Future

My cousins are illuminated from the glow of illegal fireworks over Tallahassee.

Over this weekend honoring the past and America's birthday, I've been thinking mostly about the future, or lack there-of. Where in the fuck is the future these days?

I saw a little of it in Tokyo, jammed right up next to the (way, way, way-older-than-anything-American) ancient feudal Japan (eg. skyscrapers towering over 7th century hunting grounds turned urban park). Well, it wasn't exactly future, but there were a lot of escalators and I really like escalators. But back home we've been promised The Future for 50 years by Hollywood and I still don't have a floating car or skateboard, white jumpsuit, robot butler, ticket to another planet, proof of intelligent life beyond Earth, efficient nuclear energy, Home Alone 8, unfrozen Walt Disney, or anything else even approaching the promise of year's past. So exactly when does the future start? I mean come on people, we don't even have decent internet bandwidth!

In my own corner of the corporate landscape ("The Media;" I think we should adopt Gatsby's creepy "blue and gigantic" eyes as our logo) the future is already here. Yay for us! Well, by future I mean that the dystopian nightmare of the future as a chaotic, fear-ridden battlefield half-full with the charred embers of past glory and integrity, with the hope and respect for our audience shipwrecked against a god forsaken rocky outcrop perpetually assaulted by our maker's fury...... whew, yeah, that's now. Um, so at least any step forward is a step up. Big hugs all around!

I don't have any answers when it comes to the future of my industry, and especially not about the clusterfuck of newspapers. I'd sort of like to see Mark Cuban have a go at it before its all said and done. Its pretty strange to see the massive forces on each side which have so much darkness and hope alternatively that nothing actually makes sense. On the one hand the world is sharing and publishing so much more information and art than every before that things seem that they can only work out for the best in the long run. On the other, newspaper owners have had their head up their asses so long that they incredibly entirely missed this whole "internet" tube thing coming down the pipe 20 years ago in order to recognize it as a complete game changer.

And on the other hand the cost of publishing and distributing digital content has gone down to $0.00. But on the other hand it costs tens of millions of dollars and is incredibly inefficient to publish and distribute a print edition?! Facebook is free, infantile and an advertising profit-generating machine worth billions. News media websites are mostly free, incredibly poorly designed, and anger-generating machines for readers worth next to nothing.

New media is capable of energizing and engaging the content-devouring masses who want to be connected and learn more than ever before. New media has become euphemistic in our newspapers and magazines of asking already overworked and underpaid staff members to learn new skill sets without comprehensive training or even some extra off-time with their shiny new non-professional tools, then immediately forcing them (pulling out the violins to talk about duty and wanting it) to do multiple jobs on deadline or be fired (though, they'll be fired anyway, eventually... that's the big reveal at the end of this hilarious gag).

While theoretically I may agree with Vincent that there are blue skies yet to be discovered (that transition at the end of 3,000 Chicken Little words is a bit forced, no?... not as bad as the promotion of his yet to be named workshop though), it's only going to brighten after a lot of blood letting for the industry, and even when the blue seems within grasp the true effect of the unbelievable loss of institutional knowledge is going to cripple our reach. The chorus of video cameras will change everything is pretty fucking old; they will not. The truth is that the baby and bath water both need to go. First publication to 10,000,000 Facebook fans wins, OK!?

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