INTRODUCING: FIZZY!
ARCADE SUNSHINE MEDIA PUBLISHES INTERACTIVE CHILDREN’S BOOK
A LION AND WHALE CAN DANCE

FEATURING STUNNING HAND-DRAWN ILLUSTRATIONS BY BEN MCINTIRE, ANIMATIONS, GAMES AND MORE

Limited review copies available upon request
Author on tour; Available for interviews*

NEW YORK, NY, April 30: A LION AND WHALE CAN DANCE, the first interactive children’s book by trail-blazing digital publishing firm Arcade Sunshine Media was released today as an iPad app and is now available at the App Store ($3.99).

The app has a distinctively ‘old-school’ feel to it, thanks to lush, detailed illustrations by Ben McIntire, while the story pays homage to first-time author Fizzy’s grandparents who overcame differences in race and background when they married in the 1940s. Fizzy explains, “the story is about love and friendship coming from seemingly impossible places.”

The app features ‘read to me’ and ‘read by myself’ modes, over 35 interactive animations, and a ‘critter hunt’ to keep kids coming back again and again. Simple controls and vivid illustrations mean that kids can use the app by themselves, or alongside an adult.

“It really highlights what Arcade Sunshine is all about,” said Aziz Isham, (President) of Arcade Sunshine Media. “Beautiful, hand-crafted, digital media is possible – and not just for large corporations and massive budgets, but for the independent market, too.”

A Lion and Whale can Dance is the first children’s offering by Arcade Sunshine Media, whose previous releases have included the first socially connected ebook app, Here on Earth, with best-selling author Tim Flannery and, more recently, an interactive guide to Moby Dick featuring interactive maps, infographics, and contributions from some of the country’s top Moby Dick experts.

Download the app here.

Arcade Sunshine Media just released an enhanced version of Moby-Dick into the iTunes store both as an app and an iBook.

We went into researching the project knowing that it’s been one of the most influential novels of all time, but we didn’t anticipate finding the endless strange/funny/fascinating ways in which Melville’s classic continues to percolate up through pop-culture.

We were so inspired by what we found that we decided to start a twitter handle that will post at least one bizzaro fact or pop culture reference about Moby-Dick every day for a year. @MobyDickApp

Here’s just a taste of the kind of stuff we found:

Among metal-heads, Mastodon is considered a super heavy, truly badass band. Their second album, Leviathan, is a concept album based on Moby-Dick and was named “album of the year” by Terrorizer Magazine…which is a big deal for some niche out there. Seriously though, “Blood and Thunder” (a song on the album) was chosen as one of the most important recordings of the decade by NPR in 2009, and they claimed that the album epitomized ” a phenomenal decade for metal”.

One day in August of 2009 Matt Kish decided he was going to make a painting for every single page of the 552-page Signet Classics version of Moby-Dick. The result was Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page. He didn’t use any computer illustrating tools, relying instead on crayons, ballpoint pen, markers, book clippings and all kinds of other random materials.
Here is giving a tour of his studio:

Back in 2008 a twitterer with the handle @publicdomain decided to tweet every word of Moby-Dick 140 words at a time. Moby-Dick is over 200,000 words long so it took him 12,849 tweets to accomplish his goal.

A few months ago a man posted four rolls of toilet paper on eBay and asked a starting price of 999 bucks. The kicker: he’d typed the entirety of Moby-Dick on the rolls using an old typewriter. He first fed the hyper delicate paper in an old typewriter 10 years ago and kept the scrolls in a “cool, dry place” until he was finally ready to part with it this year. There were no bids on the auction.

Back in 1962, at the height of Tom and Jerry’s popularity, director Gene Deitch decided to pay homage to Melville’s classic with a cartoon starring the ultra-violent antagonists. There’s a furiously obsessed peg-legged captain, a boat called the Komquot and a whale named Dicky Moe. In the end, when Dicky Moe is finally harpooned, Jerry wraps the harpooon rope around Toms legs and the whale swims off with the shrieking cat.

This might be the best Moby-Dick interpretation ever. The following is an illustration for the month of July in the 2010 “Great Works of Cow Literature” Chick-Fil-A calender. The title: Mooby Dick.

Remember those awesome Micro Machines commercials where the guy describes the tiny, ill-fated models at about a 1000 words per second?

