—that something like this is going on is exactly what makes it a modern moment.

For the purpose of this discussion, I’m not interested in throwing my weight behind any of those three teams. At the end of the day, these types of assessments are very hard to verify or disprove while we’re living through the moment and we won’t really know until some time has past—if even then—which group was more correct. However, what is definitely true and will always be true is that there are positives and negatives to all circumstances and exploring both the positives and the negatives helps us understand our environment and, from there, learn how best to function well within it. Let’s try our best to adapt to the situation we have and attempt to address and possibly change some of the downsides.

In terms of practical suggestions for how best to deal with this as creators, I won’t pretend to have all the answers, but I do have a couple broad suggestions. First, we should try to make our products less distracting and exploitive within themselves to encourage better engagement and focus. This means less webpage clutter, more meaningful and less annoying and creepy ads, a strong focus on design and user experience (readability, a good viewing experience, etc.), less reliance on cheap tricks (slideshows for pageviews, playing with our emotions with excessive gamification etc.), and generally operating with respect towards those who we want to be our engaged fans/users. Secondly, let’s try to encourage and explore opportunities to create things that need and reward focus. Maybe it goes against conventional wisdom, but I think there could be real-world rewards there if we respect our audience, treat them like adults, and give them things they love. Real world rewards could possibly include ads sold at a higher rate since the audience is more engaged and trusts you more or products that can be sold at higher prices due to increased value and the strong connections and feelings they inspire.

Overall I’d encourage creators and the businesses that employ them and enable them to create to think about what they want to be doing and view things at least partially in light of a social responsibility they have. Some business types might not care for this idea from a theoretical or practical perspective and are instead just focused on making money and keeping a business afloat. I understand that, but I think that most people are on board with building aspects of social responsibility into the things we do along with the money making side.

Future Starts Slow

So how will we get a handle on how to create the best media we can, have it work for society, and make money from it? We’ll see. The changes will be messy and uncertain for a while yet, I imagine. I said before that, while frightening, this situation is also exciting due to the opportunities there are. I stand by that, but I want to acknowledge how that may come off as cold comfort to those who are struggling amidst a poor economy and just want a job or to those who lose their job as a once dominant media company struggles or dies. I don’t want to overlook these realities and sound too caught up in the opportunities and the excitement of change. These changes have real-world personal consequences that will impact peoples’ lives in very difficult ways. That sucks.

Let’s not be discouraged by that, though. The best way for us to respect the hardships of this changing world is to strive for better and pursue opportunities to create systems and media for a better and more stable future. Clay Shirky says that “when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.” That is true, but coming up with a good media future doesn’t just affect those of us who determine it. It affects everyone. As media gets into all parts of our life, figuring out these problems becomes more and more important for the lives of both the creators and the audience.

Will we be able to build an island in the middle to the ocean? It may be a very difficult endeavour—maybe even hopeless. If we can build that island, though, I bet it would be quite the popular spot, or a nice little oasis at least.

Further Listening

• You Never Give Me Your Money – The Beatles, Abbey Road — a classic.
• The Great Curve – Talking Heads, Live in Rome — awful sound quality, but holy crap.
• Get It Together – Beastie Boys featuring Q-Tip, Ill Communication — impossibly groovy.
• Future Starts Slow – The Kills, Blood Pressures — masters of timbre.
• Little Room – The White Stripes, White Blood Cells — Jack White’s constraints manifesto.

It would be fair to say that I did and still do romanticize the notion of downtown life, though I would say not without just cause. I could spend many words on the inspiration I get from the city, and at some point I hope to. This post, however, is about its opposite. This post is about the wilderness.

First Contact

While I was nurturing a love of the big city, I was frequently indulging in escape to nature. I have been very lucky to have parents whose parents both had cottages, and I got to spend a lot of time at each of those lakeside escapes while growing up. While they aren’t wild by any stretch, they are a step away from the city and one which has provided me with a great source of relaxation and escape over the years. Looking out over the lake, reading in the shade, and falling asleep to cool air and the sound of crickets and frogs are all experiences that I treasure.

Going wilder, I got into the camping habit as a Cub and then a Scout. Starting with tame car-camping style experiences, I quickly moved up to longer and more demanding trips such 5-day canoe trips in Algonquin Park. I credit my Scout leader and friend’s father (Thanks Richard!) for pushing the troop to take on these more challenging (and fun) trips at a younger age than other groups might.

