How Will Humans Survive?

There's a Yahoo Answers question up by Steven Hawking asking how humans will survive the next hundred years.

If you read my blog you likely know that I think learning can only really happen when there is vulnerability present--which is why unsolicited advice is so often completely worthless, no matter how "right" or appropriate it is.

As a question is making oneself vulnerable to the truth, I figured I'd give it a shot. Maybe Hawking or someone else on the "How will humans survive?" listserv is actually interested in hearing the answer. Lord knows I have plenty of people in my life who are concerned with/working on this sustainability question who go entirely blank when I try to describe what will "save the world". I find just as many folks who are theoretically interested in making money who pass immediately on my most rational attempts to make them stupidly, annoyingly and effortlessly rich. These two groups are followed closely in number, though not necessarily in importance, by artists who are entirely disinterested in "what's next".

From my perspective it's as if I handed someone making a house a hammer and nails--being helpful. They decline and go back to karate chopping pieces of wood into place and balancing walls on top of floors. They're the expert, after all. I can't imagine why they would want to do so much work so inefficiently and for such meager and shoddy results (it's actually more like handing them a fully outfitted construction company), but they do.

Which leaves me with two options--a) I can think it's something in my delivery, which at times it definitely has been. I work on this one pretty constantly. (I also have whittled down my unsolicited "advice" to near zero--I just assume that 99.9% of people, my family included, are completely uninterested. This is strange to me, as this is basically all that interests me, but I'm not "trying to change the world", I just want to make enough money to make music and paint in peace. Thinking that anyone was interested has literally gotten me nowhere. I have to take something to market and these ideas are the most valuable produce I have. (My paintings are valuable too, but they meet with similar blank looks--whatt're ya gonna do?)

b) Which I think is more accurate these days, is that people just ain't ready and it doesn't matter what I say or who I talk to because it's not time. This may sound arrogant, but I certainly include myself in "people". It could be that none of us are ready. I get a lot further by assuming things are perfect already than by being afraid that they're not, so I think it's this one 94% of the time these days.

So without further ado--the 99th time I've taken a shot at describing what I think is happening right now. How humans can rationally build a sustainable economy that grows 30% a year while decreasing the amount of resources and energy they consume.

It's also the only way that we'll ever get significant quantities of high quality untangible emotions, free time and relaxation--what we really want--into our modern existence.

Because this is what we want more than anything, we will eventually have it--the market insists on that. We don't have it right now because of a structural inefficiency (described below) and because we repress untangible emotion while expressing tangible action and intangible thought. Only thoughts and actions are allowed to be valuable in the marketplace so that's all we can experience as producers and all that exist for consumers. We enjoy our actions and thoughts less and less because enjoyment, an untangible, is increasingly rare and expensive. The market is hammering this dam as we speak--but it ain't broke yet. Woo whoo.

(Below is the question followed by the post I wrote answering it. My post has been edited and expanded a bit for clarity.)

_______

How Will Humans Survive the Next Hundred Years?


I can tell you exactly how humans will survive--I've been studying it
for the last ten years. We will not only survive but thrive like we
have never even imagined.

Before 1900, when Newtonian (or classical) physics dominated the
world, our economic, social and political structures were extremely
inefficient. During this time our economy grew about .3% a year (based
on world GDP) and our social, political and religious structures grew
just as slowly.

Because systems were so inefficient, waste and pain were commonplace.
Literally--raw sewage and physical pain were daily features for just
about everyone. Illness was seen as a natural, omnipresent, part of life.

Even the most efficient systems of this age (like the internal
combustion engine) generated 85% waste.

The science of this age was dominated by tangible concerns--it dealt
primarily with matter.

With the introduction of quantum physics and related know-how around
1900, systems became vastly more efficient almost overnight. This science dealt primarily with energy and was dominated by intangible concerns.

After thousands of years of .3% growth, the world GDP experienced a
ten-fold jump with the introduction of this paradigm--to an average of 3% a year. (Where it has remained for the last hundred years.)

Political and social systems became much more efficient during this
quantum age as well--slavery was all but eradicated, our populated
environments became much cleaner, and billions of us gained political
authority, education, economic independence and the right to vote.

But quantum, or intangible, systems are still somewhat inefficient.
Nuclear power plants generate much more power per pound of waste than
coal plants ever did, but they still generate significant and
troubling waste.

Similarly, the economy affords us much more physical comfort and
well-being, but still generates significant quantities of anguish and
fear. We're not loosing fingers, arms, or lives at anywhere near the
1850 rate but we still have plenty of emotional worries, fears and
hungers.

Another way to put this is that the introduction of intangible systems
solved most of our tangible problems, but also generated new
intangible ones.

These new intangibles concerns, of course, can only be remedied by the
efficiencies offered by untangible systems. Just as our tangible
problems could only be remedied by the efficiencies gained by the
introduction of intangible systems.

In science the shift to an untangible paradigm is reflected in the
discovery of dark energy, which is entirely untangible. Just as
Einstein figured that intangible energy was more fundamental than
tangible matter, scientists now know for certain that untangible dark
energy is much more fundamental than both matter and energy.

In the practical economy, the shift from a tangible paradigm to an
intangible one, around 1900, was achieved when reason began to prove
its value in the marketplace via technology. Before this religion and
most political and communal authorities suppressed reason, science,
education and critical thinking. Once reason began to yield concrete
results such as electricity, trains, sewers, clean water and the like,
the intangible age was born and any markets that suppressed reason
found themselves more and more poor and irrelevant.

There was a huge, essential, global demand that only reason could
satisfy. These days, the most profitable and efficient corporations
are intangible ones like Google, Berkshire-Hathaway, and Microsoft.
And the richest and most sought-after workers are those who have
mastered intangibles.

The current market is awash in technology but cannot satisfy demand
for culture or meaning--there is a huge global demand that only emotion can satisfy. We have lots of high quality intangibles--lots of productive thoughts--but much fewer high quality untangibles--or enjoyable feelings (such as relaxation, faith, enjoyment and peace).

As untangibles enter the economy primarily through art and culture (music, movies, books and the like) the question is what's preventing creative leaders from satisfying our demands for a meaningful culture--one that allays our fears, gives us hope and delivers significant quantities of inspiration?

Most assume that the answer is abstract or philosophical, but rather
it's arcane and structural. The reason that the market can't supply
quantities of high quality creative content is fixed prices.

All movies, songs, books and other mass market creative products--all
pure untangibles--have arbitrarily fixed price points. (Songs $.99,
movies $10, DVDs $24, books $14, etc.)

This is less overt (and less tangible) than religion's suppression of
science, but the end result is the same--untangibles grow much, much
more slowly and much less efficiently than those sectors of the
economy where the market is allowed to function. We have a dearth of
untangibles because they don't pay and must be subsidized--just like
science in the 1700s. (Though it's much harder to get locked up for
making art, thankfully.)

With fixed prices, the only untangible producers that are even
remotely efficient are the ones that produce low-quality offerings.
Offerings that are easily understood by the greatest number of
consumers. Those interested in higher quality or more sophisticated
offerings are frustrated both as consumers (because nothing's
available) and as producers (because they can't work at what they
enjoy). As more and more of the population grows interested in high
quality content, frustration with existing systems grow as well.

If science had to operate this way--if Einstein's Theories of
Relativity, for instance, had to be understood by a large segment of
the 18-34 demographic before he could get recognition or
compensation--we'd still be in the dark ages. But all he had to
convince were the smartest few folks to get published, get tenure and be set for life.