That guy is John Moschitta Jr. and he’s kind of a legend in the “really fast talking” community (there really is one). So he decided to summarize Moby Dick in under one minute and it’s kinda impressive:

MC Lars is a relatively serious rapper. He owns and runs a successful record label and has toured with Ludacris, NAS, Lupe Fiasco and more…Which makes it especially weird/charming that he decided to rap the story of Moby Dick in this video.



One of the best Moby-Dick references of all time pops up at the end of Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan. After activating the genesis device which will destroy both their ships, Khan quotes Ahab’s famous revenge line against Kirk, his white whale. The acting surprisingly good, but the hair way over teased.
“… to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.”
—Moby-Dick, Ch. 135

Matt Groening and his writers are kind of obsessed with Moby-Dick, and references abound in The Simpsons. But Matt really committed to honoring the book on Futurama when he produced Mobius Dick, an episode that features Leela, captain of the Planet Express spaceship, hunting down Mobius Dick, the 4 dimensional whale who swallowed her crew.

And finally, here’s an introduction to our take on Moby-Dick.

It’s become pretty standard fare, at a conference or some party, that someone will accuse me of hating books.  Of wanting to destroy them.  Of course, this is entirely true.  Arcade Sunshine Media was started as a way to rid the world of knowledge.  I was a slow learner in first grade and this is my revenge.

Considering I’ve always been short for my age, am about as coordinated as a slow loris, and spent large swathes of my childhood flying around the country for chess tournaments, I’ve been on the seriously, compulsively ‘passionate about books’ track since the Reagan era.  And some variation of all of that is driving everyone at Arcade Sunshine.  So when someone volunteers, ‘What you guys do is kinda cool, but is it a book?’ We might answer back that we’ve moved past that particular question.

You shouldn’t be able to define a culture in concrete terms.  Culture is a metaphorical way of understanding our predicament and our place in the world.  We don’t define art or music or religion (or, rather, we don’t define any of them well) so as technology releases the written word from the economic and technological confines of the 100,000-word, printed-warehoused-shipped-and-shilled narrative, why should we worry about how we are defining a ‘book’.

Does a book have to end?  Does it have to have a word minimum and maximum?  Must it not include choice? Videos? Must it include text?  Should it be a story? Should it have an author?  Can anyone publish a book? If you can answer any of these questions in the positive or negative, I can answer it the opposite way. And, if you think about it, so can you.

Naturally, the most fervent defenders of ‘books the way they’ve always been’ tend to be established authors and publishing company executives.  Nothing wrong with that – it’s how they’ve made a living. Jonathan Franzen is rather outspoken on the topic, Nicholson Baker too – the latter in a more ornery and engaging way.  The truth is:  the change has already happened.  Books aren’t going anywhere, but most young people are already consuming information almost entirely on a screen.  In one of Doug Rushkoff’s documentaries for Frontline, they interview a group of kids at MIT who have never, not ever, read an entire book. And there are plenty of other smart, successful, competent young people out there who can demonstrate alternative, but equally viable, cat-skinning techniques. Now this may make you sad, but the truth is that the hardcover book is no longer the only path to worldly knowledge.

The lines will continue to blur – though this won’t happen overnight or even in several years.  New forms of storytelling will emerge – made possible by the fact that tablets occupy a lot of the liminal space that once separated books from videos from games (from music, from art, from etc…).  Older forms of encoding information will not disappear,  new ones will emerge.  They will begin as creoles and hybrids.  Eventually, they will find fans, found subcultures, and change the world.

But they’ll take a long time to get here.  Cable TV – a technology that’s over sixty years old – is available in under 60% of American homes.  Just over half.  A bold prediction: in the distant future, three-quarters of Americans will have basic cable.

We don’t hate books.  We’re not trying to destroy them.  No one can, anyways.  We’re just interested in exploring all that new territory that technology does make possible… We’re interested in the future of storytelling and we’re interested in telling stories on multiple platforms, in real-life, on the digital stage, and with tablets, social media, websites and, god-forbid, even on paper.

But if all of this is emerging, and the technology will take a long time to find its feet and work its way into our homes, then how do we support these experiments?  What makes the cake worth the candle?

