Officially, Google declared that “sharing is broken on the web” and nothing but the full force of our collective minds around Google+ could fix it. You have to admire a company willing to sacrifice sacred cows and rally its talent behind a threat to its business. Had Google been right, the effort would have been heroic and clearly many of us wanted to be part of that outcome. I bought into it. I worked on Google+ as a development director and shipped a bunch of code. But the world never changed; sharing never changed. It’s arguable that we made Facebook better, but all I had to show for it was higher review scores.

As it turned out, sharing was not broken. Sharing was working fine and dandy, Google just wasn’t part of it. People were sharing all around us and seemed quite happy. A user exodus from Facebook never materialized. I couldn’t even get my own teenage daughter to look at Google+ twice, “social isn’t a product,” she told me after I gave her a demo, “social is people and the people are on Facebook.” Google was the rich kid who, after having discovered he wasn’t invited to the party, built his own party in retaliation. The fact that no one came to Google’s party became the elephant in the room.

 — James Whittaker 

“[Immigration reform] has nothing to do with race, with country of origin, with ethnicity. Nothing. It is an American issue. It’s citizenship that is under attack.”

“If what he means by that (is) we represent a threat to the culture of this country, then he is right because we’re gonna change it. We’re gonna do what every major immigrant wave has done. We’re gonna make it dynamic. We’re gonna create a whole new America.”

Official Website: How Democracy Works Now

Journalism can make us care — or
it can numb us to human suffering.

China is a major fixation in my imagination, but this fascination doesn’t help much. I keep stacking away essentials to to-read shelves. China Wakes is an excellent exception. It just happens to be a terrific book by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn.

Today I got up from my bed to the news from Southern California Public Radio on which I chanced upon this thought-provoking interview on journalism and compassion:

Journalism can make us care — or it can numb us to human suffering. Nicholas Kristof’s columns in The New York Times wrap hard news inside human stories with broad appeal. He discusses the lessons of his life covering some of the worst atrocities in the world, and how he draws on insights of neuroscience to pierce through compassion fatigue.

While I was listening to this fine interview by Krista Tippett, it occurred to me that I have simply stopped following news from Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan. Though I do read stories about individuals and show interest in mostly development news, I try hard not to ignore mentions of massacres and genocides. I didn’t know this was common even among journalists and writers who are supposed to stay involved with serious issues of our times: most people share this ‘compassion fatigue.’ By telling individual stories of people, Nicholas Kristof believes we can generate empathy among our newsreaders towards issues that might seem beyond their control, but are actually not.

Over the years, I have tried hard to change the way I look at violence, its causes and aftermaths. Barbara Ehrenreich’s gripping account of origins and history of the institutionalization of violence and war in Blood Rites has been a great help in my attempt to understand the real cultural, psychological, subconscious or scientific causes of violence. As I write, I still struggle with the fact that war and violence is a constant in our world. More recently, I tried to go through Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, a terrible polemic about the seeming decline of violence in our age. I just couldn’t read it. It was badly written, and somehow just totally unconvincing.

There must be a term for ‘grievance fatigue,’ which is the only reason why I find it hard to blog these days. This post actually grew from a tweet that couldn’t fit in 140 characters no matter how much I tried to cut or edit it, and all that I was trying to say is that good writing is good story-telling. And if you’re like me, who still can’t forego that strong desire to change the world, you’ve got to tell stories.

“Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth.” – David Foster Wallace, 2005

I have never been to Britain or the United States of America. I was born in a small village in Terai, the southern plains in the Himalayan kingdom of Nepal, near the border of India. In 1816, the British East India Company forces defeated Gurkha army, but left the country sovereign. So technically, I can’t claim to be a citizen of the Commonwealth countries. My girlfriend’s grandfather, an ex-British Gurkha Army officer, happened to be both a Nepali and a subject of Her Majesty the Queen not quite so long ago but I cannot make that claim either. But then, what makes one British really? Or for that matter, say Indian or American? I write in English. I have my own picture of Britain, and I love it. My influences have been largely American, and to some extent European. I inherited the culture of north Indian Gangetic plains by birth, but happened to be a Nepali citizen by the virtue of its location.

