Wook of Wall Street

My grandma finally left her small town in northern Minnesota when she was 82 and moved to Littleton. When I was 11 and long before cryptos I remember her telling me, quite unexpectedly and away from conversation at another conservative Thanksgiving, that the world would come to an end shortly after currency became digital. This was just one of the many biblical prophecies she brought to Colorado from the small rural church on a dirt road in Hackensack, and the only of which has me wondering if the cold winter had them onto something. My poor Grandma is already scarred from the Red Scare, and now I can only imagine the paranoia hearing Russia is the first nation to create a National cryptocurrency. Wait till that hits Fox news. Russia is the first country to attempt to regulate the digital currency market with the introduction of the CryptoRuble.  Their reasoning, because they had to beat Eurasian competitors from doing it in the next few months. This sounds more like encouragement to increase National crypto ecommerce usage, regardless now we will see more National blockchain currencies being introduced. Russia is issuing a 13% charge on the CryptoRuble being converted back to Russian rubles which seems absurd but is comparable to and often lower than capital gains taxes associated with short term crypto trading in the US.

I will be interested to see whether or not Russia decides to promote applications through their national blockchain. As the the country is making efforts to ban all other cryptos I could see a high likelyhood in the promotion of state run applications through the blockchain network. Russia understands the necessity to transition and I am excited to see what other players are going to enter this market in the next few years and how the private and open source sector is going to surpass State run cryptos.

Regulations are necessary to avoid showing malleable child brains grotesque and uncensored images. Government intervention will aid in the savagery of content and barrage of sex advertisements on television and radio but cannot stop cultural shifts the Internet has brought to curious generations.   Net neutrality has been threatened repeatedly but I remain optimistic for a future of free and open information. Fortunately cryptocurrency technologies are rapidly increasing globalization and shifting the media industry towards decentralized applications. The future is in an individuals ability to publish within their investment and see return on both fronts, completely unregulated by any government entity.  Imagine any and all information stockpiled on Google’s servers completely free and accessible by anyone in the world under no chain of command. Any music, any textbook, any movie without any oversight. This is the future for those who invest in it. Televisions are just over-sized monitors anyways at this point, but are about to go completely out the window. Same with Netflix and Hulu. Comcast might stay. Maybe Cliff Diving Magazine will be run through an Ethereum app in the near future. There is already a significant culture of micro-blogging existing on apps like Eth-Tweet which functions through the Ethereum blockchain.

This technology is going to bring the world closer together in organized communities. There’s a reason Venezuelans are pouring their money into Bitcoin. It is becoming increasingly more stable and knowing it costs over $10B in processing power to fake a $5800 Bitcoin gives great protection on ones investment, often better than national currencies provide. Governments will not be able to regulate this currency and the value it creates through blockchain applications which follow. Applications and media which are created on the bockchain of EOS for example will not be regulated and this allows for unlimited publishing capacity. Russia is freaking out and has taken note by working on a National crypto and has made notions to ban other cryptos from being used, although this is basically impossible to do. 

The Internet has given the average computer user significantly more voice and production capacity than previous mediums but requires data to be stored on servers where information is always being centralized. The result is an internet where every click is being recorded, and through fragmenting audiences on social platforms we’ve built our own cage. The platforms which allow for distribution of self-produced material links the clicks of the viewers engaging to the companies trying to market to that specific audience. A snowboarding company can go out and find 10 snowboard video makers on YouTube and approach them to advertise their product. The snowboarders who only created a Youtube channel for this very moment are eager to get some free bindings for a video shoutout and suddenly every vlog that’s put out has a barrage of adverts.

All of these notions are shaken dramatically with the future of block-chain cryptocurrencies. This is fragmentation on steroids. Imagine open media with no corporate over-structure. No longer will users have to create content under the umbrella of a corporate operation and no longer will information be stored on traditional servers and sold back to advertisers. Crytocurrency is drastically changing the way value is generated digitally and offers new ways to back currencies.