At first, even going on the car-camping trips to Scout campgrounds intimidated my young self. I distinctly recall one night when I pretended to be sick (or convinced myself that I was) and asked the aforementioned leader to take me to a phone located back at the main camp area so that I could call my parents. Looking back, I’m sure that what I thought was clever deception was actually completely and utterly transparent. This is somewhat embarrassing in retrospect, and I’m sure it wasn’t the only time in my childhood or adult life that I have tried to deceive for the purpose of saving face and failed.

I’d like to say that, in time, I got over this feeling that made me freak out, knot up, and want to call home, but, to be honest, it has never fully gone away. It is not substantial nor is it inhibiting, but even now I feel small pangs of similar emotion when I’m away, and especially when I’m in the middle of nowhere. In a way, I’m thankful for this feeling and the effect it has on my psyche. More on that in a bit.

From those early experiences a habit was formed. After I was too old for Scouts, I volunteered to help out on Scout trips and, in recent years, canoe trips with friends have become a summer tradition that I am very glad to have.

All That Beauty Stuff

What would a tribute to the great outdoors be without some requisite waxing poetic concerning its physical beauty?

It’s true, the world is beautiful, innately poetic, and frequently awe-inspiring.

With that said, I don’t actually have much to say on this subject. That is, I don’t have much of anything original to add. The beauty of the world is well documented by authors, artists, and photographers who possess much more ability at documenting and conveying the power and subtlety of natural beauty than I do.

So, for the time being at least, I will leave more thorough meditations on natural beauty to the experts. I apologize for the lack of waxing poetic that you may have been expecting.

Modernity Rejected

While the beauty of nature and these excursions into the (relative) wild is certainly inspiring and something that I love to expose myself to, the most substantial impact that I personally feel is not a feeling of wonder at beauty but rather a feeling of release from what I will loosely refer to as modernity.

Due to this release, a camping trip is probably the most relaxing kind of vacation for me, despite the physical exertion these trips sometimes involve. When I’m out there I am, to a point, away from technology, away from media, away from constant connectedness, and away from time. Of course this is actually more a matter of being more away than usual rather than being completely away. We only deprive ourselves of modernity to the point that we’re comfortable with, or perhaps just a little bit over the line of comfort for the thrill of pushing ourselves.

When I say “technology”, your mind probably immediately jumps to thoughts of computers, phones, cars, airplanes, etc. We tend to see technology more as what’s new or what is very impressive to us and forget about the rest. Technology is bigger than just our iPhones and MRI machines, though. Defined as “the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes”, technology can really encompass most of the things we use to live our lives. In that light, camping trips aren’t really eliminating technology from our lives, but removing certain technology. When camping, we bring certain obvious technological things such as camping stoves, flashlights, and compasses. These are things that we deem important enough to our comfort in order to tame the more uncomfortable aspects of these trips or simply make things easier for ourselves. Even more hidden than that, we bring all sorts of things that we might regard as simple but can only exist due to modernity. Canoes, waterproof and compact tents, sleeping bags, modern clothing, maps and all sorts of strange modern food optimized for light travel all fall into this category. On top of all that, we make extensive use of communication technologies to organize and book these trips followed by heavy machinery in the form of cars to get ourselves there.

Limiting our access to modern luxuries is still one of the most notable aspects of the camping experience, but it is interesting to examine the things we use in order to see just how dependent we are on them.

The lack of technology and more advanced tools makes things harder for us, and because of that we feel a sense of accomplishment for doing things and living more on our own without modern assistance. Like most human recreational pursuits, we get pleasure from just being able to do something, and in this case the pleasure is amplified by the satisfaction and slight (or sometimes not so slight) feeling of superiority that one gets at being able to do things as they might have been done a few steps back in the march of technology. I wont pass any judgment as to whether that feeling of superiority is justified or not, but I do think that it is present to some extent in the feelings of enjoyment surrounding outdoorsy activities.