It’s complicated really, the subject of my identity, though here’s a compromise that I’ve reached: as an artist, my temperament is European but my outlook as an individual is uniquely American. A personality who best embodies this dichotomy to me is Orson Welles, the great American director who spent the last decades of his life living and working mostly in Europe. European directors like F.W. Murnau, Jean-Luc Godard and Werner Herzog have also migrated across the Atlantic, albeit in the opposite direction. So have hundreds of other artists and artisans in the following decades, including Jonathan Ive, the Briton who helped to bring Apple back into prominence. There was a time before the rise of the Internet when the impact of such migrations in the fields of arts and culture was very slow and largely contained by the traditional media. It is no longer possible to control the effect of such migration and cultural transactions from spreading into public consciousness because of the rise of revolutionary online publications, social media and peer-to-peer technology.

One Nation

In 1974, Orson Welles told Parkinson, “I like living in this side of Atlantic very much. And I like living in America too. I am not a refugee, either politically or emotionally from my country. I am neither hot about nationalistically inclined, as I hate that in anybody. I hate that [sic]. I really believe that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. I am very happy in America but it happens America is not as happy with me as I am with it.”

When I saw this interview, which was broadcast on BBC fourteen years before I was even born, I could identify with it. The rise of the ultra-nationalists in the country of my origin and the country of my exile has only pushed the citizenry to ethnic, religious and regional feuds. With great patience I had downloaded Orson Welles’ interviews from file-sharing websites. I cannot recommend enough The Orson Welles Sketchbook produced by BBC in 1955 and his 1982 interview with Leslie Megahey for Arena, which was last repeated in 1995 on BBC2, both a treasure trove for film historians or enthusiasts.

I wasn’t there when these interviews were actually being taken and certainly not when Welles was struggling to make his films and fighting all sorts of censorship, but now that I had access to some of his films and interviews and books, I could study him continually at home, in various cities, dividing my time between my day jobs and him, his cinema, just because a serious community of cinephiles have had taped those broadcasts for themselves and for people like me. Think about it: if it were not for torrent trackers and numerous file-sharing hosts, the way our world is to use the allegory of Occupy Wall Street, 99% of the film audience would have had little or no access to even so little of what remains available to us of the genius of Orson Welles. We would have to give in to the 1% of the ‘film’ people at the top who control, own and distribute these films.

Open and free Internet is a determining role in the story of my generation. So when U.S. legislators propose a bill like Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) or Protect IP (PIPA) that could destroy the very foundation of the new-age knowledge centres of our generation, you cannot prevent a global outrage. These acts will dismantle the very medium that enables free exchange of ideas and communication in an attempt to prevent piracy. The proponents of these acts want us to believe that piracy is an evil thing. The younger generation of the world population believe otherwise: piracy is a necessary evil and revolutionary online publications like Wikileaks is crucial for world democracy. Most importantly, they no longer trust politicians who want to control information in order to control our lives and dictate our future.

Film Finance

Let’s take the issue of piracy of films. The main line of argument against piracy in Hollywood and elsewhere is: We need to recover the money we put into these films, else your favourite directors will not be able to make another film. Sorry, I don’t subscribe to this preposterous belief. Despite the threat of piracy, Hollywood is still putting more and more money into its films. It doesn’t make a business sense, does it? Three lines of arguments can be made against their assertion that piracy is bad for the film industry:

(a.) Most filmmakers I admire have been able to remain independent, making their best films outside the industry. Some have faced great humiliation and censorship. They turned to non-traditional sources of funding only after being deprived of support from the so-called industry.

