Bypassing gatekeepers has been a dream ever since there were gates. In the late 18th century, William Blake devised a technology to bypass the gatekeepers and make his visions directly available to a universal public. He believed this technology could be used by all poets and artists to achieve the same goal. The technology still required a high degree of skill and none but Blake ever mastered it.
Real-time social media platforms have made publication to a universal public simple. The skills required are minimal. The trap hidden in these platforms is that there’s a corporation that owns the pencil and paper with which you write. And more crucially, determines the visibility of your publication within the real-time stream. The gatekeeper has not been bypassed.
I wonder if William Blake ever imagined the result of universal access to a publication machine with distribution to a potentially universal public?
In his introduction to the volume “William Blake: The Complete Illuminated Books”, David Bindman discusses the inherent potential of the printing process that Blake invented.
“William Blakes’s ‘Illuminated’ books, as we called them, were a challenge to the way books had been made since the invention of movable type in the fifteenth century, and continued to be made until recently. …once the plate was completed it could, in theory at least, like a woodcut be used for a limitless number of impressions. For this reason Blake was able to persuade himself that his method could empower and liberate all writers, enabling them to express themselves freely to a universal audience without leave from worldly authority. …His new method offered the hope that poets and artists would finally have the means to drown out the ubiquitous message of Satan, carried by religious and state ritual and the printing press.”
WILLIAM BLAKE’S PROSPECTUS TO THE PUBLIC
October 10, 1793.
The Labours of the Artist, the Poet, the Musician, have been proverbially attended by poverty and obscurity; this was never the fault of the Public, but was owing to a neglect of means to propagate such works as have wholly absorbed the Man of Genius. Even Milton and Shakespeare could not publish their own works.
This difficulty has been obviated by the Author of the following productions now presented to the Public; who has invented a method of Printing both Letter-press and Engraving in a style more ornamental, uniform, and grand, than any before discovered, while it produces works at less than one fourth of the expense.
If a method of Printing which combines the Painter and the Poet is a phenomenon worthy of public attention, provided that it exceeds in elegance all former methods, the Author is sure of his reward.
One of the great difficulties of the first reign of terror was the degree to which it consumed all thought. For the duration of this next era of terror, my goal is to remain unconsumed.
Yesterday, I listened to three full operas: Mozart’s “Don Giovanni”, Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly”, and Wagner’s “Die Walkure”. I was not tempted to switch on cable news or check the algorithmic real-time feed to see “what was going on.”
Instead, I employed this simple trick. I tuned in to Met Opera Radio and didn’t turn it off or switch away from it. I let it play.
This worked remarkably well in establishing an unconsumed world within the confines of my house.
The perfect composition for the real-time virtual space in which distance creates slight delays of an unknowable degree. The canvas for the work is real-time and yet slightly displaced at each endpoint of the network. Like real life, except moreso.
“In C”
by Terry Riley
Instruction for beginners
1 Any number of people can play this piece on any instrument or instruments (including voice).
2 The piece consists of 53 melodic patterns to be repeated any amount of times. You can choose to start a new pattern at any point. The choice is up to the individual performer! We suggest beginners are very familiar with patterns 1-12.
3 Performers move through the melodic patterns in order and cannot go back to an earlier pattern. Players should try to stay within 2-3 patterns of each other.
4 If any pattern is too technically difficult, feel free to move to the next one.
5 The eighth note pulse is constant. Always listen for this pulse. The pulse for our experience will be piano and Orff instruments being played on the stage.
6 The piece works best when all the players are listening very carefully. Sometimes it is better to just listen and not play. It is important to fit into the group sound and understand how what you decide to play affects everybody around you. If you play softly, other players might follow you and play soft. If you play loud, you might influence other players to play loud.
7 The piece ends when the group decides it ends. When you reach the final pattern, repeat it until the entire group arrives on this figure. Once everyone has arrived, let the music slowly die away.
San Francisco State University School of Music presents “In C” by Terry Riley
I stumbled across some near-term plans for the Amazon Corporation. It’s funny to think that they started as an online bookstore. Now it’s hard to say exactly what they are. They’ve purchased other companies, branched off into space exploration and are even pioneering delivery by drone.