First of all, we have enough of an industry revolving around early-adapters and technophiles to make well-produced experimental media valuable from a PR point of view.  Every Wired blogger, MIT Technology Review Journalist, and techno-twitterer out there is performing an important service to the creators of new types of media engagement…  They are keeping us relevant.  If we can say to a client, “Look – we only had eighty visitors to our website last week, but hey, you were written up in Wired and, judging by their current advertising rates and column width, that’s gotta be worth at least $10k…” The client is happy.  The readers are happy.  And, somewhere, a new code was generated – a way to tell a story that hasn’t been tried before was attempted.  Bloggers are funding our R&D.

Secondly, social media proliferation makes it possible, if unlikely, for independently generated media to go viral.  The viral hit is the new media version of the blockbuster movie, or the bestselling book.  When it works, the rewards can be game-changing.  Without going into how things go viral – a lot of people with a lot more viral successes than Arcade Sunshine have tried to codify the process (it has something to do with Corgis and lists) – the fact that a man on a mountain in Montana can film a rainbow that’s been seen by millions proves the possibility of the phenomena.

Finally, there really are people willing to try new things.  Whether that means downloading an enhanced ebook for the first time, taking a pay-cut to help develop an interactive novel, convincing your company to support a smart-phone web-series, or participating in an ARG…  There are people out there creating and patronizing – not just new stories, but entirely new ways of telling stories.  And it satisfies them.

‘Fine,’ you say, ‘but I wouldn’t call that a book.’

Then don’t.

A Moby Dick Case Study

This week we published two digital, multimedia editions of Moby Dick – one with Apple’s new, free, ebook building program, iBook Author, and the other as a standalone app using a framework and platform that we built from scratch. Both versions include original interviews with two of the country’s top Moby Dick experts, a series of new infographics, an interactive glossary, and tons of archival materials including period prints, archival footage of an early 19^th century whaling vessel and much more…  The idea for both projects was to see if we could take a classic work, treat it like a high-budget documentary film, and publish it quickly to the mobile screen.

We chose Moby Dick because, frankly, we all love the book and have been wanting to create a documentary approach to it for some time…  But also because it is famously one of the books that gives students and first-time readers the most trouble.  We thought that if we injected it with the right amount of supplemental materials, it might encourage more people to pick it up and try it out.

Our approach has always been to be platform agnostic about digital publishing – to try and create great, socially connected, multimedia content and use whatever platforms are out there to get a story across – from text messaging to digital catalogs and iPad apps.  So we’re publishing Moby Dick to two platforms simultaneously, and we’ll update the blog with what we’ve learned from the experiment as any numbers start to come in.  We’re also coming into this without a dog in the race – we want to help prospective authors, publishers, organizations and bloggers to find the platform that will best suit the story they want to tell…  And obviously, if you need a hand navigating either of these waters, feel free to shoot us an email. That said – right now, we’re just comparing two iPad exclusive end products.  Next time, we’ll try to include Kindle Fire and mobile web versions as well, but first…

iBook Author: Finally – digital publishing for the everyman… Sort of.

So easy! At the start at least. The framework will start to show it’s kinks after a while of intensive use, and as you add more files to the project. Still, if you’re used to using Apple apps like pages and iMovie, iBook Author was designed with the same basic principles in mind. It’s a little idiosyncratic, and your options for layout and design are definitely limited to the handful of templates that are included in the program but… The templates are pretty good looking and tasteful, without being boring. The book looks good:

But the limitations can be frustrating and take a lot of time to work around. You can’t drag pages within a chapter around, just the whole chapter. You can’t view “Page Thumbnails” in Portrait orientation, only as a “Book Outline” which doesn’t display the pages. The bookmarks and hyperlinks options are very limited (you can’t, for example, change hyperlink color, or use an image or object as a link). And you can’t make an image or object a bookmark – which seems unnecessarily ‘text-centric’ for a multimedia development suite.

There’s good multimedia support. Videos can be slugged in pretty easily – as long as they are encoded for iPad in .m4v format. But if you didn’t create the videos with iBook Author in mind, you might need someone who can knows how to reformat video files to make these work.

Webpages are kind of a pain. They have to be converted into .wdgt files (not html). I don’t want to get too technical here – but this is far from a simple procedure.  After considerable tinkering about, you can usually get something like a java-enhanced infographic working pretty well.