(c.) Once a work of art reaches the public domain, the writer, producer or director—or auteur for that matter—can no longer control its consumption, distribution or interpretation.

(d.) We can’t go back to the old and unyielding models of film distribution. The world has changed. We can’t allow film authorities or distributors to control creative expression, because we cannot expect a flawed system, which is money-and-fame driven, to really care about serious, unsexy art of cinema. They don’t care about films, let’s face it. All they care about is power and self-interest. Case in point: Touch Of Evil (1958) was released as a B-movie in U.S. theatres. Several recent Indian films like Panch (2003), Khargosh (2009), Harud (2010) and Gandu (2010) have not been released in our theatres, and perhaps never will be in the case of the latter.

In Why Artists Are Poor?, an important book about the exceptional economics of the arts, Hans Abbing writes, “In the case of films, it is possible that in one hundred years Herzog may be better remembered and more honoured than Spielberg. But even then, it is unlikely that over that period of time, his movies would have earned more money than Spielberg’s… In [Pierre] Bourdieu’s view, Herzog’s work could in the long run, generate most symbolic returns, but not necessarily more monetary rewards.”

Hans Abbing presents the case of the fine arts where “giving to the arts often follows from conventions and is embedded in rituals. Because the arts are fostered by the power of conventions and rituals, they are not as vulnerable as they sometimes appear to be. Society gives to the art and art ‘takes’ from society… In the long run, artworks with much aesthetic value can earn artists high symbolic rewards as well as market income. Bourdieu observed that publishers of serious literature and dealers of avant-garde visual art are less interested in immediate returns than their ‘lower’-end colleagues are. They make long-term investments. And when, perhaps decades later, it turns out that they were instrumental in launching important artists, they and the artists many be rewarded with everlasting recognition, fame and money.”

It is about time that we understood the fundamental economics of film as an art form before settling whether we want to be a patron of the film culture or a producer on ‘an ego trip.’ It is still too early to say whether piracy is good or bad for the evolution of cinema. It was not until I had discarded my school textbooks and had completely stopped watching television that I turned to the Internet, which was slowly penetrating Kathmandu valley, and stumbled unto the works of Satyajit Ray and Ingmar Bergman. Glamour and nonsensical romances of Bollywood and Hollywood had left a wrong impression on my mind that cinema was not suited for serious expression. Films were anything but an art form to me until I discovered the works of master filmmakers—and I know the same is true for many people of my generation. These great works of art for various legal, political and industrial reasons were and still are beyond the reach of most people, since the whole resource of cinema has been shrouded and locked away by evil gatekeepers of our culture in the name of ‘entertainment’ and censorship.

In the case of the music industry, Mick Jagger told BBC that “we’ve gone through a period where everyone downloaded everything for nothing and we’ve gone into a grey period it’s much easier to pay for things—assuming you’ve got any money.” He was quite “relaxed” [sic] about it. “But, you know, it is a massive change and it does alter the fact that people don’t make as much money out of records. But I have a take on that—people only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn’t make any money out of records because record companies wouldn’t pay you! They didn’t pay anyone! Then, there was a small period from 1970 to 1997, where people did get paid, and they got paid very handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone. So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25-year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn’t.”

There is a need to revamp the existing economic model of arts so that the artist and the audience are the beneficiary, not the middlemen. And this brings me to the sad development at BBC Trust, which is facing severe cuts in spending. I grew up listening to BBC radio services—and later at some point in 2005 I started recording radio broadcast for my own reference. It was because I couldn’t find or had no access to these programmes online, mainly because of their schedule and my location. The economic model of BBC always made sense, given the remarkable role it has been playing in shaping the world culture—and now the rise of the Internet and piracy is leading to a scenario where we would be seeing more such enterprises: people (consumers) directly funding people (producers).