I think everyone will agree that the new set of services they’re working on will move online commerce to a whole new level. The last mile problem has been there since the beginning. An order can be placed at the speed of light and the large national distribution networks get the goods quite close to where the customer lives very quickly. But getting packages from a local distribution warehouse to a specific residence ends up being the most expensive part of the distribution process.
Even if the packages arrive on schedule and are placed on the doorstep, they are often stolen by criminals cruising neighborhoods. These crooks trail delivery vans and pick off packages that look like they might have resale value on the black market. Customers are always complaining about stolen packages.
This is why Amazon bought Ring, the home security company. Ring puts video cameras on your front door and around your property. If a thief approaches, intending to steal a package, the video cameras capture an image of the person’s face. Recently Ring customers within particular neighborhoods have started sharing these photos. “Watch out for this guy, he’s stealing packages.” Often the photos are also shared with the local police.
Here’s where Amazon can really add value through its network of companies and infrastructure services. Imagine a future with even faster delivery and free of package thieves. By combining drone delivery and Ring’s home surveillance technology, you’ll never lose another package.
Here’s a typical scenario. The customer places an order. The item is picked and packed, and moved into the distribution chain. The package arrives at a local distribution center and is assigned to a drone for home delivery. The drone races to your house and places the package on the designated receiving location. What this? A thief sees the delivery, waits until the drone is out of sight, then moves in to steal the package. Here’s where Ring’s network-connected cameras kick in. The cameras are watching the receiving area—having been notified by the drone that a delivery was imminent. The images of the thief are sent to the Amazon Cloud for processing. The photo of the thief is compared to the family of consumers occupying the house. If there’s no match, the algorithm goes through the extended family, work colleagues and friends. It looks through address books and photo albums to see if there’s any possible match. Given what’s coming next, Amazon doesn’t want to make a mistake.
It looks like there’s no match. This person is stealing your package. The image is now compared to outstanding arrest warrants and neighborhood watch photos. Based on several year’s worth of video footage, the algorithm produces a list of people who have no regular pattern of activity in your neighborhood to determine if this person has been casing the neighborhood. All the while, Amazon’s facial recognition systems are attempting to identify the individual. As a courtesy, Amazon shares the information with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) to determine whether enforcement action should be coordinated.
At the same time, Amazon’s drones working in the area are alerted to the theft and they begin to gather into a swarm. The swarm tracks the thief as he tries to make his escape. Since Ring cameras are installed in almost every home in the neighborhood, it’s straightforward to track his route. The thief’s location is transmitted to the drone swarm and the cameras on the drones make an identification and lock in and begin tracking the thief. Amazon echo nodes in neighborhood homes notify residents via Alexa to shelter in place while the action is executed.
We’re Watching.
Ideally, the drone swarm will want to take action before the thief enters a vehicle. Even if full identification hasn’t been completed, the drone swarm will move in to herd the thief toward a designated location that has been communicated to local police. Since the police can’t always immediately respond to this kind of incident, the drone swarm is equipped to keep the “suspect” in the designated location for up to 12 hours.
If the thief has abandoned the package, and it appears undamaged, a drone will break off from the swarm and re-deliver it to your home. Damaged packages are taken by drone back to the local distribution warehouse and a request for a replacement item is automatically generated.
Once the police arrive on the scene, all video and audio evidence, along with any background profile data, is transmitted. Generally this results in an open-and-shut case when delivered to the District Attorney’s office. A permanent record is created in Amazon’s central data warehouse to make sure once this person has served their time in prison they receive heightened surveillance on release and for the rest of their lives.
Recidivism is the tendency of a convicted criminal to reoffend. Using the vast resources of the Amazon family of companies, we can often deter a person from reoffending by foregrounding the surveillance apparatus at a key moment prior to a criminal act. Sometimes all it takes is a reminder that someone is watching, and that any criminal act will be swiftly and surely punished.
That’s the future, but here’s some things Amazon is working on today…
