Randomocracy

Could it be true that out of 280 million people, George W. Bush and John Kerry are the best we can do? Most people seem to be motivated by hatred of Bush or Kerry, than because their own candidate truly inspires them. U.S. citizens used to snicker at Soviet era Communist "elections" in which only communists were allowed on the ballot. Yet if it's bad for a single party to monopolize power, is a duopoly much better? No third party has won control of any major political institution since the Republicans displaced the Whigs in the 1870's.

I think that part of the problem is the size of the country. No one without access to tens of millions of dollars can afford to run for president these days. As a result, candidates must be wealthy and/or skilled at soliciting wealth from special interests, if they hope to be elected.

To improve the selection of the president, I'd like to suggest the following method of selecting a candidate:


* Establish an independent institution (call it the "Election Commission" or EC for short) whose job it would be to administer elections.
* If a citizen wanted to run for president, they would submit their name to the EC.
* The EC would then randomly select a representative sample of the national population to each candidate. Each candidate would get a different sample.
* Each presidential candidate would then be required to get at least say, 75% approval from their sample. The candidates would be required to pay for the costs of creating the sample, and for communicating with the citizens in their sample.
* The EC would then select the president at random from the pool of candidates who had received at least 75% approval from their sample.

Such a selection process could potentially:

* increase the ability of candidates with new ideas to reach an audience
* increase resistance to special interests
* increase the likelihood that we will elect a candidate who has broad popular support
* dramatically reduce the cost of electing a president

Obviously, this idea would need to be fleshed out a lot more -- I record it here mostly so I don't forget it.

Live from the LIving Room

Live From the Living Room
by Joyce Slaton

Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,33978,00.html

03:00 AM Feb. 02, 2000 PT

The house is packed: 50 people. In their midst a musician plays, the music permeating the small space without amplifiers or microphones.

The audience listens appreciatively, intent only on the music and the artist who's playing just a few arm-lengths away.

Is this a scene from a Merchant-Ivory film? No, it's a house concert, an old-fashioned tradition imbued with new life thanks to the Web.

Music lovers of the past cherished intimate listening experiences, inviting visiting artists to play in their drawing rooms or ballrooms. The tradition was continued somewhat in the folk music scene, with artists playing at home-grown festivals, coffeehouses, and sometimes even the living rooms of their fans.

But higher-tech forms of entertainment superseded old-fashioned mini-concerts. At-home gatherings gave way to performances in smoky, anonymous clubs where the clientele was often more interested in drinking or socializing than hearing the music. But if Houseconcerts.com has anything to say about it, these types of impersonal shows will soon be merely a memory.

( Read more... )

Microcinema

Via microcinema:

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National Public Radio - Morning Edition - May 3, 2000

http://www.npr.org/ramfiles/me/20000503.me.11.rmm


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http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.10/microcinema_pr.html

Issue 7.10 - Oct 1999



MyHollywood!

So you wanna be in pictures? Pick up your tools and shoot.

By Rob Kenner

Until recently, filmmakers hoping to find a large audience were caught in a vicious circle: You can't make a movie without shelling out serious money for crew, gear, and film. Raising the cash requires signing away rights, schmoozing investors, or plunging into debt, all of which encourages artistic compromise or, at best, diverts attention from the creative task at hand. Now, suddenly, the cinematic landscape is changing. At the top of the heap, Hollywood moguls are finding themselves playing catch-up to digital billionaires in the power game; even the most entrenched among the studio elite have come to realize that "the future is the Internet," as one insider recently put. it. At the bottom of the heap, the change is equally radical. Microcinema, a new way of creating, distributing, and screening movies, is causing a major seismic rumble. Technical advances are driving this transformation in a way that is making movie production more accessible, personal, and spontaneous than ever before.

Film is the youngest art form, the one most reliant on technology. Arguably, inventions have shaped cinematic history just as much as directors, writers, and stars have. But every step of the way, each breakthrough - whether it was synchronized sound, color film, or motion-control effects - made onscreen magic more expensive. This time, it's different. Microcinema feeds on the widespread availability of affordable, portable image-capturing devices - but the technology is lowering cinema's entry fee, not raising it. In particular, prices of digital video cameras and desktop editing suites have plummeted in the last couple of years, demystifying and democratizing the world of moviemaking. What has been a costly and elaborate collaborative process is quickly becoming a one-person show.

Digital video is a big part of the microcinema boom. Do the math: To make a 20-minute celluloid short, you need a dozen 400-foot reels of 16-mm film at $150 each. Throw in processing fees of $22 per reel, spend a week in an editing office at $200 per hour, add another day in a sound lab, order a final print - and you're looking at a budget of more than $40,000 before you pay your cast and crew.

If you shoot the same picture on DV, 10 bucks buys you a single two-hour cassette that you can use over and over again. The camera - a Sony VX1000, say, or the popular Canon XL1 - costs about $4,000, comparable to the price of a professional film camera. There are no processing fees, and you edit at home on your G3 using a $700 software package like Adobe Premiere. So, for around $10,000 you can make as many movies as you want.

The term microcinema was coined in 1991 by San Francisco's Total Mobile Home Microcinema, where all the films are "underground" because they're shown in the basement. The founders say they envisioned an alternative movement, a sort of cinematic microbrewery, and the word has come to describe an intimate, low-budget style of movie shot on relatively cheap formats like Hi-8 video, DV, and (less often) older do-it-yourself stock like 16-mm film. It's a flexible term that can cover anything - animated shorts, bizarrely impressionistic video manipulations, hard-hitting documentaries, and garage-born feature-length movies. A classic microcinema offering is a film that probably would not exist if new technology hadn't allowed its creators to cut costs or inspired them to try something different. A good example is Silence, a short by Brent Sims and John A. Taylor that was featured at the Cannes Film Festival last year. Shot with a Nintendo Game Boy camera, the film is about a pianist dealing with the death of a loved one, cost $100, and looks raw but effective, oddly recalling the silent-film era.

( Read more... )