Jack Yan on Vox

Leadership comes from the grass roots, not institutions

nobody@vox.com(Jack Yan) — Fri, 09 May 2008 23:17:21 +1200

[Cross-posted] Sometimes I surprise myself on what comes up in blog comments. In a thread about the Iraq war and the short memories of nations over on Vox, I wrote the following. And as I wrote, I believed this to be a possible truth.

To go forth in the future we need to discover our past, a hard thing in an age of short memories as you say. … Leadership might not come from size but from those nations that have steadfastly refused to give in to the prevailing decline in so many places. Switzerland, for all its refusal to join the EU, has managed to maintain one of the greatest gun ownership rates in the world yet not have a single gun-related murder attributable to its own in most years; Singapore, retaining its Confucian philosophies, manages a city-state with limited natural resources.
Their example needs to be communicated to the world, as well as the positive aspects of certain parts of the US or China—they exist, but they are hidden.
This is one reason to like blogs because they can cut through the shield of the MSM and government propaganda. I do not think that we have reached any critical mass among netizens, networking citizens together in a form of moral leadership. … [T]here are pockets of good people everywhere as you and I have witnessed, just that we are not necessarily visible.
But that critical mass can come—and if warfare now is at a terrorist, guerrilla level in so many places, I suspect moral leadership itself will come from a grass-roots base.
The system needs idealists like us, reminding people of their short memories, and maybe change will be effected not through top–down governmental, propagandist methods or the MSM, but through one-on-few communications from each of us.
I would rather hope that the next superpower, therefore, is not a nation or even an ideology, but a collective of humankind cutting through the BS and revealing the truth. Who says the ’net cannot be a force for good once more? If it can propagate hate and porn, it can just as easily propagate hope and truth.

I get reminded of this every now and then by others who feel the same way: Chris, at the Edutainment & Convergence blog, wrote to me privately and inspired me. And when I think back to books like Beyond Branding and Typography & Branding, I think there was a great deal of post-9-11 optimism and the desire to build a better, more understanding world. I ﬁnd passages of my Typography & Branding inspiring, if an author is allowed to be inspired by his own work, and I can’t have been this cynical back then.
It’s a good zone to be in and I haven’t felt this hopeful about the potential of the ’net in about a year.
Last year, I was bemoaning the decline of the blogosphere as it began looking more and more like the darker parts of society, with gossipmongers and rude, anonymous commenters ﬁnding their way on to it. Where were, I asked, the globally minded idealists of the 1990s?
On the other hand, their entry into this world surely puts them closer to the hands of the idealists who can now shape agenda, creating more hopeful sites and messages.
And maybe channelling or ﬁnding the above message from my subconscious helped me put things into perspective more. If indeed the state nation is less relevant and change is better effected by people helping people directly, because technology has now made that possible, then the moral vacuum caused by various changes in society can be ﬁlled.
All it needs are willing participants prepared to get together to make the world a better place, regardless of their political, cultural or religious stripes.
That’s really why I got into media.
If we agree on this target, then the rest must follow.

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Have you been archived?

nobody@vox.com(Jack Yan) — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 12:43:27 +1300

While I was trying to refresh my memory on blog posts for the Vox QotD, I came across this weird link:

http://jackyan.humanarchives.org/

They ask that folks click through at this link instead:

http://humanarchives.org/members/13077/archive

Oh my gosh, we are being archived by the World Wide Web!

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The gap is back

nobody@vox.com(Jack Yan) — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 23:18:24 +1300

If anyone was going to get WGA writers back on their show, that was David Letterman. Reuter reports that the late-night talk show host will be back on CBS on January 2, with his company, Worldwide Pants, Inc., paying, inter alia, royalties from internet broadcasts to its writers. Both The Late Show and the Craig Ferguson show, also owned by Worldwide Pants, will be back.
Since Letterman himself is a union member, and since he showed immense goodwill by paying his whole staff till December 31 whether a new show was made or not, this is good karma for he with the gap.
Rival Jay Leno will be back the same night on NBC, but without writers.

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This is heavy

nobody@vox.com(Jack Yan) — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 02:07:22 +1200

Michael Maloof, who is campaigning Nike to make the shoes that Michael J. Fox wore in Back to the Future Part II, notified me earlier this month that he successfully tracked down the patents. They were designed and do exist, the patents registered to Nike, Inc. in the early 1990s, some years after the film:

http://jackyan.com/files/mcfly2015_upper_for_a_shoe.pdf
http://jackyan.com/files/mcfly2015_element_of_upper.pdf

All it takes now is for the company to make them!
If you feel you’d be in the market for such shoes, Michael is leading a grass roots’ effort. Just fill in your details at www.mcfly2015.com and click on the button—it is rather painless.