If a musician, writer or filmmaker appeals to such a small population--no matter how great the demand for or value of the actual work, he or she is an abject failure. Even more importantly, as there is a sea of low-quality, fixed price and free content with
which he or she must compete, it is unlikely that such an offering would be seen by any significant audience. Price may be valuable for its ability to ensure the success of the best producers, but it is invaluable for the speed and efficiency with which it communicates complex information about quality to consumers.

An rational idea can be monetized in the form of a patent and make the thinker rich overnight. A creative idea--which may inspire many such valuable rational ideas--will likely be so specialized that it will be given away or ignored. These are the ideas not of popular bands, movies and books, but the more obscure bands, movies and books that inform popular offerings--The Pixies obscurity vs. Nirvana's overnight success. As these artists serve niche markets, their produce is worthless at a fixed price points. As such, they struggle and starve and eventually give up. Also, though this content is more valuable than more commercial content, fewer people are interested in making it due to the level of financial sacrifice necessary to participate.

Quite literally, we make our best artists pay to do what benefits us all immensely. Think what you want of this ethically but it's an incredibly inefficient and backward way to run both our culture and our economy. We all pay dearly in terms of lower quality culture, less creativity at work, and, perhaps the largest cost, we think that doing what you really want is hard, impoverished and lonely. We think that being real, or authentic, is incompatible with making a living. It is, but that's only because we've set it up that way. It doesn't have to be. We crave the authentic more than anything. All we have to do to make it commonplace is pay market rates for it--it's no different than anything else.

An easy analogy is food--we have a fast food culture but without
allowing demand to raise the price per "meal", there's no way any
significant producers or distributors can offer healthier, more
enjoyable, organic or less processed fare. No one considers fixed
prices a more efficient way to deliver food, housing, transportation
or prosperity, but we still insist upon it for our untangibles.

Consequently, the untangible sector looks like a throwback to the
Soviet era--government subsidies, poorly stocked shelves, uninspired
offerings, and enormous demand/long lines for the few quality goods
that do make it through. If high quality content could be horded, it surely would be.

As with all fixed price markets, the content market is
failing--despite growing demand. In the music industry, where the
transition to digital is essentially complete, the entire system is
falling apart. With film, television and books about to go digital,
it's likely that without floating prices we'll have a recorded culture
almost entirely created by amateurs, hobbyists and part-timers within
ten years.

(As most bands profit only from touring, endorsements and merchandise;
recording and songwriting for even the most successful artists is a
sideline endeavor. Recorded songs are a loss-leader--essentially advertising for live shows and t-shirts. Consequently, the more "successful" a band is, the less time and energy is spent on creating new high quality music. By way of example, if engines made no money and auto paint did, the market would be increasingly filled with dazzling durable paint and shoddy, underpowered and disposable engines. This is a little different with culture because so many are willing to subsidize its creation, but the overall result relative to other economic sectors is the same--socialized products are derivative, stale and carelessly built while profitable products are well crafted, novel, and exciting. In our current system we get better t-shirts and more spectacular tours while recorded music--the songs being sung--gets less and less appealing.)

Eventually demand will set content prices as it does all other prices,
but until then, our intangible problems such as environmental
devastation, depression and violence will continue to threaten us and quality untangibles such as relaxation, fun and even love will be absent from our public lives.

Very simply, they are systematic inefficiencies in the intangible
paradigm we currently employ. Our markets structures insist that
reason is more valuable than emotion and as a consequence, it dominates how we feel. No amount of technological or intellectual growth can produce the happiness we crave because happiness itself is seen as worthless in the market.

Once we correct this anomaly, start to deploy untangible systems, and reward the creation of high quality untangibles, much of the economic and political strife that has dominated the last century will disappear. Creative pursuits will pay handsomely and the economy will be much, much larger and more efficient. Much of our fear about shortages,
which relates directly to the fixed quantities of energy and matter in
the world, will evaporate as we realize that that which is truly
primary and valuable--dark energy/untangibles/emotion--is unlimited and constantly growing.

(In science this discovery is presaged by the discovery, in 1998, that
the universe was growing at an ever accelerating rate. It had
previously been thought that the rate of growth was slowing and that
it would eventually contract. In contrast to matter and energy, dark energy grows along with the universe--that is, there appears to be no "Conservation of Dark Energy" law as there are conservation of matter and conservation of energy laws.)

Once the bulk of our economy is based on "stuff" with an unlimited supply, many of the skirmishes over resources will be relaxed or disappear. Growth will require fewer and fewer resources as we employ highly efficient untangible systems. Growth will also be much easier and rapid. Ball bearings must be shipped, energy must be wired for each house, but with content you can just post it on the internet and set up a Paypal account. There is no effort to distribution.

Relaxation, happiness, peace and joy are all untangibles, they will be
much more plentiful once their creation and consumption is valued in
the economy. Just as reason, education and intellectual stimulation
(intangibles) became much more plentiful after reason was allowed to
be valued by the market, high quality emotions will become much more
plentiful after they are valued by the market.

(This is also a way of saying that this will happen because it's what the market wants--people want a million dollars, or to be smart, sure, but without the feelings of wealth or the feelings of intelligence, neither money nor smarts holds much value. Feelings are more primary than thoughts or energy which are more primary than health or material.)

These efficiencies will also make us much, much richer. If the tangible age produced a few millionaires and the intangible age produced many billionaires (and made more than half the world self-sustaining), then it's likely that the untangible age will produce trillionaires and make almost all the world what we currently think of as middle class or above. If this seems unlikely--remember that our current prosperity and leisure seemed absolutely impossible to the most educated observers at the end of the tangible age.

This financial and emotional prosperity will also come quite quickly. It's important to note that as the cycle period seems to decrease by a factor of ten with the introduction of each new paradigm (the tangible age was thousands of years, the intangible age was around 100), that all this could happen in as little as ten years.

For the prosperity of the intangible age to arrive things had to be built, entire countries wired and systems developed. For the untangible age to arrive, all we need to do is tell stories and sing songs over existing wires. It can and most likely will happen overnight.

All of this means that we will likely have an world GDP growing at an annual average rate of around 30% in as little as ten years while actually decreasing our consumption of energy and natural resources. Large portions of the population engaging in very profitable, enjoyable, and extremely low impact untangible activities for most of their productive lives will allow this hyper-efficient growth.

Untangibles

You may not have heard much about untangibles, but you will.

Untangibles are to intangibles as intangibles are to tangibles. Times ten.

Basically, when viewed scientifically, the universe is made up of three distinct components: matter, energy and dark energy.

Matter is tangible--and relates to a corporation's products and material assets--buildings, trucks, computers, desks.

Energy is intangible--and refers to a corporation's know-how, ability to reason, design acumen, and part of what is termed "goodwill".

Dark energy, discovered by science only recently (1998), is entirely untangible. That means they can't find a single mote or flicker of it. Despite it's elusive nature, scientists know conclusively that it's running the entire universe. They estimate dark energy comprises 96% of the universe--with matter and energy making up the remaining 4%.

You can imagine, then, how crucial untangibles are for any business' future.

Before 1900, the economy was almost entirely tangible--and the world GDP grew at an average rate of less than .3% a year.

From 1900 to 2000 the economy was both tangible and intangible. Running on two cylinders instead of one, the world GDP grew exponentially more quickly--averaging a robust 3% per year.

But while the intangible age has provided for many of us materially and intellectually, it hasn't done much emotionally or culturally.

Just like the tangible age failed to deliver reason (high quality intangibles), the intangible age has failed to create meaning, happiness or relaxation--or any other high quality untangibles.

In the market, untangibles are essentially creative content--songs, movies, television, fiction, etc. This sector of the economy is most clearly defined by its low, fixed prices.

All songs are $.99, all movies $10, all DVDs $24--regardless of production cost, demand, or quality.