Media has become a companion to our existence and the wild brings us mostly away from the constant bombardment of information and entertainment. Like with technology, there are some exceptions that are smuggled along. Books and newspapers are pretty much the only practical pieces of media that can be brought on such trips. References to media often come up in conversation as well, of course, but the scale of exposure is substantially limited. The feeling of isolation that this separation from media creates is freeing, but at times a little disconcerting. It’s nice to be free from the barrage of information and entertainment, but as people who are used to this, the lack of it seems a little empty and isolating in an uncomfortable way. I have thought many times about how all sorts of things could be happening in the world and I wouldn’t know about them! When returning from a trip I always glance at the first newspaper I see (or, in recent years, I check my phone left in the car) with a mix of excitement and apprehension. What has happened while we were gone? What’s changed? Has something possibly terrible or catastrophic occurred? Will there even be cell phone service when we get out of the park? What if everyone is dead from a virus outbreak and we have to go on living like this (but with our luxuries quickly dwindling) for the rest of our lives? I NEED TO KNOW.

Okay, so I tend to have a bit of an overactive imagination sometimes. Modern society, mass media and constant connectivity is the perfect petri dish for neurosis to grow in and flourish. I’ve never used the word before to describe myself, but I think I can reasonably call myself a little neurotic at times.

Constant connectedness is the fusion of mass media and communications technologies. When out in the wild it is something that we are completely without. While I’m sure this wasn’t as big a deal for past generations, connectedness has become so ingrained in our daily lives that being without it can be somewhat uncomfortable. Being connected has become the default state, and unplugging from our stream of information, social interaction, and intimate friendships at a distance is the conscious choice. (I’m speaking for myself, of course. I imagine there are still some out there who aren’t this way.) I am embarrassed to admit it, but on recent trips there have been times where I’ve put my hand in my pocket looking for my iPhone only to find it missing. You mean I can’t pull it out and check Twitter? What am I supposed to do with myself? It actually takes some time for me to subdue the slight panicky feeling I get when I don’t feel the familiar press of my phone in my pocket.

Part of this whole experience is removing layers of society and behaviour and constructs from our daily lives as a way of exploring ourselves and different experiences. This past summer I experienced the removal—or at least diminishing—of one more layer for the first time. That layer was the construct of time. (Pedant disclaimer: yes, I am aware that time can be/is considered a dimension and as such is maybe not truly a construct. For the sake of this, however, I’m going to treat the way we interact with this dimension and what we call “time” as a construct.)

On previous trips at least some of us would have watches that were durable enough to bring with us. This summer, however, we got to our canoe launch point, put our phones in the car and realized that none of us made a habit of wearing a watch anymore. We all relied on our phones for time.

This realization had a practical impact and a psychological one. Practically I thought it might be a little bit of a problem because even though our schedule was fairly light, we had to get up early enough in the morning in order to get on the water and reach our next campsite before dark. Canoeing at night trying to find a campsite and then setting up said campsite in the dark is not fun. More importantly, we had to be out of the park at a certain time on our last day according to the rules given to us with our permit and in order to check out before the park office people went home. Luckily we had a couple reliably early risers in the group and this never ended up being a problem.

Despite the practical considerations being relatively minor, my brain did a couple flips over itself when I realized that I was about to spend the next five days without a precise knowledge of the time available to me whenever I wanted it and that there was nothing I could do to change that. Why did this bother me? There weren’t any serious practical negative consequences to this reality, but I became a little uneasy regardless. If I thought about it I knew that humans got by just fine before clocks and before watches by telling the approximate time by the sun, but the idea of doing that myself was a little bit unsettling and a little bit thrilling.

In the end, I found this experience to be incredibly freeing and going forward I might actually want to make “no watches allowed” a policy of future camping trips unless practical needs really dictated otherwise. After I got over the initial unease about falling behind schedule, I found that the beautiful thing about not always knowing the time was that I listened to my body and my surroundings for cues about what to do next and, in turn, my mind didn’t protest or second guess itself nearly as much as it otherwise would have. On past trips when I was invariably woken up by a morning person every morning, I would always either check the time myself or inquire about it. Upon finding out that it was 6AM, I would groan and grumble and feel generally wronged that someone was making me wake up at such an unfortunate hour almost regardless of how tired I actually felt. Without timekeeping devices, I was far more content when woken up in the morning. What time is it? Time to get up. A similar ease around decisions extended to meal times and bedtime. When should we eat lunch? When we’re all hungry enough. When should we go to bed? When we’re tired enough that the desire to sleep outweighs the desire to sit out under the beauty of the stars or in front of a mesmerizing fire. Some nights I think we stayed up far later than we would have with watches due to conversation running on in a relaxed way or our inability to tear ourselves away from the beauty of the clear night sky. Other times, I think I went to bed far earlier than I ever would have found acceptable with a watch.