These days I’m listening to The Century Speaks after downloading the BBC series from a file-sharing website:

During 1998 and 1999, forty BBC local radio stations recorded personal oral histories from a broad cross-section of the population for the series The Century Speaks. Sixteen themes were conceived and developed to frame the whole project, including such topics as ‘where we live’, ‘getting older’ and ‘beliefs and fears’. From the outset, the project sought to focus on local, everyday experiences. Interviewees were encouraged to reflect on events and change at a community level rather than on the wider world stage. Although the primary objective was to record thoughts and attitudes rather than speech patterns, the English spoken has an extremely strong community and place-based resonance.

As I listen to this incredible oral history collection about the quality of life during the past 100 years, I am slowly beginning to understand what ‘change’ could truly mean. For the first time in my adult life, I can gauge the term ‘change,’ which now implies something more than just an idea.

Piracy means this newfound awareness to me. Piracy is synonymous with what culture stands for. Without piracy, I’d be lost and deprived of my basic right to information and education as an individual. Where and how would people get to films like Gandu if we censor the World Wide Web and ban the import of books like The Satanic Verses? What will happen to the culture of cinema? Forget about filmmaking, you need handsome capital to be able to see and collect these films as works of art for serious study.

I still remember my futile search for Guru Dutt’s Pyasa (1957) and Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959) for several months at video and film stores in Kathmandu in 2006. Back in those days, it was rare to find torrent trackers of Asian movies on the Internet. You hardly found download links for books on cinema either. These books were too expensive and more than often not available in the major public libraries in my country, which turned a blind eye to local films and preferred instead to broadcast mainstream Hindi movies from across the border every Saturday on the national television network—and particularly due to this the state of cinema in Nepal is pathetic.

The Promise of the Internet

Can we stop piracy? No. We cannot stop ‘piracy’ if what we mean by it is ‘stealing.’ But what we can do and should do is to allow more innovations and market reforms in order to see a new kind of conscience evolve worldwide. We know stealing is a bad thing because it’s not a socially acceptable behaviour. All of us grow up in a society where moral and ethical bombardment against it is a constant. We must understand that for such a broad agreement to evolve in case of piracy, the world has to be far better organized and open than it is today. After all we live a society where Robin Hood and Chulbul Pandey are still celebrated.

There is also no alternative to piracy, especially in the third world countries. For instance, if it weren’t for pirated copies of Windows OS, I don’t think India or China could have become technological powerhouses. More than 90% of the current manpower in the third world countries has learnt the basics of computer on pirated softwares. These people can’t afford expensive education, entertainment or original products and the situation in the so-called developed countries isn’t very different. By trying to curtail piracy, censor the Internet and limit our choices on the cyberspace, Hollywood and those who make profit from corrupt establishments are now trying to prevent the people from thinking and raising serious questions about anything that could diminish their power and influence.

The world has changed so much in the last decade. You can no longer isolate an event. What happens in China affect the United States and what happens in the United States affect the rest of the world. The world is moving towards a larger democracy—at least on the Internet. Today we have the power to choose what we want to watch, read or listen to, and we have to take this power seriously because it has made us rich and powerful. The world politicians and advertisers have become very savvy at manipulating people who are led to believe that they can trust ‘their’ politicians based on these fabricated news and advertisements. Politicians throughout the world seem united in their conviction that there is a need to control the people. So it’s important for us to unite to redefine and reinforce the meaning of world citizenship and our role in this new context. We have to understand the tools employed by these politicians and advertisers to mobilize and manipulate people, so that we know what’s happening to us and people around us, and how to defend against it, if need be.

David Foster Wallace saw the commercialization of human emotions as a great bane of our modern times and asked people to be more responsible for our actions. He was talking in the context of America, but the same applies to citizens worldwide. “American cultural and economic systems that work very well in terms of selling people products and keeping the economy thriving, but do not work as well when it comes to educating children or helping each other know how to live and to be happy,” he said in 2003.