Your company has all three attributes whether it knows it or not--products, reasons/technology, and stories. The stories are what's most important and where most of the value is, but because they're essentially irrational, they scare the pants off of most managers and executives.

Forests are murky and ambiguous, trees are concrete and clearly defined. Forests are also where the money is, even though many businesses get by for years going fearfully from tree to tree.

The current economy doesn't properly value untangibles just as the economy in 1800 didn't properly value intangibles. And it suffers from just as significant inefficiencies because of this oversight.

This will change as the market corrects pricing structures for untangibles. CEOs, CFOs and COOs will be largely outsourced just like white collar is now. Most of what we think of now as commercial activity will be little more than a back office for enormous content engines.

Untangibles are 96% of the economic landscape. Right now they're largely hidden, just as reason and technology was hidden a hundred years ago, but they will have their day.

Put it this way: after iPhones, designer shoes and blazing internet connections are universal, disposable cheap and omnipresent, the only thing that anyone will care about is content--meaning--and they'll gladly pay a premium for quality just like they pay a premium for organics, good design and selvage jeans--high quality tangibles and intangibles.

Put another way, after all the "what" and "where" (tangible) questions are answered and all the "how" and "when" (intangible) questions are answered, the only game in town will be the beautifully untangible "why".

As this new untangible age blossoms, the world GDP is likely to increase by as much as 10 times--to an incredible 30% a year. The economy will not only be more efficient but will also be more relaxed and have a much smaller negative impact--thanks to new ultra-efficient untangible systems that produce nowhere near the environmental impact of current intangible and tangible systems (both of which are relatively inefficient and produce lots of waste).

The Googles and Microsofts of tomorrow will be making films, writing songs and books, producing high quality television and creating new content. They will play the internet like Jimi.

And they'll mint billionaire artist/producers like MSFT mints millionaire managers/engineers.

And the owners--the pioneers and original shareholders--cold easily be trillionaires.

It sounds fantastic, but it's important to remember that it sounds exactly as fantastic as billionaires did the the most reasonable experts just a hundred years ago. The tangible age created millioniares, the intangible age created billionaires--you do the math.

Oh--and by means of comparisons--as the paradigm-shift cycle time seems to decrease each cycle by a factor of at least ten (tangible age--thousands of years, intangibe age--one hundred), we should expect to see these trillionaires in as little as ten years.

Sound impossible?

Imagine a corporation better at relating than Oprah, better at rocking than the Stones and with better taste than Prada. Now make it global and mass-market like hip=hop.

The best band in the world selling $14 songs.

They don't have to tour to make money, nor do they care about albums, so they release 10-20 singles--hits--a year.

At $14 a song, $140 an album, a corresponding $12 reality tv show (two and a half episodes a week), a licensing deal with Gucci for an affiliated clothing line, an 8 Mile-like movie telling the backstory ($24 a ticket, $14 a rental, $140 for the DVD).

Since they're the first and clearest of vision, they sign the best new talent to their roster like Dr. Dre signed both Eminem and 50. (Who both signed other platinum-sellers, started clothing lines, etc.) They might even have ghostwriters writing books like Jeff Koons has other people doing his paintings.

At that point, Hollywood looks like the backwater it is and have lawyers watching accountants watching computers loading up bank accounts. As no artists really want to run the back office, if you can do it right and preserve quality, you'll be sitting on top of the largest licensing and production deal in the history of the world. Managing the best artists/designers/creatives in the world.

And inspiring others to shine--you make trillions by making the best artists billions. As every artists has a virtual monopoly, there's little of the competition for market share that we see in the tangible/intangible economy.

And a rabid audience of wealthy, brilliant sell-outs and starved, creative counter-culture refuseniks--both desperate to connect creativity and cold hard cash in their own lives. Thankful that it's been done and interested in as many particulars and as much inspiration as possible.

It's aspirational, inspirational, high, low, Wall Street and gutter all at the same time.

It will be untouchable and it is the future.

We have everything else--the only significant demand left is for a meaningful way to live. A way to be happy and feel the luxury that surrounds us.

And the market always gets what it wants.

Whole Foods

I had a heated conversation a few years back with the former marketing head of Whole Foods. This was when their stock was around $70 and they thought their shit was priceless manure.

I was fishing for business and suggested that they didn't have any silver bullets and so could expect competition to do in much of their advantage over the next few years as they "taught" the rest of the market how to sell organics and take care of foodies.

The marketing expert was insistent that it was magic and that that anything they touched would soar. He actually said that Whole Foods products were price inelastic--meaning that it didn't matter what they charged. He was high as a kite.

My advice on how to grow their business--by adding a "dirty thirty" of products like Clorox and real mayo that consumers were forced to shop at Safeway or Dominics for was obviously ignored. (My idea--isolate them, put them on a back wall, and make them pay for the priviledge. Then use the $$ and relationship to clean up what you can of their practices. --Like trading with China instead of boycotting them. Just having WF be a one stop shop would mean a huge jump in sales.)

It's still a couple hundred million dollar idea, but who wants to work with someone struggling just to keep their spot on the middle of the totem pole? The corporate fear must be palpable--probably indirect proportion to the arrogance that they felt three years ago.

My point is it's hard to tell a top performer anything, even though studies show that improving top performers is a much more efficient way to grow than trying to "save" poor performers. A lot of times a brand must succeed and then fail before it gains any true legs--witness Apple, Starbucks, etc. It may seem like a natural process, but it can easily be avoided. There's also a lot lost in that early failure, somewhat like a corporate divorce--you can find love again, but making the first run work is a much better story and much more fun.

Their stock today is around 20. And the stock of Kroger--an old school grocery concern--has beat their performance soundly over the last three or so years. (Since we had the conversation.)

The atmosphere gets very heady around the best in the business--and no one wants to hear no or experiment. Success tightens people and brands up like nothing else, a lot of times it's years before they get back to anything even broadly resembling a freedom to which consumers can relate.

Can people really only innovate and go big when they're threatened with failure?

Hipster Update

Corroboration of my post the other day about the Adbuster's article.

Today I happened into Barney's Co-op. I usually don't do Barney's, but I've been switching up my look a little and decided it might be worth another look. (It wasn't but that's what I get for entertaining stale sympathies for folks who pledge allegiance to communalism.)

And what did my wondering eye observe? The 20 something clerk wearing a DIE HIPSTER SCUM t-shirt.

Either that's pure irony or he hates himself entirely. Who the fuck would be more hip than the guy selling Acne Jeans?

Either way, it's clear the counterculture is imploding. Everyone thought it would happen after 9/11 but better late than never.

Glory Hallilujah..

I know the end is near now.

How?

The Adbusters cover story is blasting hipsters.

Fuck, if that isn't the final solution of self-hatred curing itself, then nothing is or will ever be.

A little history--I used to be a self-loathing graphic designer. I was on top of the corporate world (in a sense--I had international clients and my own firm but little interest in making money so didn't make any huge money, just enough for Italian bikes, Gore-Tex, travel, fancy beer and regular Thai food). When I was there, I was simultaneously on top of the hipster world (backstage on the Seattle scene before and in its heyday).

I worked 6 or 7 hours a day, 4 or 5 days a week, 4 or 5 months a year.

The rest of the time I traveled, fucked off, slept and tried to think of productive things to do. I also did a significant amount of volunteer work. And hung hard.

I was a hipster par excellence and relatively unabashedly so. I worked in a dirty, smelly, huge, raw loft in the middle of downtown and rode my bike to work every day. I was also a DJ and in a band. (Previous gigs--espresso jerk and bike messenger. THis was 15 years ago or so).

Anyway, the only magazine I felt worth it's salt was Adbusters. And a similar anti-advertising rag called Stay Free, which was very similar but ten minutes ahead and more punk. And more fun and loving.