Images and sound files are easier to deal with and look/work great. But…  No social media support. What? I can’t imagine that Apple looked into their company crystal ball and saw a future of the book that doesn’t facilitate communication between two readers. Between a teacher and a student. Between a grandparent and a grandchild…  Apple’s never really done social media well – but to us, an interactive book must be multimedia and socially connected – and iBooks Author fails pretty spectacularly with the latter.

No real interaction means you can’t personalize your book. It can’t be location aware – you can’t, for instance, find other people near you reading the same book at the same time. It can’t recommend other books you might enjoy.  I’m not saying that our app version of Moby Dick does all of these things right now (it doesn’t) – but if we had a little more time to program, any of this would be possible.  Not so with iBooks Author.

So iBooks Author is easy, but not that easy. Provided you’ve got all the media in the right formats, right order, and have a week to tweak everything together so that it looks good, anyone can publish with iBooks Author and without any special skills. But the real problem with iBooks Author is that it doesn’t really push any limits or show any unusual capabilities or hidden potential. I mean yes – it lets anyone publish multimedia, and that’s cool and will potentially change the textbook market. But this is the same company that invented the digital music market when most folks were rocking out to a discman. And I won’t even go into the DRM and closed limitations of the format – basically they’ve taken an open-source EPUB3 format and added just enough proprietary additions and a nasty EULA to make it impossible to distribute on competing platforms. Which has sparked plenty of well-deserved backfire.

The eBook App: Expensive. Complex. But oh-so-powerful…

On the flip side of digital publishing, there’s not much you can’t do with multimedia publishing in iOS. We’ve been around at least as long as any other company out there, and its only been about a year – but still we’re just barely scratching the surface. Our first book, Here on Earth, was the first to integrate a live twitter feed – now twitter has been built into the very operating system.

With Moby Dick: A Digital Odyssey, we’ve adapted our Arcade Sunshine platform without doing too much customizations so that we could  get it out the door quickly, and at the same time as the iBook Author version. If we had coded it from scratch, it probably would’ve taken at least three-weeks longer. That’s three weeks of programming time. That costs real money. Lots of it.

What do you get for all that cash? Well… The app version is a little easier to navigate – we have a visual Table of Contents:

And the note-taking system is better integrated – with the app version if you like certain passages from the book, you can save them to the app itself. Then, later, if you want to email them (to yourself, your professor, your friends) you can. It would be fun, for example, to create new remixes of Moby Dick using this function – but a more practical application is selecting quotes, as you read, and then using them in an essay or term paper.

The twitter function allowed with the app is also fun. You can see everything that people are saying about the book / tweet on topic without leaving the app or going to your computer. Removing that one extra step might encourage a more interactive experience.

As for design – anything is possible with an app. We like using the full iPad screen to view images and videos.

Multimedia support is also pretty robust in iOS. We’ve got videos, java and html stuff, sounds files… No real limits (except flash) here. But you do have to be careful about working with video – there are many slips twixt the cup and the lip – and re-encoding, trying different compressions, and generally knowing your way around Final Cut is essential.

The Verdict – Two Versions of Moby Dick

So for this project, the app version of Moby Dick only gives a few small advantages. The twitter feed and note-taking mechanism especially. But… We designed this platform about a year ago. That’s several generations of technology in a field that’s growing as quickly as multimedia publishing. If this is all the interactivity that you need – and for most multimedia projects and textbooks, it probably is – iBooks Author is pretty great. But it’s way more ‘gee whiz’ than ‘holy shit.’

I imagine that this year we’ll be doing a lot of work in both formats. For the really boundary-crossing breakthroughs in interactive storytelling (and the spectacular failures, incredible successes, and revolutionary new products), I think we’ll be working with a lot of native apps. There’s way more social media integration possible, location-aware books, ARGs and everything else that exists in the wide-open space that tablets have created between videos, games, and the 100,000-word narrative. But for smaller projects – where publishing a great-looking, media-rich final product and getting the best bang-for-buck, I’ll be recommending iBook Author. You still need a multimedia producer who knows how to put something together, but you don’t need a professional programmer – and that means a much less expensive final product.

Next post, we’ll talk about sales and discoverability — which format is best for getting your work out there and into the hands (and onto the screens) of your desired audience.