EOS for example is a token that I would heavily advise getting in on early, and will officially be released as a coin next summer. Prices are estimated to surpass Ethereum in several years because of the blockchains ability to host decentralized applications. EOS is creating a decentralized connection of computers for these apps based on the users spending coin. It is blockchain based meaning in simplest terms, the value comes from the transactions being completed using the coins and the number of coins is always definite and encrypted in the blockchain. This also gives the coin more security, which increases the value itself. Coins like EOS will offer users the potential to create anything they want, truly unlimited and unregulated potentials. It will put an end to the misinformation age that comes with corporately run agendas heavily effected by the status quo.

I’ve always thought Lacan’s mirror stage theory is fairly accurate and explains the essential lack which drives consumerism and human nature to build identity through the acquisition of labels and self-identifications; both tangible and performed. Lacan deserves a nice Facebook scroll. I’m sure he would be fascinated by the extent in which one is able to use their personal pages to create their preferred identity and never finding the happiness and unity felt before staring themselves in the mirror and using personal pronouns. Just clicking their lives away, addicted to likes, and assembling networks of status by friend count and selfies all to feel significant in a digital strive for meaning.

Yesterday I decided it was time for a haircut. For days I had to dodge offers from a hitchhiker who’s crashing on the bean bag in my living room, who insisted that after a personal bottle of wine he would do a bang-up job. Eventually, I was staring myself in the mirror getting my hairs chopped by a guy I met a week ago with cheap Malbec on his breath. The whole time I couldn’t help but think the significant extent one attaches hairstyle to their personal identity. I’ve been in a long term relationship and have certainly let myself go as much as possible, but as my egg-shape head began to emerge from the shag I felt renewed and almost nostalgic for when I was younger and had a similar do. I felt like “Derek” again. 

My sister spends hours doing her hair for a single selfie, and despite my verbal criticism I am not naive to the significant weight this single self-facing camera image bears. This was going to be THE profile pic. The exact angle and lighting you want every single stranger that may come across you on their bus-ride scroll to see and put with your name. With Facebook there are only two main photo opportunities on your personal page to juice as much status as possible. Beyond that, people will have to search your posts and shares to see what labels you loosely associate with. Now, Facebook and Twitter offer fewer creative liberties in the creation of personal pages than Myspace, but the idea that one can click on their own page as a mirror offers significant ties to Lacan’s theory on self creation and self obsession. If an individual was required to describe themselves on paper, it would look a lot like a social media wall. Social media has amplified the ability to publish ones self and make edits along the way. When we look into a reflective surface we see the self, and our name is one of the first labels we apply to that self. That is where the emptiness begins. 

I’ve shared many emotional moments with myself in the mirror after logging onto Runescape and seeing my total play time grow past 300 days. Even now, I have a tendency to justify sitting through the loading screen which has drawn several relapses through multiple girlfriend ultimatums. Although the game consistently fails to please it’s players it is interesting to analyze the ways in which mass-customization has given Runescape immense longevity. MMORPGs appeal to players through incorporated mass customization models which allow an individual to recreate themselves through an online persona. It begins with the first time a player steps foot on Gielinor soil and is introduced to their character in a customization screen which offers flexible gender options, and the ability to design what their base outfit looks like. Individuality is a consistent component and getting to claim a screen name says a surprising amount about the motive for play, age, and maturity level of the person behind the monitor, i.e. Kellen Heller. 

Players are introduced to others from around the globe as soon as they click create, and are dropped into the frustrating introduction of Tutorial island. Here players struggle initially to cook shrimp and chop down logs one at a time while anxiously awaiting the real world which players are teleported to after successfully casting air strike at a chicken. The free version is a tease for Jagex to get more out of you, like a waiter giving me some free drinks for a larger tip. Most players begin on the free version but after slaving hundreds of hours into the resource based free trade economy, the time saving incentives as well as expansions on game play offered to subscription based players become overwhelmingly taunting. 

VR cameras have changed the game of filming and combined with headset technology, viewers can navigate 360 degree views with the motion of their head or the tilt feature on most smartphones. Although VR technology is still very new, many industries, particularly the $14B annual grossing porn industry are pushing production. VR has unlimited capabilities and changes the way that film is conventionally viewed on a flat screen. Although 3D technologies have developed, VR allows the viewer to fully immerse themselves in the content in a way traditional film does not allow for.