“[The] paradox, I think, of what it is to be a halfway intelligent American right now, and probably also a western European, is that there are things we know that are right, and good, and probably would be better for us to do, but constantly it’s so much funnier and nicer to go and do something else. ‘Who cares? And it’s all bullshit anyway.’ One of the things this causes is tension and unhappiness in people… Emotionally, spiritually, in terms of citizenship, in terms of feeling like a meaningful part even of this country—forget the world—I’m sure the U.S. government’s sort of arrogance and disdain for the rest of the world is unpleasant. But, it’s also a natural extension of certain cultural messages we send ourselves about ourselves that work very well in some ways and that make us very rich and very powerful.”

If you take away the freedom from the Internet, what would you replace it with? Where would you document the opposing voices of concerned citizens? Universities? Libraries? You know these are institutions just like any other, and have the power to screen individuals for financial, legal, political or regulatory reasons. There is also geographical constraint, of course. If search engines like Google is censored and Youtube dismantled, anyone who raises serious questions about the state of the United States, or any other country, are bound to remain in oblivion. There will be no platform on which to express dissent if blogs are to be censored. And those who control this flow of ideas and information aided by modern technology will freely wage wars in the world in the name of protecting us from terrorism and what not, and yet emerge not as mass murderers but as the champions of equality and freedom. Is the new generation of American citizens well aware of the perils of the inherent contradictions and complications of their nation? How many of us do truly understand the significance of Harold Pinter, who felt morally impelled to turn his Nobel speech into a political protest?

In 1971, one English dreamer wrote these famous lines:

Imagine there’s no countries/ It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for/ And no religion too
Imagine all the people/ Living life in peace

You may say I’m a dreamer/ But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us/ And the world will be as one

For three decades following the assassination of John Lennon, we were led to believe that his vision of the world was too good to be true. His ‘anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional, anti-capitalistic’ world was unattainable or so we thought, but we were wrong. For the first time in the world’s history, a vast majority of the world population is united in their worldview irrespective of their social or geographical conditions. We must not let the politicians and powerful institutions keep us separated in the name of language, culture or security and protection. We must rise against what Welles called ‘officialdom’, if we truly want to live a life of dignity and exercise our basic right to freedom.

The absurdity of the current situation would not have been lost on the two American minds, Orson Welles and David Foster Wallace: while the politicians take away our freedom by criminalizing almost everything in the name of protecting us from terrorism and violence, we the people have done so little to almost nothing to defend our privacy and the right to freedom. It’s time we told them through every means within our reach, through our ballots and our blogs: let the Internet be what it is. Let it innovate, self-regulate and evolve without any interference.

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.” — David Foster Wallace, 2005

America, when will you start listening?

I’m addressing you.

Postscript:
An edited version of this journal was published on openDemocracy on February 21, 2012.
See Allen Ginsberg’s address to America here on Poetry Archive.

Also published on mFC on Jan 6, 2012

The last day of December demands introspection, and I sense a now all-too-familiar pressure to choose the right words for this end note. The year on the calendar upsets my plans. These plans have now become ‘old plans’; plans that stopped my time a long ago. And to watch Frank Capra now means to freeze this time even further.

Capra’s world is the one of hope—often, the oldest hopes of man. There’s a childlike simplicity that characterizes these men. His women are strong-willed and independent. In this world the greatest villain is self-centeredness. Honesty and kindness come across as something worth striving for, and because you want to believe so. ‘Be nice.’ ‘Be good.’ That seems to be at the heart of his best-known films: It Happened One Night (1934), Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Lost Horizon (1937), Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and Meet John Doe (1941), among others.

Screenwriter Robert Riskin with director Frank Capra

It’s a shocking discovery then: the voice in these films doesn’t belong to its director Frank Capra. This voice that we admire so much belongs to the writer of his films who could sympathize with the underdogs, who sailed the boats for Columbus but never got their due share of credit or recognition. Sadly, his partnership with the writer of his best films, Robert Riskin, can be described as the relationship that D.B. Norton had with John Doe in Meet John Doe.

