In The Embrace Of The Ledger: Art On The Blockchain

We've been hearing that the future of music is streaming. This may be so, it certainly looks that way. A future in which music is streamed and not owned looks to be here, but its current mode of delivery through central services that operate with heavy costs, from licensing to data storage to bandwidth is an animal that feeds off venture capital and music creators with a voracious appetite and has yet to prove profitable. Anyone who doesn't limit their listening habits to the Disney assembly line of future nervous breakdowns has been witness to much hand-wringing, rending of teeth and gnashing of garments or sommat over the economics of culture creation dissipating like a fog in the mid-day sun.

Observing the tense negotiations between indie labels and aggregators with Youtube, Pandora and Spotify many issues were brought up like a bad breakfast and chewed like a bitter, ever-repeating cud that couldn't be spat out. Politicians were lobbied, Youtube has yet to unveil their music subscription service and labels joined the streaming bandwagon, withdrew their releases from streaming and few of us would be surprised to see our finest artists show up as our roofer's apprentice or begging change downtown.

In the current mode of business there is no way artists could ever get a fair share of revenues created through music unless they have a proportionate ownership in all the companies involved. I had thoughts that perhaps what little cash we artists bring in should go directly into stock in Apple and Amazon, or establishing funds that invest in not-yet-public streaming startups to get a cut of the middle man's always disproportionate share of the still enormous amount of capital flow generated by music. Maybe one thing that prevents this is what music careers and startup tech companies have in common: the high early mortality rate of music careers and tech startups. You're taking the small gains from one high-risk endeavor and placing a bet on an uncertain proposition in another. But from the point of view of the middle men, maybe giving artists an equity stake would be a better position to negotiate lower rates. This would be a reversal of capitalist practice, though, for the hands that got dirty making the widgets have always gotten the smallest share of the value generated. And one may ask if what could happen to a successful cabal of small to mid-sized labels with ownership in delivery infrastructure be but another hegemonic gatekeeper.

Human Demonology: Your Creative Impulse

Life emerges from arrangements of matter and chemistry through a process that can't be traced from the properties of the physical component parts it inhabits. A similar phenomenon is the kind of artist who changes culture and how a society sees itself. This artist emerges from a complex of education, organization, rule enforcement and millions of points of sensory input. What is thrown at an individual for the sake of socialization is a set of base materials that may to some extent be woven into the body of this artist's work, but the living quality of expression arises as a new state that could not be calculated or predicted as a combination of this input. This impulse for creation and mutating the consciousness of humanity is like another layer of the chaos that expresses itself in the property that animates and mutates matter. This is a force so unstoppable that every jurisdictional, organizational and mode of indoctrination and application of force is ultimately put in place to keep it at bay. Alpha humans of every age in positions that can decide the fate of nations, whether they got there through action or accident, have a compulsive need to have things arranged as they want them and to envelop humanity in cryogenic deep freeze when they succeed in imposing their ideal.

With a certain density of human population on a planet, only so much freedom is possible. In fact, most people in recorded history have lived under terrible oppression. It is a part of modern western mythology that growing freedom is destiny, but it is taken  or scammed away so easily, that one might wonder if human tendency is in the opposite direction. Most things can be controlled in society and in a majority of individuals with little directive energy once set in motion, but the creative impulse can't ever be completely eradicated, and it doesn't take a huge endeavour to upset the whole arrangement. If this impulse is channelled less through culture and custom it comes out in twisted forms, commonly the SNAFU principle.

Lollapalooza is God, And God Is Blackout Drunk

Sup guys. I'm new here, so allow me to introduce myself. My name is Cory O'Brien, and this is what most of my days are like:

     Lollapalooza was hardly an hour old, and a gangly boy in a muddy yellow t-shirt had already become an object lesson in collision physics. In the midst of the mob he was safe enough, bobbing as he was in a sea of people animated by a tsunami of bass, but take the crowd away and he became a newborn wildebeest with half the requisite number of legs. I could tell you what music we were listening to when this happened, but you've got the whole rest of the internet for that. Instead I am going to tell you about the crowd, because the crowd is where I found the agents of the gods.

     More accurately, they found me. My friend and I were a little sick of having all the hollows of our anatomy vibrated in four-four time while strangers cheerfully attempted to feed us their elbows, so we retreated to the relative safety of the port-a-potties, where the only danger was hepatitis. I wasn't too jazzed about locking myself in a closet full of other people's shit, so I opted to wait outside. I found a few square inches of lightly-trampled grass to call my own, and began juggling to pass the time. This was my first mistake...

The Myth of the Lazy Youth

As we have seen time and time again in our exploration on this site, one of the challenges of modern myths is their relative invisibility. It is the outsiders of any age, those who are alien to their own times, that make the best artist shamans, and the same goes for mythic explorers. If you are too close to a culture, you will very frequently mistake the truisms of culture, the myths, as a fact. This is true with "human nature" (as we have seen), and it is also true with our myths of labor and work.