Not that I could read either, I just recognized that they were on the leading edge of culture and media.

But it was implicit that they were hipsters. Uber-hipsters. What on earth else could you call moping, over it graphic designers who wrote for the just as over it cultural elite? Who thought that writing and better design would save the world and art couldn't do shit?

Mayakovsky?

Anyway, for as whatever as these mo-fos were, I certainly didn't know and couldn't find anyone who knew more than them. I was them and they were me. (At some point, I'll tell you about my "liberation capitalist" company T Hree--which was two thirds what Adbusters should have been and one third what White Gold became. All mixed up into a beautifully unprofitable mess.)

Fast forward fifteen years or so and the counterculture has both grown and fractured so much that it's hard to find a head anymore. But if there was one mass media publication (I saw it at the checkstand at Whole Foods, after all--it's not like I was rummaging around some hippie newsstand)--if there was one pub that led the mainstreaming of hipsterdom charge it would be Adbusters. Not Utne, definitely not The NAtion, not Spin or Rolling Stone and not Details or Interview. (It sounds strange to include those last two, but they used to be important, along with Paper--for a minute, Mondo 2000 and maybe even Wired a tiny bit. And Dirt, Sassy and Grand Royal kind of.)

Anyway, if there was one demographic descriptor that could be applied to that same leading head it would be hipsters.

How this microscopically wide leading point of the head split and attacked itself today, I have no idea. It would almost be worth buying it to try to figure it out. (Maybe it's a battle over rent controlled apartments in Williamsburg.)

I know for certain they don't listen to different bands, like different politics, buy different products, eat different food, like different restaurants, take different classes or wear different clothes. So--what would make them different? Eyelash inclination? How often they wash their American Apparel socks?

It's not like they're two separate people in the same relationship, or two separate eyeballs on the same head, they're the indivisible heart and soul of the same beast.

It's a split that can't be survived. One symbolic of an entirely and comprehensively fractuous society.

Anyway, I say hallilujah completely unironically--because you can get to heaven either way--through believing belief (the mainstream or Western tactic) or through disbelieving disbelief (the counterculture/Eastern approach).

Evangelical Christians are working on believing belief, Adbusters and hipsters are working on disbelieving disbelief.

Both paths lead to ultimate, transcendant, belief, of course. But with believing belief, the appearance of a superficial, judgmental, supplicant's belief covers any real knowing right up until whatever precipitates real knowledge.

With disbelieving disbelief, irony, weariness and distance covers everything until knowledge appears--until the disbeliever decides to apply his disbelief entirely, and disbelieves his own disbelief as well as everything else. (Disbelieving everything else only is a lazy, self-serving, and trite disbelief indeed.)

From this realization, it's a short freefall--some would say relaxation--to a rock solid, eternal, knowing and ultimate belief. Because this belief has tried everything, said everything, and inhaled, in my opinion, it has the chance to be more real or more solid--more appealing--that a naive believer's belief. Folks leave the Evangelicals for the hipsters because Evangelicals are about as appealing (culturally, sexually and epistimologically) as a polygamists' housedress.

We must be getting close. It's like in the Matrix when the attacking machines split and then join again--finally overwhelming the defenders of Zion. Except this time the two droid channels have different instructions and collide into each other with radical ferocity--saving the beleagured city below. (I have no idea how to spell beleagured.)

First you blast big government and corporations. Then the media, then capitalism--or all of these. You blast the other--your father and mother. The state. The church.

Then you blame your friendcs, cool kids and hipsters, then yourself--then you realize that blame only gets you more blame. And attack only prolongs war.

Sooner or later you just decide to try vulnerability. Not because you're corny or happy or nice--but because there's nothing else left.

You don't leave irony because you feel great and are revved up and ready to go. You slink off alone because you're fucking hurt from all the sarchasm, in jokes and put-downs. Just like you don't leave the mainstream because you're stronger than it, you leave it because you're sick and tired and there is no where else to go.

It's a delicate exorcism--because the hipsters are us. We are adbusters as well. And if we are eventually to end up more loved and happier, we have to be more more certain of ourselves. It's no simple operation to skim off the fat without taking off a hunk of meat or some delicious broth. Since the patient is alive, any gouges are going to hurt.

Let me put it this way, Adbusters doens't make anything, they just critique things that others have made. Even their shoes are a critique of other people's shoes.

The counterculture is no different--it doens't make itself vulnerable or express it's desires--because it wants what it considers superficial and unholy: sex, money and happiness. So it just ends up recycling what was already cool--what is already mediated and safe. What is already counterculture.

It runs from the "normal", warm, and calm just as dig doggedly as the mainstream runs from the weird. If the mainstream doens't love anything, the counterculture loves only drama--after a while both are just as boring.

HIpsters--Adbusters included--are just as uptight as a Southern Bat=ptist preacher--they just have different "issues" or reasons.

Let me put it this way, after I wrote my book I started buying and wearing the most beautiful clothes I could find--$800 cashmere sportcoats, $200 pink shirts and $500 bench-made shoes. I looked like a million bucks and would tell anyone who asked exactly what I wanted to do--make art, make money, get laid--whatever I felt like I wanted to do. I started to live like I wanted whatever happened and no matter what anyone--cool or not--said.

When I started, I was rock-solid in with the in crowd. I knew top indie filmmakers and #1 indie rock stars. I knew lots of people that owned labels... etc. It's not cool to say you're cool, but I'm not cool anymore so believe me when I tell you I was. The kings and queens of the scene were at ratted-out parties at my house. We were so cool we didn't even hang out with mainstream punk or rock bands. We all knew bigger--stadium/Intl./SNL--bands, for example, but they weren't cool enough for us. (Though we did like some of their wives and nannys and would gain entry to their practice spaces/houses/pools and weren't above playing music/chilling/swimming there when they were out of town on occasion.)

Anyway--nothing was cool enough for me--that was the whole thing. The less you think is cool, the cooler you are, duh.

And believe me when I say that being cool didn't do shit for me.

Not shit. I was the most depressed I had ever been at the height of my cool (and the height of my money--as a designer, I was basically paid to be cool. After I lost my cool, I couldn't even convince my previous clients to hire me on a sympathy job).

When I started wearing nice clothes--and by this point I was more of a starving artist than I had ever been, living on credit cards and by selling my musical gear--I felt this was the logical punk progression. If punk was really dead, then sharp was the new messy.

And since punk, or hip, was so huge, then the way to show the new squares (who were really the newly minted hip) was to flip the script on em.

They were only into the shit now that it was safe, neutered and Hot Topic. They were conspicuously absent when you could actually get hated on, yelled at, go broke or lose your privledge for the shit.

Needless to say, my redefinition of punk--my out-punking of the punks--wasn't a huge success. (There's a great book about this in Thomas Man's Antonio Kroger--also check out The Anarchist Banker by Pessoa.) My hip friends took to my cleanshaven, clean, upscale punk like I had fucked their girlfriend. Which is to say not at all.

I've since loosened up my look, but I still like the good--read expensive--shit. Unabashedly and unapologetically. I'll scream quality from the mountaintop.

And I still believe in free markets, ambition, drive, self adn all that other shit that's taboo in both the counterculture and at Adbusters.

There's no difference between material quality and spiritual or mental quality. You have to put the right one first, or course, but they aren't at all mutually exclusive--that's some stale-ass fearful thinking.

It's unfortunate that we have to learn it this way, of course, because there's a huge attrition rate. It's not cute, fun, or even necessarily safe to learn love by hating hate, but it does work.

Anyway, if you're still here and still interested, the future is ready to be dropped. It won't be at current price points, of course, but it's ready-made.