Even the choice of the title of Frank Capra’s autobiography, The Name Above The Title, clearly propels his reckless attitude. The star director refused to visit the lowly writer who was slowly dying in a hospital. Throughout his life, Capra attempted to shroud the genius of the great scenarist. The truth is that Capra eschewed the funeral of a man whose creative vision and distinct voice was widely mistaken to be Capra’s own. Nothing could be more ironical for the man who reaffirms the Christian doctrine of forgiveness in his works.

Robert Riskin seems to have no problem with accepting the true nature of the director-writer relationship in the studio era. Riskin helped to set up the Screen Writers’ Guild and fought as a screenwriter for the screenwriters, and the fight still continues. Riskin needed Capra as much as Capra needed him, or any writer needs a director unless they are both one. The collaboration, between the man with an idea and the man with the means to sustain it, couldn’t be less lopsided:

                        JOHN DOE

Do you mean to tell me you’d try to kill the John Doe movement
if you can’t use it to get what you want?

                      D.B. NORTON

You bet your bottom dollar we would!

Such a reading of Meet John Doe’s text then adds an autobiographical quality, on Riskin’s part, to this last collaboration. And it seems Meet John Doe is nothing short of a triumph of Riskin the individual over Capra the institution. Yet it cannot be denied that the brief marriage between Riskin’s idealism and Capra’s pragmatism was responsible for the birth of some of the finest classics in Hollywood.

In the beginning of the last year or was it the year before that, I left the oblivion of a film that I had co-written to return to the oblivion of advertising. The oblivion grows on you, no matter whether you’re a director-in-the-making or a director who’s made many films.  Capra did his best films with Riskin, and Riskin did his with Capra. On the first viewing, a Capra film is a dialog film—hence a Riskin film. It’s all drama, and then when you keep playing back your favorite scenes over and again, you begin to notice the mise-en-scène. Capra clearly knew how to translate the text on to the silver screen, and all so well. Only if he were less ‘mean.’

 ***

Postscript from In Capra’s Shadow: The Life and Career of Screenwriter Robert Riskin by Ion Scott:

Jo Swerling, a mutual friend and colleague of Riskin and Capra, and himself a wonderful Hollywood screenwriter, once paced around Riskin’s wheelchair while he was ill, complaining that Capra’s reluctance to visit his old friend was just not right. In the end, however, Riskin lost his temper with Swerling and revealed a deep-seated loyalty to his former partner by dismissing what seemed to be a reasonable claim with the comment, “You’re talking about my best friend.”

Co.Exist editor, Morgan Clendaniel, writes that companies that aren’t making a difference—to the world and to consumers—aren’t going to be around much longer. Instead of just making your product incrementally better than the competitor, you need to create impact.

Also read Three keys for moving beyond branding, and into storytelling.

The truth about social advertising & how to get more for your spending
It pains me to see how a great idea is being crushed under the weight of unsympathetic brand managers. It is sad when you’ve to cook up feel-good stories when the original idea—if executed right— could produce real, outstanding results.

Key to Social Advertising

Social advertising isn’t for people looking for short-term goals. If the primary focus of your social advertising campaign is your brand, but not the social cause which you pretend to espouse, you shouldn’t expect your advertising money to produce the kind of results that you want. A brand can’t leverage from the social advertising if it fails to bring out the merits of the original idea—which is often the case with brands that solely focus on chasing that magic number.

Social advertising is worth your advertising money if your goal is to build long-term relationships with the people who buy your products. The truth is that social advertisingisn’t advertising per se. We should think of social advertising as philanthropy, and then make our campaign strategies accordingly. We shouldn’t be afraid to project the people who buy our product as the heroes of our social advertising campaign. If they aren’t the real heroes of your campaign, it’s unlikely that your brand would emerge as the winner.