While there were unsettling times, such as lying awake unable to sleep one night having time just drag on, going without time was a fascinating and freeing experience. I recommend it for anyone who has ever felt like a slave to the hours and minutes.

With all these things said: I love modernity. Plenty other posts I plan to write will be singing the praises of things only possible due to modern society, technology, and all that fun stuff. As I mentioned before, the only reason I can comfortably engage in these kinds of experiences is due to the small luxuries modernity and technology has given us. Without those, I’m not sure that I’d have the same fun experience. It might just be more hard and unpleasant. We deprive ourselves of our luxuries up to a point as kind of sport afforded only to those of us privileged enough to do so, but in the end we are only reallybtaking away just enough to give us a little sense of adventure. Take away too much and a little adventure might turn into too much adventure.

Simply Complex

A lot of the ideas around a modern narrative about an escape to nature or doing things in a more “old fashioned” way involve some romanticism about the simplicity of the experience. This can be true. Without modern bombardment, things often do seem simpler, more straight-forward, or easier to understand.

Beneath this impression of simplicity hides an extreme amount of complexity. If you spend a few minutes focusing closely on something as common as a leaf, you’ll find an object and a system that is incredibly complex. If you then turn towards examining the tree or the forest or the ecosystem or the climate, you can reveal progressively huge levels of complexity that we frequently just take for granted and don’t really think too hard about. We oooh and ahhh over new technologies, but what are they when compared to the understated complexity of the natural world? Impressive, of course, but it’s nice to sometimes be reminded of the heights that we are reaching for.

I find that the social and technological simplicity (for lack of a better term) of many outdoor experiences allows me to focus on things I otherwise take for granted and reveal or unlock thoughts or observations I otherwise might have just glossed over. I can zoom in and out from what is going on around me and reveal a world that is either simple or complex or a nice mixture of the two, depending on how I observe it.

The escape from technology allows us to understand and appreciate how far we’ve come. Focusing on natural systems allows us to see how much complex possibility there is in the world. While escaping to nature is certainly not the only way to gain these insights, it is an extremely powerful and pleasurable way to go about it for me. This duality of being able to appreciate the natural simplicity and natural complexity provides a great setting for putting any sort of thoughts in perspective. It inspires me through appreciation of simple natural beauty and elegance or the mind-blowing complexity that is hidden under the surface.

Air, Water, Trees, and Room to Think

When my mind isn’t being blown by the complexity and wonder of it all, I find that the outdoors can deliver extreme stillness of mind and sense of peace.

A lot of my time outside is characterized by stillness. Watching a fire, watching the water, watching the stars are all things that are almost endlessly captivating to me. Even when my body is active, such as while canoeing, my mind is frequently far more still than it generally is in my day to day stimulated life. Watching a fire burn is stimulation of sorts but, to me, it is a stimulation that helps push my mind into a more focused or, at times, almost meditative state.

Frequently, when my attention is captivated by nature or I’m generally letting it all soak in, my senses feel heightened and so do my thoughts. Though there are meditative moments where my mind feels far more empty than it generally does, there are also times where this freedom from extreme stimulation replaced by gentle rolling stimulation and relaxation allows me to focus on thoughts, contemplate problems, and synthesize ideas in a way that I generally am not allowed to do or do not let myself do.

People often talk about how they get ideas while in the shower or while doing other so-called “mindless” activities. There is a lot of evidence that indicates that an important part of being creative and solving problems is allowing your mind to have so-called incubation time. Noted psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (who also proposed the term and described the idea of flow while working on something) includes incubation as one of his five stages of creativity that helps you to be creative, productive, and later achieve flow. I find that this kind of extended time away from societal bombardment is an incubation period for my mind and thoughts I have relating to life, work, the problems I have to solve, and the decisions I have to make.

Letting the Darkness In

Then there’s the isolation. Then there’s the darkness. There are stars and there is the fire—maybe it seems big to me, but what is it compared to the stars? Then there’s that feeling from my childhood that makes me freak out, knot up, and want to call home.

I can’t do that though. I left my phone in the car and besides, there’s no signal out there anyway.