The bottom line is that almost no-one in the counter culture because they're original, they're in there because it's the best thing going. They didn't create its values, mores or artistic forms, they just prefer them over mainstream offerings.

Just as the mainstream became too stifling for the freespirits of the 30s and 40s (and even earlier for a few real weirdos--and I mean weird lovingly)--today's counterculture is suffocating.

Today's counterculture doesn't allow almost anything. It doesn't like warmth, money, fucking, responsibility, fun, being in charge, ambition, leadership. The mainstream may be one dimentional, but the counter culture is only two-D.

What's coming is 3-D.

I can mothafucking-m-u guarantee.

I've been putting the shit together for ten years.

In The One

Content has split.

Upwards is Kanye West--high art that you're lucky to get once every two years. Concept albums with pretty videos and meaning. Rare quality. This is the tiny head.

Downwards--not at all necessarily worse, mind you--is Lil Wayne. He just spits off tha top. He's reality TV to Kanye's immaculately scripted sit-comma. Mass quantity. This is the "long tail".

We're all hungrier for the real shit--middle shit with some quality and some quality--than either of these poles allow. A half hour a week of something you like isn't shit. Neither are daily episodes of "Who Want's to Be a Millioniare?"--something you don't really like.

What corporation sits on a hot brand like MTV sits on Buzzin'?

What if you couldn't buy but one Mercedes every four years? Or could only have one cell phone at a time? One latte every two days?

Why can't the content industry meet demand? Because they have socialized--fixed--their own prices. They are so inefficient it's laughable. If they weren't all doing it, they'd all be run out of business.

It's moronic, stupid, idiotic and a huge waste of money.

Not to mention an enormous drag on the economy.

We could have Kanye quality songs coming out every week if they made more than Lil Wayne's one-offs. The split is entirely arbitrary, a function of the fixed prices charged for all mass content--movies, music, books, tv--all that shit.

Content is stuck in the world of either/or like a depressed-ass Elliot Smith--either great and fleeting or plentiful and shitty--because it can't afford to reach any other level. Kanye's got to tour, shoot videos, advertise cell phones, run a label and sell clothes to make money. He doesn't get paid anything to write or record music.

Lil Wayne makes tons of music, but so what, only one in twenty songs is worth buying. And even then, they don't have any ideas or real inspiration in them.

We think that the real--the authentic--is naturally rare but it's not at all. We've made it so. Our frugality and fear. Our insistance that consuming content is a guilty pleasure.

White GOld says FUCK THAT SHIT.

We're not victims to anyone--big business, woe is me artistes, mommy and daddy, our own demons--no one. We're 3-D, the whole enchelada.

We make what's real, charge what it's worth, live relaxed adn are ready to ramp up as far as you can afford. No--fuck that--not can afford, cause your ass is starving with a millie in the bank--you can afford fucking anything but you choose not to express yourself that way.

We're ready to go as far as the consumers of the developed world are willing to consume.

But you're scared to consume. Just like you're scared to feel. Just like you're scared to slow down.

Just like you're scared to fuck.

Guilty guilty guilty guilt. This is changing--quickly--but the folks with money are still scared as a motherfucker. Scared and burnt out. It might take a crisis to shake them out of their repression.

White Gold is ready to meet demand because market transactions insulate us from the market's bullshit--we make profits from content itself and so can tell the advertizers, label bosses, dorks, freaky fans and dorvmos to fuck it. We can even tell the audiences to fuck it. We don't work weekends, tour in vans or do press junkets.

We dont kiss ass, don't approach you on our knees or give away our first song. You don't really want a pandering culture, but you don't know that yet. Don't feel it.

You think a non-pandering creative is arrogant, or less valuable. Just like you think a confident, attractive woman is a stuck-up bitch. You don't know her, of course, but you hate that she's escaped the fear and insecurity you cultivate daily.

Higher prices gives us more time to make shit. What a revelation!

The reality is that people are starved for new quality content--but our media structures can only provide huge ponds of shit a mile wide and an inch deep--like YouTube, or puddles of pristine H2o a mile deep.

And you can't high dive in any of them.

No backflips, dives or even pool edge horseplay.

White GOld is a sandy beachfront to this shit. Clean, well maintained and landscaped. Go as far out as you want. Stay as long as you like. There's a raft with springboards up to 60'. Lifeguards, showers and a great little place to eat.

Once you've mastered those, we'll show you where the cliffs are.

And, yes, it costs more than a puddle in the parking lot. Go figure.

Or we can all sit round these oily, evaporating, concrete-rimmed .99 per song puddles for a few more years til they're just dark spots.

I was bored in 1998--I don't know what's sustaining you. Have you convinced yourselves that The Black Kids are great? That LCD Soundsystem will feed you into your 40s?

Or are you surviving on two songs in heavy rotation?

I don't know how you do it--starving with money in the bank. Workaholic thinking that more money will get you more fun, more love or even more like.

Will that promotion make your wife or kids like you any more?

No, fuck that, they're on their own too--will it make you like yourself anymore?

That's the real shit right there?

Luckily, there's a book you can read about just this shit. It wasn't written by David Sedaris, David FOster Wallace, or David Eggers. It isn't sad and doesn't mope because it didn't have the luxury.

And it's not $14.

Not even $24.

It's $120.

Because that's what it fucking costs for an educated motherfucker who's got commerce by the balls to chuck it all to figure out if he even has a book in him.

If you're a businessman worth his salt you'll recognize the risk/reward ratio.

Hipster taking a few years off after school to write a "scene" novel, and maybe make it big among his friends=$14.

Hipster at the end of his rope willing to alienate all his friends and sacrifice any chance of getting published by putting down the white, man, scary and fetid truth=significantly more.

I got the price the same place I got the title--$120.

If you don't like the title, then you won't like the price. The title is The Love Artist.

And if you don't like the title, you won't appreciate the cover.

And if you don't appreciate the cover, don't like the title or aren't willing to drop a fucking measly $120 on something you think you might really care about, then we probably don't have anything to talk about anyway.

Just keeping it real.

Follow the link to White Gold store to buy it. (Upper rightish).

I'm going to bring content back together if it kills me.

I can't do it without you but I won't go begging. There's been too much of that already.

This is a business proposition--$120 is the price of the prospectus. It never goes on sale and it isn't going anywhere.

Take your time.

Maybe selling out will work for you if you do it another 50 years with some real gusto--if you're fucking hookers and taking down your boardroom rivals with aplomb instead of just kind of half-assing your way to the top.

One Way

They just changed the direction of the street in front of my window.

Used to be one way south, now it's one way north.

It's interesting when you think you know something and it becomes not only irrelevant but wrong.

Do you get confused or imagine blockages with people just falling into chaos and punking it out (as I did)?

Do you tell people "It's one way!" even though they're going the right way now, as the businessguy in a suit just did?

Do you ignore the new signs and go the wrong way you're used to?

Do you charge up the new direction beautifully oblivious to anything that the fact that the street suits you?

Cause that's how quick things can change.

The Last Shall Be First

The view from my new balcony. Not bad for an as yet undiscovered motherfucker who hasn't had a real job in ten years. 900+ SF, floor to ceiling windows, granite, 42" cabinets, stainless steel appliances, indoor parking and "espresso" hardwoods--all brand spanking new. May god bless the City of Chicago's Housing Department.

Consumption Is Holy

I'm first draft done with a book I'm writing about premium content and its ramifications for growth of all kinds--personal, economic, environmental and social.

Basically, we humans started off as tangible beings and burned intangible producers (thinkers and scientists) at the stake. During this tangible, Newtonian, period, from 1000 (AD) to 1900 or so, the world GDP grew about .022/year.