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Wifi at North Island airports

nobody@vox.com(Jack Yan) — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 11:06:56 +1200

Auckland Airport wifi: $10 an hour, payable by Mastercard or Visa (which kind of sucks for a guy who uses American Express exclusively). But the food is pretty good, with a Japanese place having opened up there.
Wellington Airport wifi, according to David Philpott: free. Wellington: keep it that way. I chose to wait till I got home yesterday before sending my emails than give $10 to an airport which was already making money from me via my air fare and my buying food there.

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I want the ’net to be an experimental utopia

nobody@vox.com(Jack Yan) — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 22:57:11 +1300

[Cross-posted] What has dawned on me these days is that the ’net is no longer a place of escape. Not that long ago, businessmen like me could go online, easily ﬁnd colleagues who were interested in making a difference on the planet. Go online now, and you’ll ﬁnd spammers, petty jealousies, gossips—everything that you might confront in the physical world, but more invasive. The shield of civility often disappears, replaced by the biting tongues of those who are ill-educated, but think they are armed with all the knowledge of the ancients.
Inevitably, we will all congregate into groups, only to ﬁnd that as those groups grow, the same pattern is followed. The ’net in general gave way to the blogosphere, where many of the better thinkers went. But as I watched the whole Jennifer Siebel-attacking matter unfold over the last week (SFist’s obsession seems unnatural, but try telling its contributors that), it is fair to conclude that the blogosphere is suffering from the forces that made the web clunkier, slower and less exciting. The new frontier, just like California must have been to its ﬁrst settlers (I do mean the native Americans), gave way to the white settlers, lawlessness and disease, before an experimental civilization began to take root. That experimental, occidental civilization is now armed with the internet, slagging people off while ignoring the homeless people minutes away from their residences. It just seems easier to be nasty, but is it more natural given one’s humanity?
I imagine we must start with other communities, other groups, and hope that contact with the educated class rubs off some knowledge on to the ill-educated. We now live, at least in this medium, in a world of the information-rich and the information-poor, but even we must depend on schools and governments—perhaps online schools (?)—and the hope that reasoning is something we are born with. That the internet remains somewhere where all can learn and better themselves, not a medium where pettiness and hate are propagated.
The realignment of what the internet is must start with those of us who write in it, conducting ourselves in the hope that we are working toward a utopia that will, God willing, transmit its positive energy in to the real world.

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Snakes on a Plane is number one—thanks to the blogosphere

nobody@vox.com(Jack Yan) — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 01:58:37 +1200

Snakes on a Plane is the number one movie in the US, and its Google references surpassed 47 million—which does make it a certiﬁed hit. I know earlier I had my doubts, especially when the Google references started falling and interest began waning—and we wondered if August 18 would ever come around. But as I wrote last week, the fans did come back, and there were events to promote the ﬁlm after all. Now it has more internet references than some other number-one hits I had been keeping an eye on.
Here in New Zealand, the première was given as a fourth-quarter date but I notice that that no longer applies. Snakes premières August 25.
And what of the movie? The reviews aren’t great, but Samuel L. Jackson is enjoying himself in the publicity machine, including a Rats in a Deli spoof in Rupert Jee’s Hello Deli on The Late Show with David Letterman. The fans are enjoying themselves in this phenomenon, which, with hindsight, will be one of those fads that people a generation from now will wonder what we were on. Like the Moonies, the Pet Rock or Slime.
What is sad, however, is that old media are quick to criticize the internet, blogs and citizen media. From The New York Times today:

“Snakes,” which opened for midnight screenings on Thursday, drew a respectable number of fans on Friday, but fell off 18 percent on Saturday and was expected to fall off still more on Sunday, as have other horror ﬁlms in the past.
“We see that Internet interest in a movie doesn’t necessarily translate to good box ofﬁce,” said Paul Dergarabedian, president of Exhibitor Relations, a company that tracks the box ofﬁce. “To some, the marketing was more exciting than the movie. Everyone was talking about the movie. But you have to convert that talk into moviegoing, otherwise it’s just talk.”

My view: don’t blame the internet. There are many reasons the billings fell off, and one should ask how much New Line spent on promotions. The newspaper says $20 million in addition to fan support. I would argue that it wasn’t that hefty for what is a horror ﬁlm—hardly mainstream. In fact, because of its genre, the fact Snakes reached number one illustrates the opposite of The New York Times’ conclusion. The bloggers did have a say, and they drove a lot more people to Snakes than we would normally expect—ten to one non-horror fans went along.

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