I miss those I love. I miss my comforts. I get a little twitchy not having them. It’s a little disorienting having so much more time to spend within your own head and with your own thoughts. Without work and chores and socializing and social media and TV shows there is a lot more time left over for thinking. That thinking can bring uncomfortable thoughts, realizations, or fears that otherwise might be covered up by the mundane day to day of life or one of our various social addictions. I’ve touched on how being out in the wild, as it were, allows me to live a little simpler and be more relaxed and thoughtful as a result. That is true, but every so often it pushes up against the edges of my comfort. It’s not the sleeping outside or portaging or decreased personal hygiene that pushes my comfort, but rather what it does to my thoughts. It’s hard to ever say that living one way is more “natural” than another, as changing our environment has been a long-standing human trait, but even if going towards more outdoor/simpler/wild living is more “natural” in the abstract, it is certainly not natural for those of us who have grown up and been socialized otherwise.

Not only does the lack of constant stimulation and things I’m used to make me feel a little uncomfortable, but the sheer grandness of everything starts to tickle small feelings of fear at times as well. I am frequently awed by the forest and the lake and the vastness of the night sky and the stars therein. I am just a small creature in the forest, on a small boat on the lake, and my small fire at night is just barely enough to keep the overwhelming darkness at bay. Awe is a much more interesting concept than those of use who use it frequently with the word “awesome” may generally think about. Awe is “a feeling of reverential respect mixed with fear or wonder”. There is always an element of fear in having these experiences and I think that is a very good thing. The space makes me feel small.

While too much fear and feeling too small can be problematic and very uncomfortable, a little bit teaches me humility and perspective that helps me strive to do my best with appropriate reverence to the world around me. Getting a dose of natural grandeur and space helps me understand that our creations and ways of living are not necessarily as important as we sometimes think.

Balance is something that people talk a lot about when they speak about natural systems. Frequently us humans are cast in the role of the unbalancer. We disrupt what was once balanced and in a lot of ways I think our disruption unbalances ourselves too. That is not to say we really have much choice in the matter. We evolved to the point that we have the intelligence and thus capabilities to change things and move beyond natural balance and create our own world. This is thrilling and amazing, but it can be sometimes emotionally overwhelming. We have built a society and filled it with so many things and ideas and systems, but have our emotions caught up with what we have created for ourselves? How can we ever be satisfied when we are always striving for more and creating environments for ourselves that we don’t even ever fully understand or control?

This may sound more discouraging than encouraging, but it isn’t for me. I find life to generally be an act in balancing contentment with what you have and drive for something more. I think that this sense of awe and humility can be a check against falling into extreme states of mind outside of perspective. This kind of exposure to grandness outside of social constructs and our own personal narratives of successes can fight back against egotism or too much self-pity. In a different way this kind of exposure can also help me fight against boredom with the world and the lack of wonder and excitement that is so often a feature of the average adult day-to-day life.

I find myself inspired by the grandness of the world and its simple compexity to achieve and create things that are worthy of the world and the limited time I have in it. At the same time, these experiences can also inspire a feeling of oneness with things which makes me feel more okay with myself and being part of this whole amazing thing.

I don’t think we’re ever going to really be fully balanced or fully at ease with life and the world. We will always have these competing feelings making it a struggle to both be content and push for something more. We are inherently unbalanced creatures. Though none of us are likely to ever be fully balanced, we can be more balanced and more at ease with the fact that we aren’t perfect. We aren’t the centre of the universe but we are notable and pretty impressive. Outdoor wild experiences help me with this balancing and give me time away to feel better and know what I should be doing when I get back.

The stars are amazing. If I think too hard about them they can seriously freak me out. There is fear and there is contentment and we can’t only have one. The stars help me understand this fact of existence but so does my campfire. It is beautiful but dangerous. Our harnessing and control of the natural world fights against the sometimes intimidating darkness and makes our time more comfortable. If you build a fire too big or aren’t careful enough you might have a problem. If you stare at the fire too long you might have to step away from it for a bit to see the stars. Sometimes I want the controlled fire and sometimes I want the darkness and the stars. Sometimes I want my apartment and the Internet and the city and sometimes I want the wild. Sometimes I want warm contentment and sometimes I want a little unsatisfied ambition.

And that’s okay. Let’s call that an approximation of balance.