As soon as we got over ourselves and allowed the market to value intangibles such as reason alongside tangibles like wood and cloth, our world economic growth jumped to 3% a year (the average for the period from 1870 to 1998).

The thesis of my book is that we're on the cusp of a similar paradigm shift, in which we'll not only experience a similar economic jump--to average world rates of around 30%--but also clean up much of the intangible era's messes--radioactive waste, festering geo-political conflicts and things of that nature.

Right now we allow the market to value tangible and intangible goods (cars, wheat, management, consulting) but not untangible goods (creative content)--which all have fixed prices. We don't burn anyone at the stake anymore, but if you've ever tried to make a go of it as an author, musician or other serious mass-media creative, you know there's little practical difference--you can't make a living making creative books, songs or movies.

You may be able to piece together a below market rate existence by touring constantly, doing workshops and the like--but you'll just be doing twice the work. With your real value--the creative work--essentially being a loss leader (advertising) for more tangible, less enjoyable and less valuable work. You do twice as much work, get half the return, and the economy (and our culture) grows twice as slowly. An incredibly inefficient way to produce value.

Not even the most successful bands make money off their recorded songs. This has nothing to do with the demand for new, high quality material, which may be enormous and everything to do with the artificially low, unprofitable, rates, that artists and labels (and iTunes) charge for songs.

Even if every single fan would rather have a new album than a tour, the artist must go on tour. Why? Because we've decided that all songs are $.99 but allow ticket, beer, and t-shirt prices at concerts to float at market rates and return profits. The content is at a huge competitive disadvantage and eventually must experience a drop in quality relative to those offerings that return profits.

That's economic reality.

In the tangible, Newtonian age, we enforced our values by hitting each other on the head, now we enforce them by hitting ourselves over the head. An improvement to be sure, but nothing to get excited about. Once creative value returns market rates every job that requires creativity will not only pay more but also feel more rewarding.

And we'll have an economy and culture brimming with creative offerings of every shape, size, color, tone and viewpoint. Right now, only the most broadly appealing (read watered down) content had a snowball's chance in hell in getting nurtured, presented in the marketplace, and returning a profit.

This means $5 songs alongside $.99 songs and $45 books alongside $14 ones--whatever the market will bear. If an author, filmmaker or musician has a small audience or takes longer to create, they'll have the opportunity to communicate profitably with their audience if the audience so desires. It won't be a free ride any more than Mercedes, Starbucks and Hermes has a free ride. To get more, artists will have to deliver more.

If all cars had low fixed prices, we'd be driving Yugos exclusively. It's not essentially different with music, films, books, television programming or magazines. Low prices means low quality--fewer talented people with less time to spend on the task at hand. That's a reality for any product in any developed economy. They might get us a few decent bands, but there aren't enough trust funds in the world to get us a steady supply of decent films or almost any decent television--so we'll have to pay market rates.

We think we're keeping songs cheap, or just dealing with file-sharing realities, but fixed content prices have ramifications that go far beyond culture--for one, since no one can work profitably in the untangible realm, where their environmental footprints would be minimal, all economic activity is intangible or tangible. Thus bands have to tour; consume tires, fuel and energy; and sell t-shirts and beer in plastic cups to make money even though their primary produce is very low-impact.

Once we pay what these products cost to make--plus a profit--we'll see our cultural economy explode. In a very real sense the Internet is a pipeline and it will ship cultural gold all around the world. We built the Internet by valuing intangible reason, we'll build the supply of content by valuing creative content.

The book is based on recent scientific discoveries and historical analysis but written for the lay reader--much like The Tipping Point and popular business books like that.

I'd say Who Moved My Cheese, but I think I come in half a notch above the parable-type books. Although it should be as easy and fast to read if I'm doing my job right.

One thing I never anticipated when I wrote a $120 book and tried to get start-up for the label carrying it was the abject fear that people have for ideas that no one else knows about.

Are there very, very important ideas that no one knows? History says, of course, lots of them.

Will these ideas almost effortlessly make some people rich and improve the living conditions of billions of others? History says naturally.

But I'll admit I have no idea how to get the truth that I stumbled upon understood.

I've explained it rationally, historically, economically, in human terms and emotional terms.

I've translated it into uptight business-speak for the suits and into woe-is-me victimhood for starving artists. I've appealed to ego, compassion, the gods of money, the environment--whatever I think will work.

The truth is that there are few reasons NOT to embrace floating prices on untangibles. Because they will not only achieve what we think of as "saving the environment", but also make our jobs many times more enjoyable, grow our economy by a huge factor, and make room for those currently forced out of the tangible/intangible economy.

Oh, did I mention that they will provide us with a multifaceted, mature, rich, fun and varied culture beyond our wildest dreams and allow our children to do what they like rather than grinding a life out as lawyers and middle managers.

I don't see a downside--any short-term dip in spending in other consumer sectors will be massively offset by a rapid rise in the earning power of most people on earth. What allowing untangible prices to float will do is create a new, round, top to our current socio-economic pyramid.

Which will create upward momentum around the base, where most overt conflict in the world takes place.

But from what I can tell, artists don't want to be successful, nor businessmen, really. They want to be NOT ALONE. (They feel lonely and want to moderate whatever causes they THINK could exacerbate that.) They actually want to be with--within the safe and understandably rational confines of whatever community to which they pledge allegiance--but to admit that requires vulnerability, which they have been well trained to avoid at all costs.

And taking a significant enough risk to really change the game--which is the only way to truly and permanently be WITH (if any spiritual traditions are to be believed)--takes risking being alone.

If you're normal and succeed, you subjugate your self--causing alienation.

If you're normal and you fail, you're fucked.

If you're weird and fail then you might alienate people and be fucked.

If you're weird and you make it, of course, you get love, attention, money and all that other stuff that artists and businessfolks work for.

On your own terms.

You bring the world to you.

Looking for one true believer.

If you see business as a spiritual pursuit AND understand that that should make you more money more enjoyably than seeing it as unholy and divisive, then please contact me.

Maybe you have a trust fund. Maybe you made your own money. Maybe you have enough to know that protecting it as fervently as you have is making you boring and stiff.

Maybe you just understand rationally that you'll never go without food, shelter or clothing.

Maybe you're tired of being rich and scared. You did what was expected of you and never felt the sense of "arriving" that you thought was promised. Even though others see you as arrived.

Maybe you just don't give a fuck anymore.

I don't know.

Hell, maybe you just want to be rich, free and safe.

White Holes

Physicists are starting to theorize about the existence of white holes.

What's a white hole?

Take a black hole and turn it inside out. Instead of being so dense that it sucks in and destroys everything around it, a white hole is so light (?) that it constantly creates new energy, light, matter--whatever (untangibles if you ask me--and have been following my physics-themed posts).

There's no coincidence that White Gold is named White Gold. It's structured to act like a white hole--even though I named it seven or so years before I ever heard of white holes.

The whole idea is that is you go through the horror of the unknown and learn to master your own fears, you will eventually gain access to the permanent, ever expanding core of what's going on. And will experience joy, growth, money, love--whatever it is you seek--in limitless quantities.

White Gold the corporation assumes that the detritus of such an exploration--the record/produce/story/map and simultaneous proof--will be invaluable to those interested in growth in any and all forms.

Basically, the idea is that if people will go through Basquait's trash for shit he threw out and his grocery lists, pay $50K for a pair of ripped and stained vintage Levis, buy $1.7 mil Bugattis, and watch cheap home videos of Timbaland and Busta Rhymes in the studio fucking around--then there is a market for a truly creative corporation that approaches commerce itself like a canvas.

Creative works--music, movies, books, tv shows--magazines and the like will be the core, but the satellites will be clothing lines, management tomes, consumer electronics, furniture--anything we feel like. Content, values and craftsmanship all exist on a continuum--having manufacturing standards doesn't negate your creative if you've got integrity. Lighten up folks. It's supposed to be fun.