Let's consider the example presented when one generation judges another,

"Twenge and Kasser analyzed data from the Monitoring the Future survey, which has tracked the views of a representative sample of 17- and 18-year-old Americans since 1976. They compared the answers to key questions given by high school seniors in 2005-2007 to those provided by previous generations.
To measure materialism, the youngsters were asked to rate on a one-to-four (“not important” to “extremely important”) scale how vital they felt it was to own certain expensive items: “a new car every two to three years,” “a house of my own (instead of an apartment or condominium),” “a vacation house,” and “a motor-powered recreational vehicle.” They were also asked straightforwardly how important they felt it was to “have a lot of money.”
To measure their attitudes toward work, the seniors rated on a one-to-five scale the extent to which they agreed with a series of statements, including “I expect my work to be a very central part of my life,” and “I want to do my best in my job, even if this sometimes means working overtime.”
The researchers found a couple of disturbing trends. ..."

(Full article on Salon.com.) 

It isn't particularly difficult to smell the distinct scent of bullshit in this article. This is the same gripe the elder generation has had since time began about the younger generations: they are lazy, they dress funny, they aren't concerned with the same things, they represent the end of 'the old ways,' and so on.

Furthermore, it's become quite apparent to people that the game is rigged and that it has fuck all to do with how hard you work whether you are materially successful or not. So why kill yourself to make someone else rich? Is it possible that the younger generation has just become disillusioned with the idea of breaking their back so that they can wind up on the street? "Success" has everything to do with your family or the connections you make or the people you fuck over.

Myths often emerge from anecdotes. The myth of the lazy youth does, and so does the myth of the lazy rich. For instance, Bush Jr. didn't work hard to become president, and those that did work hard to become CEOs are generally such workaholics that the rest of their lives are totally out of balance.

Even numbers lie, or at least, numbers need to be interpreted within the context of a narrative. But if we're to believe numbers, then systemic workaholism is also at an all-time high in the US and yet employers and the rich keep touting these myths of the lazy youth.

I'm personally dubious of any claims leveled toward an entire generation, much as such claims toward race, nationality, class, or gender.

However, sometimes generalizations can be applied that are more true than untrue.

If the claim posed by the "lazy youth" myth is true, it's only because these ne'er-do-wells were deluded their entire lives by parents, system, media and peers alike -- and nothing is going to easily undo that.

As we've discussed, the best way to get youth to learn things is through play. Even cats know that and they have brains the size of a walnut. Humans have an inborn creativity and ingenuity that only systemic rubber-stamp education and employment could quash.

So I would say-- work hard by playing hard. Not that everything is always pleasant, God knows. But if you're engaged with your passion, then it won't matter so much.

If anything I'd claim the real issue with "this" generation in question is not laziness so much as idleness through distraction. It isn't a lack of myths of work, but rather a lack of myths of passionate play. Our education system is failing, and that is in part because it seeks to work against our own nature, rather than with it.

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

The Mythology of Business part 2

This is Part 2 of an excerpted series for Reality Sandwich from the upcoming anthology The Immanence of Myth published by Weaponized. Purchase it on Amazon for $25. Read Part 1 on Reality Sandwich here.

Despite the exciting creative possibilities posed by new media in regard to myth, they do not come without a price. The danger presented by the presence of myth in modern media is paramount, and must be considered outside the mythic framework of industry, for instance, which reduces the material world to a matrix of profit and risk.

Though the propaganda of Fascist mythologies such as those of Nazis or the U.S.S.R. serve as the clearest example of these dangers, they exist in only slightly more subtle forms in the media produced by modern Capitalist states. (Subtlety in this case not being an indicator of benevolence, necessarily.) After all, it was Mussolini who declared fascism to be the merger of state and corporate power.

Elite Reptilian Overlords Like Eating Our Brains Cold

Title taken from the lyrics to Thee Aeon Falls:

The idea of reptilian aliens that rule the planet is of course on its face patently absurd, yet it is a myth that has driven a wide range of fictional media (V, Sitchen's various novels, etc), as well as a surprising number of people who believe it quite literally, especially those that buy Icke's implicitly anti-semitic model of reptilian aliens.

As I said in the Immanence of Myth,

"...Zecharia Sitchin has written several books about the “true” origin of Sumerian mythology: aliens. Th is, or the mythology of planet Niburu, is a wonderful modernization of ancient mythic elements, but considered as empirical fact, one may as well buy into the hollow Earth theory. Th e author David Icke takes it a step further: aliens, or reptilians, exist in the world today and control the world economy. Though there is some truth to the argument from ignorance “the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence,” that doesn’t mean either of these scenarios are even remotely likely in a factual or historic sense..."

