More musings...

Apparently, adding an ellipsis on the end of an e-mail subject header triggers a lot of spam filters, especially Gmail. Between junk mail and AI, the English language is being curtailed - you have to write how the machines expect humans to write, or they think you're one of them. Meanwhile, the likes of Grammarly are busy trying to get us all to sound that same. Passive writing is bad writing, apparently. This is fashion. Ignore fashion. We are being linguistically herded.

I'm trying to get out of the Google ecosystem entirely, for no reason other than I hate Google. I can barely remember why, but I know it runs deep. Fastmail is a privacy-focused Australian company that has been running a really solid email and calendar system for a while now. Apparently Hey, which has been my email provider of choice up to now, built their system on Fastmail's architecture. The internet will have you believe that Fastmail is not as secure as Proton because Swiss privacy laws ace everyone else's. That's technically true but practically irrelevant; Proton is only truly secure if both sides of the conversation are using it. Also, I want privacy in the "Don't fire my data all over the internet" sense of the word, I'm not planning crimes via email.

Fastmail also lets you use your own domain names, which means I can link it up to my various websites and look more "professional". I have never been remotely interested in looking professional, but I understand that other people care about that stuff and look askance at personal emails.

A long discussion yesterday about Hollywood's shift from selling tickets to selling shares (that is reductive, but who has the time?) I suspect that means that the trend of the major studios hedging their bets and homogenising their output is not a blip this time, as it has been for periods past, but may be where they end up living. Hollywood agencies make more money working for brands than they do representing clients. The future looks different, but it is full of opportunity.

I watched Robert Rodriguez's movie "Hypnotic" last night, which is an 80s John Carpenter movie executed to a high standard. Depending on your mileage, this is either praise or condemnation (I really enjoyed it). From the get-go, Rodriguez has been working outside the system, or at least has been system-adjacent. Now he has a new venture which essentially crowdfunds development for movies. As with a lot of these schemes, the carrot is supposed to be that investors make a profit if a movie makes a lot of money.

But I'm wondering if financial gain is the only worthwhile reward? If someone puts a bunch of money into a Rodriguez film and the film doesn't make a profit, the relationship, which has been based purely on the investment potential, must start to sour?

When I buy a book, I'm investing for a different kind of reward. It's OK to part with money in return for entertainment, or escape, or illumination. Not everything has to have a financial motivation. I participate in crowdfunds often purely because I want the thing to exist in the world. My own experience crowdfunding has suggested that people are happy to pay to get more of the thing they enjoy, and they are keen to tell other people about it, partly because of the same mechanic that makes us want to share the things we like, and partly because the more people who know about the thing, the more likely it is to continue to exist.

When we create something for a studio or a record label or a publisher, there is a necessity for that thing to make money because the future relationship relies on the financier making a profit. But when you deal direct with the audience, as we do in crowdfunding, the thing doesn't have to be a roaring success, it just has to be pleasing to the people who invested in it. That is back to the idea of selling tickets, not shares.

I like selling tickets. It feels honest. We'll put the show on right here and, if you want us to keep putting the show on, tell your friends about it so they buy tickets too. In return for the price of admission, we'll provide you with a few hours of entertainment. That's a fair trade. Without wishing to sound like a grandpa, it's how things used to work. When money becomes the only reason for doing anything, when the return on investment is all anyone looks at, we all lose out.

The stated aim of the Rodriguez model is that his crowdfunding audience are sufficiently invested in the movies that they will tell all their friends about them. The idea is that he is then showing up to a studio with a new project and an army of thousands of volunteers who will be their own de facto marketing department. I would argue that there are enough people who like Robert Rodriguez movies that it goes without saying that he has an audience, are we to be required in the future to provide names and addresses? It feels akin to the time when publishers were insistent on authors having a Twitter profile. Was the huge percentage they took from the cover price not supposed to cover marketing?

And the people Rodriguez is presenting this package to are likely no longer driven by ticket sales anyway, they're too busy making billions of dollars buying and selling movie studios and sports teams. They need to make movies to bulk out their library, or to provide "content" for their streaming service, but who cares if they're any good? You don't spend $350m on a live-action version of "The Little Mermaid" if you just want to make your money back selling tickets.

Wall Street has Hollywood in a vice. A handful of people are getting very rich and everyone else, the audience included, is getting squeezed. I suspect the future of entertainment, at least in the medium-term, is smaller, more local, more community driven; whether it's a crowdfund or a book purchase or a download, you buy a ticket for the thing you like and that's how the thing gets to come into the world. If you don't want to do that, then sit back; there's Netflix and Amazon and a bunch of Marvel movies on the way, but none of them are being made to entertain you, they're just assets on someone else's balance sheet.

In our new marketplace, as with the old ones, vendors sell direct. We have a relationship with our audience which is not "What do you want me to make?" but "Here I am and this is what I do. If you're interested, come and play." With the Pleasant Green crowdfunds, we have lots of people spreading the word, but we also have artists doing designs and people helping out with admin and advice (all paid, where possible). The atmosphere is akin to a community raising a barn. It's collaborative and creative and fearless and, above all, fun.

I think this might be the future.