Do anything!

White Gold is the first but these Uber Brands are the future. Brands that take other brands and give them meaning. Well, that's old school terminology--these brands will simply emanate light. And attract those interested in bathing in that type of light.

Like graffiti artists doing shit for Nike but bigger. This time we'll be pimping (very lovingly and relaxedly) them instead of them pimping us. We'll outsource to Nike and take the swoosh off. Have Lexus building cars with our name (or not) and our values. Have Savile Row working for us.

This is about having artists in control of the whole shebang and subordinating the suits, rather than having the suits in charge and subordinating the artists.

That's what people want. And that's what they'll pay for now that the suits have proven themselves incapable of generating enough high quality content to sustain interest.

What, did they think us artists wouldn't get better at managing accountants and directing lawyers?

They certainly haven't gotten any better at making art--they don't have the time.

I don't give a fuck about telling someone off. I don't often do it, but I'm not afraid of a fucking CEO with his own island. He's probably a scared child with an iron-clad work ethic and an overwhelming, though thoroughly repressed desire for rest, play and fun. In other words--a sold-out punk.

And we make better beats, movies, books--all premium, all true, all real and all premium.

No counter-culture moping victim pimps and no mainstream chipper alpha dog whores.

Just straight razor's edge. (With props to both Somerset and Occham.)

There's the future for you. It will be financed by allowing content prices to float--$14 songs, $24 movies, $160 DVDs, etc.

If you want in, hit me up.

Let's do one for the numbers people.

Profits have been moving from the tangible to the untangible as long as economic activity has taken place. Everyone's hot on intangibles at the moment, but those aren't dick compared to what untangibles will do once they're allowed floating prices.

Exxon/Mobil has a P/E (Price to Earnings) ratio of around 13, Google has a P/E of around 40. Why are people so willing to pay a premium for a company that returns smaller earnings? Because they own the intangible future.

And Exxon Mobil is burdened with the tangible past.

Exxon Mobil makes a hell of a lot more money and many fewer people want to own their stock.

Google has mastered the intangible realm like Exxon mastered the tangible one. But everyone's so far up Google's ass, they can't see that the intangible age is just as doomed by the march of progress as the tangible age and its toxic oil wells.

What's funny is that those who should be in the best position to capitalize on the value of quality untangibles are trading with P/Es around those of tangible companies. Time/Warner, Sony, Dreamworks--these content companies are all duking it out with the manufacturing sector with P/Es around 12.

No one wants to own them.

Why? Because even if they deliver the high quality content that the developed world is increasingly starved for, they won't make anything. Because--say it with me now--content prices are arbitrarily fixed. The market knows this and values the companies accordingly.

But you and I know that a company that really owned the untangible future would trade at a P/E of what--80? 120? A couple thousand? It's upside would be almost unlimited.

And, unlike the speculative oil, gold and biotech stocks with massive downsides (which tend to have high P/Es), mining the soul is a guaranteed return. Once you know how to do it. Not all land has mineral wealth, but every soul is gold.

Another way of looking at this is that the best artists rarely, if ever become irrelevant during their lifetimes. Pollack painted dribbles for years and they go for millions each now. There was never a demand problem. Still isn't.

The same is true for mass content--the best mass content is often consumed over and over. Books taught and canonized. Songs re-bought in greatest hits packages, licensed for movies, etc, etc, etc.

Whoever owns the first publicly accepted premium content company will be sitting on a money printing machine the likes of which we've never even considered.

Look at it this way--because I know you might be too scared to even buy and read The Love Artist--or take the word of the author that it's the book to do it:

Look at it this way--even if The Love Artist fucking sucks. And by sucks, I mean is a piece of absolute shit..

Even then, what would three million in advertising to introduce the world to the idea of premium content do?

It would attract the best works by the best artists. As a label.

A label that made $14 a song instead of $.99 could pay the artists 4, 6, 8 a song and still crush iTunes, Interscope and all the pretenders to the throne.

It could pay writers $60 a book.

Sure, you say, they could release it on their own and make all the money, why do they need White Gold.

I'll tell you this about artists: we don't want to do any fucking paperwork. We don't want to print and sell our shit.

We want to fuck around and make more. Like Henry Miller said--we're like trees, and once we drop a piece of fruit, we're so over it it hurts. We want birds and deer to come and eat it--and carry the seeds miles away--but if it's up to us, we'll just let it rot. That's how uninterested in transportation and distribution we are. We just go on making the tastiest and most nutritive fruit possible. Let someone else package and sell apple sauce.

Look, if you're in business, you're in management. And if you're in management you know that the name of the game is talent.

And if you're into talent, you know that money and freedom is all there is.

But if content makes money, it's mainstream drek. If it has..

Aw, fuck it. If you pussies haven't felt it yet, you just won't get it.

But remember this: I'm appealing to your most base greed. You haven't even read my book--I'm not appealing to any artistic instincts or taste. I don't give a fuck about that. I'm appealing to your greed and desire for more money, an easier life, to leave something for your family.

To make money.

I can make you Paul Allen times 50.

And I've described how in exhausting, rational detail. In your language with math.

If you've given up on your dreams to make money and you don't even want to make the maximum money--then what the fuck are you? If you've embraced life as toil and reward and don't even want the rewards, what do you believe in? Pain?

Y'all some kinky motherfuckers.

Don't you want a front row seat to the most important and most flexible brand of the coming millennium?

Cimbing Stairs

It strikes me that life is like climbing a set of stairs--or walking somewhere.

The West has told us that all that matters is getting to where we're going--or else why walk at all?! So around here, we ignore the scenery--try to get past it faster.

And we certainly have a point.

The East, on the other hand, insists that as we're walking at the moment, where we're going is immaterial. Which, of course, is true as well. But why not at least head for places with even better scenery as long as we're enjoying it? Why not go visit shit we've heard great things about? Why not investigate what we want--as long as nothing matters anyway?

It's not too hard to see that here in the 3rd millenium, what we're going to do is shake them both and say: "Yo, mothafuckers! It's both!"

And maybe add a quick "Get over yourself." Damn.

The question remains, though, which one to use as our primary reaction to things. Which one to favor and hold more holy. For certainly we aren't bad-assed enough yet to speed like we've been doing and dawdle smelling flowers at the same time. Maybe some day, but not quite yet.

Like computers, our attention doesn't quite parallel process as efficiently as it does singularly focus.

The rent is due, and the couch is feeling relaxing, do we believe or get scared?

We have missed rent before. Even starved and hurt. The question is real.

And there's a series of paintings calling. And a few songs percolating.

You have paintings to sell, but none have sold so far.

You've been at it ten years and haven't sold shit.

Faith or fear?

Which will render you a man and which mighty mousey?

The Love Artist

As far as I can tell, I am the world's first self-descirbed love artist.

There are a few others. There's a conceptual artist and yoga teacher who owns www.theloveartist.org (I own theloveartist.com). She runs workshops as a love artist--and promises better fucking, which is great--but I don't see much in her site or work that goes beyond Kundalini Yoga and a somewhat hippie/liberal/romantic notion of love as being really nice.

Annie Sprinkle has a site called loveartlab.com, which is surprisingly boring for such a vaunted performance artist. For a fee (I assume), she and her partner will hold a cuddle-in--where they install a bed and have bystanders cuddle between them on it for minutes at a time.

Which sounds like hell to me. To me, that doesn't even sound intimate--let alone like fucking--let alone loving. Why is being touched by strangers love? (Unless you're on X maybe.)

But I do like that the notion of a love artist is bubbling up in the collective unconscious.