So let's look a little deeper at this as a myth, and at some of the ideas that exist in what we might call the connective tissue of these ideas. Reptilians are of course cold-blooded, and they do not nurture their young. If you've ever spent time with a lizard or bird, you can get a sense of the consciousness at work behind their similarly cold eyes. It calculates, it measures, it ponders and waits, and most of what it is contemplating is food and danger. So too with mammals, but there is something uniquely... reptilian... about the way that a lizard does it, isn't there?

Questions Towards A Philosophy of Gaming, Transmedia, and Myth

By James Curcio

As Mr. VI has started to explore, there is a clear connection between games and gaming, and modern myth. However, the layers of this connection cut much deeper than surface analogies. I'd like to look a bit at the process of analysis, or de-construction, that many of the writers here on Modern Mythology have been taking. And I'll keep it to gaming, in hopes of seeing more posting about games of all kinds to come. This is a tip of the iceberg, off the top of my head type of inquiry.

There's a layer of looking at something - let's say a specific game, like Final Fantasy VII and then saying, "look at how this other specific myth was an intentional or unintentional influence..." The villain is named Sephiroth. What does that do for us? Sometimes you can make an interesting point with those analogies. Most college papers work like that- relate Charles Dicken's Tale Of Two Cities to Marx or whatever.

That kind of analysis is OK, we've done some of it here for instance looking at various vampire or apocalypse myths in modern media. But this is generally done as a means of getting a glimpse at a larger picture, or process, at work. So, we're not actually pointing to a deeper relationship which could be represented through the example of the relationship of characters in a Disney film, if we so choose. But we're not scrutinizing Disney.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer
And Philosophy.

We want to look at those deeper trends, the holographic or fractal view one can catch by blowing things up or scaling them down, twisting them around, looking at them in a way that most people might not consider. But it can only be done sometimes through an allegory or metaphor, even in an essay. That is what I would hope to do whether we're talking about Buffy the Vampire Slayer or the "end of history." This approach to analysis is not about 1:1 analogies, "what Hindu goddess are the female character in Buffy?" but instead a new vantage point that we're trying to point out by making associations - top down, bottom up.

For instance, in biology there's the argument that competition drives evolution, and there is a counter-argument that there are co-operative factors. These are two myths, especially when rendered as "evolution is inherently competitive," (and co-operation is incidental), or vice versa. Of course, we can create synthetic myths that encompass both views.

So we're looking at games in myth, right, that's what we're here to do - but we want to cut deeper than just sifting through video games and finding the shallow points of overlap between myth and gaming, like when a mythological character appears, or even the plot-line of a game follows a pattern in a myth - unless if we can draw something insightful out of that association. That's been the goal here. Sometimes, maybe, we succeed and sometimes we stay on the surface. Blog posts have to run fast, you have to hit hard and keep going, so you just keep swinging hard as you can.

Let's take that swing. We've talked about competition and cooperation as ways that we can view evolutionary progress. Where do we find that in gaming? Do some games emphasis one rather than the other, and what are the results of that emphasis? In a narrative sense? In terms of the gamer or participant? The game system elements of competition and cooperation can apply to anything, even SEO. Our world really is a sprawling hub of networked information, and hierarchies are myth-dependent.

A lot of the material written about gaming and its social or cultural effects are some kind of alarmist noise, or they come out in support of gaming. Books and articles are constantly re-acting to this. The first time I can recall it being a major thing was around the time of the Tipper Gore family values thing, and the ripples off of that. Though I'm sure it began before then.

From Techshout

All such stories have stats peppered throughout, to prove their point, and they all allow an opportunity to take a position and spin it towards an overarching thesis. "Video games are destroying our attention span," is a popular myth, but what about ones like "games are actually a fundamental part of how we learn about ourselves and the world and game design that realizes this also must take responsibility for that role, and thusfar it does not"? Is that question too hard to formulate, so we just go for the cheap fear question?

But if we ask that question, suddenly knowledge of the mythic implications of gaming becomes of utmost importance. The only way to know the cultural effects of a myth are to understand the interplay between the two. Our moral myths will sculpt any kind of moral conclusions or presuppositions that we'd draw from this. Throw them out as garbage.

In the Immanence of Myth, Stephen Hershey does a brief exploration of the military and their utilization of myths in video games to recruit and train, and how these games and the overarching military rhetoric forms a myth that draws in their would-be converts. But that just means they understand something about how to market. Why can't we sell intelligence? Why can't we sell education and team-work without making it hokey and awful? The moral failure isn't the military using these things. It's that no one else does. The fact the military knows games are great recruitment and training tools and yet the schooling system does not? Unconscionable. Watch this presentation by Jane McGonigal. It covers what I talk about in this post, and then some, in very direct terms.