By the numbers:

Total time to create (once all the media was filmed, edited, compiled, commissioned, etc…)

• iBooks Author: 6 Days
• eBook App: 5 Days (plus ~5 weeks to program the platform)

Total time under review at Apple

• iBooks Author: ~3 weeks
• eBook App: 5 Days

Total media:

• iBooks Author: 11 short films, 50 images and illustrations, 3 interactive infographics, 1 American epic.
• eBook App: 11 short films, 50 images and illustrations, 3 interactive infographics, embedded note-taking system, live twitter feed, American epic.

Tomorrow morning at NYU:

http://socialmediaweek.org/event/?event_id=1210list%20of%20imaginary%20places.

Awesome lineup including Aziz Isham from Arcade Sunshine…  Probably not worth missing.

Games are big these days. Companies have turned mundane filing tasks and returning emails into games, SETI is looking for extraterrestrial life using games, and cancer researcher are folding proteins with crowd-sourced games. Gamification is the new synergy. Gamification is everywhere and gamers are coming out of the dungeon, proud to game and happy to evangelize!

But there’s also something a little wrong with the whole picture… I mean, isn’t the whole point of games that they are, entirely and explicitly, unproductive? In 1952, Edward Lasker, the great chess player, gave Albert Einstein a copy of one of his books, Chess for Fun, Chess for Blood. Einstein suggested that with all of Lasker’s brilliance, wasn’t he wasting his time by spending so much energy on the game of chess? Lasker responded by paraphrasing the prosecutor Clarence Darrow: “We are born, and we die; between those two most important events in our lives more or less time elapses that we have to waste somehow. In the end, it doesn’t seem to matter much if we waste it with mathematics, practicing law, or playing chess, as long as it makes us happy.”

Gaming is a fundamental human endeavor – like love and sharing and storytelling – but games have been insulated from the rest of our lives for most of human history. Most of us don’t carry our scrabble scores around the way we do our bank accounts or SAT scores – they are, after all, just for fun. Is all that about to change?

What is gamification? Basically it is a neologism that suggests ‘making things fun’ but really means ‘assigning points and, occasionally, arbitrary rewards.’ Foursquare has succeeded by giving people points to ‘check-in’ to places they visit, and awarding generally meaningless titles, ‘mayor,’ to people with the most points. Sometimes, you can convert points / titles into discounts and free stuff. But usually you ‘play’ for the points themselves – they become their own reward. The whole thing sounds an awful lot like fiat money capitalism (itself a gamification to facilitate the flow of goods and services.)

So we encounter the same problem with gamification that we encounter with our current economic system: the things we value the most does not depend on their value to society, but their value to the game. With capitalism, bankers, people who make money, are the most rewarded (and valued) ‘players,’ – they are valued literally thousands of times greater than poets. But who cites famous bankers when recounting the history of the world?

As gamification creeps into more and more areas of our lives – both online and off – should we beware? What will happen when relationships – already being gamified online as ‘twitter followers’ and ‘facebook friends’ become stand-ins for ‘points’ and ‘dollars’ become gamified offline?

There’s something to be said for gamification, after all. It’s fair. It’s meritocratic and basically democratic – once you have the tools to play, everyone pretty much competes on the same playing field. The rules are pretty clear. It is usually judged by code and algorithm, not by potentially biased or inefficient referees.

Chess is a perfect game because it needs no computers, no luck, very few rules to play – it is complex without being complicated… It’s why computers are so good at it. Football is complicated – to try and make sure that one team ‘really’ won, massive rulebooks, a fleet of referees, scores of computers and millions of dollars of high-speed, instant-replay cameras and lasers are employed. Football, which has been played for fun for a century, and as a way to pass the time, is being fully ‘gamified’… And the result is such a massive increase in popularity. As if we are just now, finally, arriving at some objective and perfect version of the sport.

Gamification can be thought of as a transformation of the human endeavor into a machine-readable, competition-enabling code. It is the reward system layer that fits over our human interests. Already, on youtube and facebook, we transform our emotions and our desires, our flights of fancy, our vulnerabilities, and our creative spasms into a commodified entertainment – but while the media companies and social networks become wealthy, we earn empty ‘points,’ ‘likes,’ and hollow reputations.

The game plays us. It has created a false economy of illusory currencies (because, deep down, it insists that everything creative is, in ‘reality,’ worthless) and yet it creates very real fortunes from it.