So what's my claim to fame? Or at least origination?

I started writing my book The Love Artist around 1995. The first thing I got was the title. And then, laying in the grass at my family summer house, I asked myself: "what the fuck is a love artist?".

If I had come up with an answer, I wouldn't have needed to write the book.

But I couldn't, and so I did.

What was interesting was that, if anything, I started off with a fairly conventional notion of being nice to everyone as being loving, and had that repeatedly dashed on the rocks. Like it was being beaten out of me. (And believe me, I was as nice and as big a pussy as you would have met.)

It turns out that love can just as easily tell people to fuck off, when that's what needs to be said.

Love is loving yourself--it's just like oxygen masks in airplanes in that respect--you can't really do it outward until you know how to do it inward. Which is why so many well-intentioned attempts go awry: i.e. welfare, trust funds, being a "giver", putting others before yourself, etc.

And so many supposedly hateful approaches work so smashingly: capitalism; individualism; boundaries, borders and fences; taking, etc.

There are lots and lots of manipulative people out there and if you're "being nice" to them, then you're spreading emotional molestation, not love. Showin 'em the hand is love.

I published The Love Artist in 2000 and bought theloveartist.com shortly after. It wasn't until after I put it out that I learned all the money and fucking stuff about love.

It's all wrapped up into one neat little ball. Money, fucking, love.

And any artist who pretends to be dealing with one without EXPLICITLY and OPENLY addressing the other two is full of shit.

A nice artist. And likely better at theory than painting, writing or making music.

Always go by the work. Even with me. Don't give me shit for how clever, witty or "smart" I am. None of that means shit. Though concepts are of more importance than ever, conceptual art itself is bullshit--just reasons the mind makes up to cover a lack of talent, a fear of venturing into the truly unknown and wordless frontier. If it's valuable, then it's applicable. And should have examples in abundance.

An artist trying to sell theory is like a real estate guru trying to sell seminars. If the shit really worked, why is he running around teaching it instead of logging in from Bermuda for an hour every third day and doing the damn thing?

Read a fucking poem, check the paintings, buy the book. I'm off to get my hair cut.

You Can Lead a Horse to Water..

But that motherfucker might be dedicated--mind, body and soul--to dying of thirst.

AKA: The Two Second White Gold Primer:

1. All prices for mass content are fixed. (i.e. all songs are $.99, all movies $10, all magazines around $4, all DVDs $24, all TV and radio free, etc.)

2. Fixed pricing (or socialist) systems yield unnecessarily low quality products.

3. Our culture is unnecessarily (and massively) worse than it should be.

4. Allowing content prices to float, as we do in every other sector of the economy, will result in a wide range of cultural content at all quality levels and at all price points.

5. Floating content prices are inevitable, but they can be sped along, most notably by buying the only premium mass content product available in the market today--my book, The Love Artist, available at $120 from the White G store. Even if it is the worst book ever written (and it's not), making it a "story" and allowing it to become mediated will positively impact our culture. economy, the environment, and our daily life more than all the fucking Adornos and non-profits combined.

(Remember, non-profits don't make any money, they must be funded by old world activities like oil, direct advertising and software. Non-profit growth must be predicated by growth in corporate profits, period.)

[For explicit reasoning and numbers on all this, just dig into the blog. This isn't a hope or a wish or a viewpoint, but a concrete, predictable mathematic certainties. I'm going to run through it without much proof for the sake of speed and rhythm. --I'm not busy, but I know you are.]

Right now we have a fast food culture. Very low price points demand that products reach the broadest range of consumers. So the 18-34 demographic os overserved and most other smaller niches--including very wealthy, very loving, very conscious and more mature consumers--are underserved or not served at all.

Artists who think that they have escaped the economy usually just use whatever perspective they have gained to fight the economy. Resulting in two kinds of culture: a vapid and committee-approved mainstream and a depressed, angry and bitter counterculture, which claimes to want to destroy the mainstream but really just sharpens and improves it by providing a valuable pool or new ideas, feelings and fashions from which to draw.

Ultimately, neither the mainstream nor the counterculture is valuable to mature, responsible, loving grown-ups--the consumers with the most money to spend and arguably, those in need of a culture most desperately.

Art and culture--love--cannot succeed without vulnerability and neither the mainstream nor the counterculture delivers more than the smallest amount absolutely necessary to sell (or, in the case of the counterculture, to be conferred by insiders as "authentic").

Neither feels safe enough to do much new or valuable. To take significant risks. So our culture grinds to a standstill. And no incentives (money, love, recognition, security) exist to draw new practitioners into the mix.

Put it this way--being depressed and wearing all black is as culturally risky in 2008 as being perky and going to church was in the 1958. Not at all. The counterculture, which prides itself on being the sole arbiter of modern authenticity, is as fake as a Barbie knock-off.

A mohawk means nothing. Nor do ripped jeans, nor does no bra, nor do piercings or tattoos. They are all well-mediated poses.

Only love, vulnerability, taking risks, exploring and expressing desires--only these are real, valuable and risky. The only problem is that as these are not rewarded anywhere more highly than the status quo, they have little incentive to grow. Our culture is growing--as quickly as our 18-34 year olds are growing culturally.

But there are people and populations who are growing much faster. And who have already gone through and graduated from what those folks have gone through.

Our culture sounds like a skipping record because it never graduates anyone. It just stays in high school and college. (And the often confused first years after.)

A book that's real will likely only appeal to the small portion of society that's real, meaning, at $14 a copy, that it MUST fail. And that the writer will be forced to labor for years and years (a good book takes years to write) to subsidize another one. Which must fail as well.

The same is true for songs, movies, magazines, televisions shows and all mass medium arts.

To grow up, the counterculture must get real about its desires for love, fucking, money, fame, attention and stability. It wants health, security, home ownership, insurance, new cars and all the rest. And it must confront its own infatuation with fixed price systems (socialism) and communalism in general to grow. And it must own up to that. Because currently individuals must leave the culture (or be banished) when they admit these verbotten desires.

(And don't worry, the mainstream has just as many fears to confront.)

Whoever has the balls to face these fears--and can understand that cultural content MUST eventually grow in both price and quality--will make a shitload of money.

I'm currently looking for $3 million in start up money. To create the first and only premium content company. The products are ready. The marketing campaign writes itself:

$120 for a book? Are you f$%^ing crazy?!

Yes, compared to what you think is sane, I am.

And I will be ridiculously and overwhelmingly (again, by your standards) compensated for introducing the world to a new standard. It's been done many times before and will be done many times again.

The only difference is that you know about it beforehand.

And can make an investment that makes the Google IPO look like a dud.

After all, they're just the pipeline maintenance company.

We own the oil, baby.

Spring Ahead

Read the Julian Schnabel piece in the latest Vanity Fair.

I was grooving until it mentioned that he was condo-ing his own building out.

What the fuck??!

I don't think he's a good painter, or even film-maker, for that matter (though the value of Basquiat is pretty unquestionable)--but he's an important enough artist historically and globally that he should be living in his own fucking house!!?

I guess he should have stayed in the unique arts, like painting, and stayed away from the mass arts, like movies, where the money even for the best is shit.

If I were you I would be ashamed to live in a world that treats it's artists so poorly. What a fucking joke. The sold-out hedge fund hand job geeks get their own islands and the only visual artist who even matters (even though he's leftover grunge at this point) is taking on roomers like the fucking broke British aristocracy. Now ain't that some Cherry Orchard shit?!

The poor bastard probably doesn't even have dental insurance. He owns a Picasso and doesn't even have dental insurance.

Ha. You can't even make money being a SUCCESSFUL artist.

Must mean the collapse of the old order in nigh.

Buy your leather pants now.

Motherfuckers.