Imagine setting up a VR camera at a family dinner. Years later you would be able to replay that moment and not only remember your own conversations, but be able to look around the room in it’s entirety. This would allow the user to hear conversations they may have missed and every time the video is relived the viewer has the capability to indulge in a completely different field of view.

Writing this midterm essay gave me the chance to explore two of my favorite publications which inspired the creation of Cliff Diving Magazine. I learned in studying both Sniffin’ Glue and Thrasher that both magazines began telling the stories of a scene that was not yet recognized. My dream has been a print publication and it’s happening December 20th to cover the world of cliff diving straight from backwoods cliffs.

Sniffin’ Glue is awesome, and began as a small punk zine with 50 copies. It was an inside look at the scene for people who were participating in British punk culture. Sniffin’ Glue over the course of one year jumped from 50 copies to 50,000 by the 12th issue, and at this moment the creator, Mark Perry, decided to halt production. He recognized that he would fail the punk scene entirely by creating something so significant it became mainstream, something punks actively fight against.  

Sniffin’ Glue approached print far differently than Thrasher, and although both developed in reclusive scenes, Thrasher was much more intent on adapting to the age of digitization and monetizing their business. They have created videogames, skate films, athlete sponsorship, fan submissions and many other techniques to continue to adapt and dominate the skate scene.

Act of Valor is a 2012 American war film which feels like a hyperstimulated mutt cross-breed of Black Hawk Down and any of Michael Bay’s B-roll explosions. It’s not an over generalization to say American war films glorify US soldiers maiming anonymous screaming vigilantes but Act of Valor attempts to make these raids genuine with authentic battle-hardened actors.

Bandito Brothers Productions in coordination with the United States Navy had active duty SEAL team members playing all the major characters throughout the film. They jumped out of planes, shot machine-guns off boats, and used amazingly more advanced weapons than their enemies in order to slaughter thousands. This isn’t where the film died entirely although the acting felt less rehearsed than Tiffany’s lackluster performance in Mega Piranha. The plot was full of loopholes with an typical angry facial scarred villain who’s plan was to blow up America. A nice capper on an unfortunate plot was the well expected martyr sequence involving everyone’s favorite gunman jumping on a grenade for his friends. It offers some flashy sequences for when your thumbs are too sore for Call of Duty but not much more.

Lessig’s argument was partially valid in 2009 and several of those points have carried through the past eight years although I can’t entirely commit myself to the idea that in 2017 remixing culture speaks to every generation more effectively than original texts. I suppose if a generation holds entrepreneurship on a pedestal than the compilation of original works is certainly marketable, but to completely discard the creative process by valuing monetization over expression is an ethical dilemma Lessig isn’t ready to address. 

Advertiser media like Radio, and television and movies make their revenue by creating an audience and selling the audience’s attention for companies to show their ads to. When companies choose to sell-out and profit through advertisements they give away a degree of liberty in their content production. Unlike non-advertiser media which heavily relies on subscription, advertiser media relies on a non-verbal contract and understanding by the audience that the content they are viewing is intended to group a particular portion of people together to shove targeted advertisements in their eyes and ears.

By choosing to generate revenue by selling advertisements the media company not only needs to keep their content entertaining to maintain audience engagement, but must align their content with the advertising companies values. Magazines like DOPE for instance sell advertisement space to companies with the promise of editorial content as well. This is a specific instance where choosing to monetize through advertisement sales directly impacts the content being displayed and given out.

Our societal concepts of media ethics are incredibly arbitrary and are governed more so by the status-quo and fear of lawsuits than any grounded moral boundaries. If it’s going to get viewers than it’s going on T.V., and if there is a female nipple in there you can find the full, uncensored version on the internet.  

I’m flipping through the channels trying to set up some ISIS recruitment videos and chill for my girlfriend and I, and all I can find are grown ass men smacking their heads together. It just seems a little open-ended as to what is appropriate to show children. Showing them dead US soldiers may make them rethink their 5 second Call of Duty spawn time and dismiss the military industrial complex. Instead we have them trapped into these meat-eating, head-bricking, hyper-masculine product of the times, and anyone who falls short has a life time of hot-dogs, beer and spectating to look forward to. Sportsball!