So what’s going to happen next? The world will become increasingly gamified as more companies embrace mock economies to drive their networks, games and websites. Will the more powerful created economies (and this has already happened, albeit in a smaller scale, with games and virtual worlds like Second Life, World of Warcraft, etc.) create an exchange rate with US Dollars? Will the creative industries transform into something like college sports – where unpaid ‘amateurs’ create massive cash flow for already wealthy institutions?

The new app showcasing 826DC’s fantastic after-school poetry program, City Blossoms, is at the app store. Go download a copy and check out the kids reading their poems, short films about 826 DC, and much more… And support a great organization while you’re at it!

Pat and I tear it up on CBS Unplugged. Oddly, we still manage to shop without drawing a crowd at the grocery store…  http://bit.ly/rkk5NQ

This is the first part of a two-part post on the slavery of free creativity. It’s meant to be a fun post…  With a healthy dose of hyperbole…  

The London riots were set off by the suspicious shooting of Mark Duggan, but it rapidly became clear that something deeper was amiss… Could be that they had something to do with eBooks.

Of course, we’re moving into an information society – we’ve been doing it for at least a decade now with the digitalization of the music and film industry, but it’s really picking up steam now that books and journalism are undergoing the transformation. In a recent piece for the Guardian, the writer Ewan Morrison gives authors (and the publishing industry) 25 more years, tops.

The crux of the argument is this: The value of creative information or ‘content’ trends towards zero when it becomes digitally transferable and is no longer contained in something like a paperback book or a CD. Once it becomes free, of course, no body gets paid to produce it. So ends publishing as we know it (and full-time writers, musicians, etc…) The rebuttal to his piece missed the point; when you take the long view, the twenty-five year view, content must always adapt to medium that contains it.

Most of what a developed society produces is content. Especially youth and especially today. We create youtube. We write fanfiction. We write blogs and webcomics and wikipedia… We create the internet every day, and we do it all for free.

And we create all of this because we need it. There was a recent report on Fox News report (citing the US census) about how 99.9% of the ‘poor’ have refrigerators, 65% have cable tv, and so on… Aside from this being a striking example of right-wing callous, it speaks to a very real truth: space is finite, the planet and its resources are finite, and yet capitalism relies on infinite growth. Capitalism works when people need refrigerators… But when everyone already has one (and there’s only enough room in your apartment for one fridge anyways) what do we consume?

Free time is infinite. As societies develop and become more efficient, it’s also growing. And content fills time. Content is the only growth economy. Creativity makes content, but most creativity is not remunerated – and even many traditional forms (music, indy films, books) are trending towards the free.  This is not a new concept — Buckminster Fuller called it ephemeralization and saw it happening with the factory assembly line.

It used to be that to fill time, you’d have to buy a CD or a paperback book. Now you download or stream it of find it on facebook – usually for free. Except that we have to pay the service providers for our internet hookup, cell phones, Netflix and such – when all they do is ship our content around. We have created a new system of slavery – expect that instead of free work, we have become creative slaves in the service of ISPs and search engines. The information economy is based on slave labor.

We know how to create an economy based on stuff – do we know how to build one based on time?

Right now, strictly as a business proposition, no one makes a living wage by writing poetry. And yet who could argue that society doesn’t benefit more from poets than it does from the angrily unemployed?

The trick is: creating a set of economic rules that reward creativity. Should it be up to individuals to do this? Corporations? Governments? How do you measure how creative someone is? Should people be paid to write code / music / literature? Should new collectives be formed based on the labor unions that revolutionized the industrial workplace around the turn of the century? I think we’ve got the makings of a few solutions out there – but we also need to define a cohesive ideology to help galvanize the political movements of the early 21^st century the way that socialism galvanized those of the 20^th: For capitalism be allowed to continue it’s course of infinite growth, human creativity must be financially compensated.

Its not like the rioters were out chanting ‘pay for poetry’ – and I don’t want to trivialize the very real and very moving calls for freedom that have resounded throughout the Middle East and North Africa, but the interesting question is: What do the London riots have to do with the Arab spring? Could the underpinnings of both be an expression of the spiritus mundi that something is not quite right with the global economic infrastructure? Could the Tea Party, the most organized American political movement in decades, have similar roots? Egyptian protesters had a despotic government to blame; the Tea Party, with calls to abolish the Fed (an organization that creates money from thin air), default on our debt and return to the Gold Standard, seeks to make capitalism ‘real’ again – despite the fact that the vast majority of economists believe this to be impossible; while the rioters just have their own rage. To oversimplify: In Europe, people feel they should be doing better; in the Arab world, that they can be better; in America, that they deserve better.

