Here’s an article I wrote for Falkvinge on Infopolicy, the third in a three-part series on how the theoretically reasonable and rational “profit motive” is actually broken and damaging to society. But we can fix it.
A banker offers you a loan so that you can buy a house located near your cushy new job. You sign, comfortable that your salary will allow you to afford the payments. Months later, your employer downsizes, and your job disappears. With no job, you can’t pay back your loan. But the banker’s not upset — in fact, he was hoping for this. As you miss payments, your interest rate goes up. You need a new job to pay your increasing debt, and conveniently enough, the banker is the only one in town hiring. This is the crux of the issue with the profit motive: those who profit can put harmful pressure on others.
At its core, profit is power. Whether it takes the form of having many coins, being owed many debts, or something else entirely, profit is a measure of one’s ability to get other people to do things. By giving a merchant money, I can get her to give me her product. By reminding my friend of all the favors I’ve done for him, I can get him to do me a very large one. I gain these abilities through profit.
As I’ve tried to drive home, this is a perfectly reasonable thing to desire, and a perfectly natural thing by which to be motivated. But today, sometimes profit enables us to make people do things that they don’t want to do. Is this a necessary evil, or just another fixable bug?
Here’s an article I wrote for Falkvinge on Infopolicy, the second in a three-part series on how the theoretically reasonable and rational “profit motive” is actually broken and damaging to society. But we can fix it.
A salesman sells you a tube of toothpaste, claiming it will make your teeth whiter than they’ve ever been in just a week of use. It’s a bold claim, but he wins you over — for twice what you’d normally pay for toothpaste. A week later, your teeth are still yellow, and you’re tremendously ill. Not only was the toothpaste nothing special, but it was also contaminated with a nasty bacteria; apparently, it was cheaper not to sanitize the toothpaste factory equipment. Now your friends certainly won’t buy any of this not-so-miracle toothpaste, but the damage is done. You’re vomiting, and the salesman’s got your money. Herein lies the problem with the profit motive: bad behavior is profitable.
[...]
Fortunately, it isn’t insurmountable. It’s a bug in the system, and bugs can be fixed. To fix a bug, you often have to dig deep to find the root of the problem, deconstructing it — and the system it exists within — to its bare essentials.
Here’s a new article I wrote for Falkvinge on Infopolicy, the first in a three-part series on how the theoretically reasonable and rational “profit motive” is actually broken and damaging to society. But we can fix it.
A man in a big house on a hill asks you to tend his garden. In return, he’ll give you a great deal of shiny gold coins. It’s not like he’d miss them, because he has more shiny gold coins than anyone you know. But you don’t want to lift a finger for this man; everyone knows that he got all his shiny gold coins from lying, cheating, and stealing. Unfortunately, you’re starving and your rent is due — the only way to pay for food and shelter is with shiny gold coins, and Big Evil House Man is the only one with any to spare. This is another problem with the profit motive.
Longtime readers of this blog may remember (but probably not) that I’m working on something or other called Your Face is a Saxophone. It was coming out in February of this year, until it was coming out in April. Needless to say, neither of those things happened.
First, let me explain what the hell Your Face is a Saxophone actually is: it’s an animated comedy series about people working at an advertising agency. All of these people have inanimate objects instead of heads.
The title does not, however, come from the fact that people might have saxophones for heads. Here’s the character Blake O’Malley explaining it:
“Your Face is a Saxophone” is a statement that may not be true, and may not make sense, but it would definitely get your attention if plastered on a billboard. Thus, it is a metaphor for all of advertising.
Anyway, my plan was to release a pilot episode at the beginning of the year, and raise funds on Kickstarter for the rest of the season. The funds would be used to buy a computer that didn’t choke on this really, really simple animation, microphones that didn’t suck, register as an LLC or corporation or whatever, and other things. There are several reasons why this has not yet happened:
The cast and I recorded all the voice acting over the last weekend of January. After having animated the four-minute Goliath over the course of three days, I figured that I could animate a full 30-minute episode in a few weeks. However, I’d forgotten just how low-complexity Goliath actually was, as well as the fact that it took me about a week to recover from the sleep deprivation I’d inflicted upon myself to finish in three days.
In addition, it turned out that I actually did need some money. I bounced around between a bunch of jobs, which took up a great deal of my time. In hindsight, I would have been perfectly capable of working on Your Face is a Saxophone during my free time, but for the most part, I didn’t. Working for The Man burned me out, and I wanted nothing more than to be lazy. So I was.
It is now November. I am spectacularly displeased with myself, as I have not been able to get this one damn episode done for the entire year. So I declare now, to the entire Internet, for reals this time:
Animation for the pilot episode of Your Face is a Saxophone will be completed before the end of 2010.
There are a few methods I’m using to ensure this:
I’m bringing David Lanz, who voices Blake, on as an environment artist. Evidently, Apple Motion has no idea how to handle both a 2.5D environment and moving characters at the same time without overloading a computer. I don’t think it even knows what a GPU is. In addition to distributing the labor, Dave’s skills with Cinema 4D (an actual 3D program) will cut out a tremendous amount of time lost to crashing, freezing, and exploding.
Dave’s duties will also include becoming officially Very Disappointed In Me if I don’t achieve a minimum level of productivity on a given day.
I’m going to write a blog post every day about progress, so that the entire Internet can also become Very Disappointed In Me if I’m lazy.
No more taking odd jobs. For all intents and purposes, I am officially employed full-time at Plankhead. Speaking of which, I probably shouldn’t be writing any more blog posts at 3 in the morning.