I come from a family where on Christmas we blow out candles and sing happy birthday to Jesus. We keep a solid mid-yell so the good Lord can hear us over my grandparents T.V. which plays Fox News even when my grandpa is passed out on his sleep apnea device. Their bookshelves are ruined with piles of Bill O’Rielly’s pinhead pages and cassette tapes about the end times for my Grandma to play on her routine drive to the Rec. Center. My grandparents live a life of fear, constantly looking at the sky for a Korean missile and investing large portions of their savings in Scottish Gold. They do whatever the box on the wall tells them to do. 

i cringe at the sharp serpent voice of Jeanine Pirro.

Jagex, the creators of the popular MMORPG Runescape, have created a massive online community of millions of accounts each of which log thousands of hours of human life harvesting in-game pixels. Andrew Gower developed the game in 1999 and although the aesthetic complexity has seen drastic development, the basic mechanics that drive players to grind out hundreds of hours of catching fish one at a time remain. 

Jagex throws players into the fast-paced, free-trade, resource-based fantasy world of Gielinor, where players are free to interact with one another on over 200 servers which host up to 2000 players at a time. MMORPG’s are about developing a character through the skills you choose to train, relationships you form and the moral compass you choose to adhere by on an anonymous online space. Runescape keeps its player base through a consistent economy which has been structured to stabilize itself through item drop rates and coin-sinks. 

Stable economies are a trait heavily sought out by MMO players. 99 Woodcutting on Runescape takes a minimum of 450 hours with max efficiency and a dragon hatchet. This is one of the quickest skills to level up to 99, and Runescape has 28 skills for players to train, bragging at hosting over 50,000 hours of content including hundreds of quests. In real life you trade paper until you die and in Runescape you trade gold coins until you quit or get hacked. Gold-coin is the building blocks of the Runescape economy and any activity can be broken down averages to give a gold-coin value to the time invested. Efficient players have calculated the maximum amount of gold a given activity can produce per hour, for example killing Frost Dragons will produce on average $250k gold coins per hour. These dragons occasionally drop gold-coins but the value in killing them is for their bones which can be sold back into the economy to players using them on a gilded alters to train their prayer skill.

When players invest hours like these into a computer screen they are counting on Jagex as a company to regulate the economy and item drop-rates to keep the price of gold-coin from inflating. The skills available to train in Runescape do a decent job of stabilizing resources entering the game, but it does not mitigate the need for interference. For example, the logs you chop woodcutting can be used to train firemaking. 

Although Runescape has seen a gold inflation rate some forums estimate around 10% a year, Jagex has implemented gold-sinks like in-game fees only purchasable by gold-coin as a way of removing the pixels from the game permanently.  

GAPE HARD GAPE OFTEN was the first bumper sticker I ever created. Bold Impact font that drew heavy inspiration from Colorado’s massive gaper migration which plagued my 2015 senseless. Endless waves of mouth-open, gaper-gap, Instagram photographers with little regard for my urgency to escape in the timeless setting that drops a gapers chin to the floor.

I remember disregarding my best judgement one Saturday and driving to the top of Mt. Evans to catch some views and drink some brews with my sister when she was out from Palo Alto. Near 13,000ft we came to an abrupt halt behind a Honda Odyssey with Nevada plates, parked to make sure it blocked both lanes of traffic. The driver squeezing through the sunroof, camera-first had his mouth open wide and eyes stretched to let in as much possible light and scenery as his head wobbled in a 360 spin. Getting out of the office can be overwhelming I'm sure, but I had places to go so we swung a dangerous maneuver through some dirt and proceeded to watch him in the rearview mirror.

“Gape hard, gape often dude.” my sister said to me, and a week later we had some bumper stickers.

With the right typography a bumper sticker can sum it all up for anyone who has sat in their car behind a gaper, and certainly a degree of hypocrisy contributes to the humor. We are all part of the horde traveling West on the weekends. 