So are the three major political movements of the early 21^st Century reactions to capitalism’s failure to create growth in these three regions (Europe, America, the Arab Middle East) or are they results of the transition from coin-based (real) to credit-based (virtual) currency, as suggested by Anthropologist David Graeber’s Debt: The first 5000 Years? It almost doesn’t matter – the result is the same – a crisis of faith with the stakes so high is a scary scenario indeed.

Governments are easy targets – but economic systems, like all ideologies, draw strength from collective belief (and its ability to reward that belief). To paraphrase Philip K. Dick: when stop believing in something that isn’t real, it ceases to exist. So if capitalism is to persist, we must devise reasons to keep believing in it, and allow it to reward our creativity. ‘Content’ is the ‘goods and services’ of the information age – and the same way that the post-slavery world financially rewarded work must be done for creativity.

There is growth. Tons of it… Just look at wikipedia. And wealth is being derived from this productivity. Tons of it… Just look at Mark Zukerberg. It’s all make believe, of course, but so is a currency created from thin air. But how do you hold Google hostage? How do you riot against Facebook?

Over the last two-hundred years we have created copyrights and patents to ensure that intellectual work was fairly compensated; worker’s compensation, child labor and the five-day work week to ensure that physical labor was fairly compensated. Casual creativity and virtual work are next on the list.

Of course, that would make life seem even more like we’re living inside a video game. And a lot of people won’t like that, either. But the alternatives look grim: the last time a global economic system unraveled left humanity with a four-hundred year-old dark age. And they hadn’t even wrecked the planet back then…

A Complete Digital Experience

A couple weeks ago I had a meeting with an extremely bright VC at one of the region’s top firms and, about ten minutes into the conversation he said, ‘oh, I get it, you guys provide publishers and authors with a complete digital experience.’ At the time, it seemed a little like newspeak, but I’ve found myself coming back to that phrase again and again – and not just when we speak to publishers, but to broadcasters, authors, non-profits, and anyone else that we find ourselves working with.

Ninety-one percent of broadcast executives say they’re not taking advantage of the opportunities that digital creates. It has ‘got to be mobile and has got to be tablet.’ And that’s true, of course, but there’s a real danger in pointing to the mobile / tablet space and saying: ‘This is our strategy. We’re going to make an app.’ Sure you need an app. But you also need a website. Even more importantly – you need the two to work together – and to tell the same story.

So are we moving towards a moment in the culture where mobile is taken for granted the way that websites are? I was looking for apartments this past weekend in New York and, of course, I turned to craigslist first. But then, a couple hours into the hunt, I looked up apartment-finding apps. Craigslist, broker websites, apps, youtube videos, email lists – this is all part of the digital experience of looking for an apartment. And none of it replaces walking around a neighborhood and bugging my friends to ‘keep their ears open.’

Putting together a digital strategy for a web-series or a cause or a book can be fun, but it’s also full of challenges – most of them financial. From the outset, we have to think multi-platform, not ‘let’s make an app.’ We target alternate distribution channels and niche audiences. Look for viral subject matter. Above all – we must tell good stories, tell them well, and connect them with the audiences who will feel strongest about them. And all of this costs money – especially on the technical end. But for many execs, the complete digital experience is something that exists outside and in opposition to their ‘core business.’ It is something amorphous and with potential, but which hasn’t really been monetized.

I think there’s a bigger picture here, though… Storytelling in general is becoming more holistic. Increasingly, we are blurring the lines that separate the ‘official’ or ‘canon’ release of a book, tv show, or whatever, from the online ‘extras.’ The ‘article’ and the ‘comments’ are becoming one. The behind-the-scenes footage becomes just as much a part of the show as the audience vote, or the user-generated content. When we talk about the complete digital experience, we’re not talking about a website or an app or a marketing campaign that goes along with a story. We’re talking about the story itself.

The idea that ‘Broadcast Executives Say Digital Brings Opportunities’ is great, I guess, but it also misses the point… There is a complete digital experience to everything that these broadcast executives are doing, the only question is whether or not they want to have a say about what that is.