I watch cliff-diving clips from sunrise to sunset and there is always some fresh footy rolling into my inbox. Through creating cliff diving magazine I have met talented photographers and videographers who create stunning minimalistic images. Pristine virgin cliffs hanging over 100 foot waterfalls, and divers hung over from a night of priceless stargazing captured in a lens. All of this could be cashed in on. Would the Nike watermark really ruin the memories? Or the footage?  I’ve met most of these friends through social media. Social media sites, particularly Facebook and Instagram, provide a convincing illusion that has allowed the companies to profit tremendously off of users. The sites offer nearly unlimited custumization for web pages and connects individuals and companies in ways that often overshadow the fact that every click is being sold or monetized in one way or another. Generally, people are knowledgable about ways to monetize their social media presence and find avenues to commodify their pages, but not everyone  succeeds in becoming an influencer capable of producing revenue. The main avenue which tends to inevitably occur involves a user with a large social media presence being approached by a larger company associated with the page’s interests. The user, whose dream is to do what they have been doing and make money from it, accepts regardless of moral compatibility and proceeds with their trade under the umbrella of a larger brand. This is particularly toxic in my opinion, as it taints the art and expression on social media by having users continually anticipate being paid and adjusting content accordingly to bring in followers from specific markets and the companies that surround those markets.

The future is an endless worry of possibilities. Chuck Klosterman puts it perfectly in his book But What If We’re Wrong? when he suggests, “When you’re gazing into the distant haze of tomorrow, everything is an assumption.” (Klosterman, pg 13) It is difficult to predict the next 5 minutes let alone 10 years especially with some of the recent unexpected political faction changes in several major countries. English media has always been the dominant voice around the world. The United States in particular has created a culture industry, exporting in vast quantity the fashion, music, movies, and ideology developed by the hegemonic class in America. In the next 10 years I think we are going to see a massive global media consolidation form, one which is so financially powerful it cannot be rivaled. Companies continue to buy out one another and it is the dollar that is ultimately going to decide whose messages get to be disseminated globally. It is because of this reason that English based media will remain the dominant

English media has been the dominant voice worldwide because of colonial and modern imperialistic tendencies. When western culture isn’t being sprayed out the barrel of an M16 or carpet bombed into a country, it is being scattered and integrated around the world by more covert measures. We spread our western ideology through ways that aren’t corporate based. For instance, when we send rich white church kids to Africa to build a house and call it volunteering. It’s called voluntourism and just like the Peace Corp it exists to send our brand laden drones of western society to places of the world as the seeding stages for western corporatocracy. 

However, recent technological advancements are changing the way that we view media and are especially changing the ability for one to create a separate piece. China and India’s media outlets are becoming more dominant in their countries than English based media. These are beginning to rival western corporations and this is starting to give individual regions their own voices globally. Al Jazeera is immensely popular worldwide as a news outlet from Qatar. Unfortunately I fear the same advancements which are allowing for multiple voices to be heard across the globe are the ones which will allow for massive consolidation. The internet is the last safe space for cultures to playout and exist free of the influence of a corporate agenda, yet we are seeing a world where even the internet is being massively consolidated.

In the next 10 years we are going to see large amounts of cultural appropriation all around the world which is going to be disguised as hybridization in popular culture. With the consolidation of major media corporations and my prediction for a globalized society through this, the companies will continue to do what makes them the most money. This entails taking cultural trends from a society and commodifying them to be sold to another group of people. Media is not the only industry where we see western corporations appropriating a culture and selling it back to the society they stole it from. Take McDonalds for instance and its menu variance based on geographical location. Companies like Newscorp, Comcast, and Disney will continue to expand and purchase media outlet globally and expand the sectors of media which they are currently prominent.

I don’t think much is going to change in the next 10 years in its essence. America is still going to be the largest culture exporter worldwide and the ways which they are able to do this is mostly media based.  The appearance and format that English dominated media takes will be well disguised and continue to influence the world as long as The United States and its allies remain militarily supreme. In the next 10 years Google will have acquired most of the web traffic online and be able to own the clicks of nearly everyone. If it’s not google, then it could very well be a Facebook-Google partnership. These clicks will be sold to the highest bidder, most likely American corporations looking reach their tentacles further into the global front.

The future for global media is massive consolidation. Unless international treaties are put in place prohibiting this massive consolidation of media powers the dominant voice in the world is going to continue to be English and global media will continue to be dominated by western ideology. The internet is one of the few avenues for rebellion against this corporate force but it too is being quickly harnessed by only a few corporations.