Taylor VO: Microsoft Office and XBOX Game Trailer

 

Science Day. Fiction Night.

clues are sometimes hidden in plain sight...ha

A mistaken idea is that beauty and truth are somehow identical, and that if you find beauty you’ve found truth.

James Baldwin said, “When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know.”

And that’s just it, the whole language of writing for me is finding out what I didn’t know before, possibly didn’t want to know, but through research and interviews, find out because something is there urging, forcing you to reveal something many had turned a blind eye to.

I have the fortune of running a technology/media company that is obsessed with its community, its partners…not users, not people who take away, but give, add, and create in the most fascinating of ways. They’re our partners on our platforms because they share in the profits. The money we earn, we share with the community, because that’s the way it should be. We are very focused on consumer sovereignty.

I started Ranked Media because it’s become nearly impossible to source good data. When I myself who is as vastly different as my neighbor, are clumped together because of our location, and this is just one example, that type of “statistical collection” of data is bizarre in 2019 and beyond. There are multiple categories of people, as we have known for centuries, but still, certain brown people have to check “Caucasian” when identifying themselves for statistical reasons, which is nonsensical. When it comes to data, there is too much. It’s inaccurate, out of context, incomplete, and usually draws specific behavior from steadfast and noisy sources like social media, or contrived, dishonest feedback from surveys and questionnaires.

What we’re seeing is that the over gathering of data allows market research teams to fall victim to statistics’ number on rule: garbage in, garbage out.

We want to put the democratization of data in the community’s hands by allowing everyone to rank and find the products, brands and content, that matter to them, using

video & the diversity of crowd-sourced rankings. Find, watch and purchase what you want, quickly and easily.

On the other hand, as a writer, I create bombastic thoughts like “The sunlight drifted into the room with the peacefulness one recalls from early childhood—a sunlight that as an adult is usually encountered only in dreams.”

This duality between art and technology, has actually served me well, because although empathy may not be a mandate to being great in tech, what is needed is the ability to be absolutely, unforgivingly passionate about a commodity and then figuring out how to put this passion into the hands of global citizens.

The way I start a lot of my writing, especially when I'm writing something original, is by reading everything I can about a particular subject. While I was working on Me2  I read everything I could get my hands on about cloning. For Soldiers of Fortune, I met with several highly-ranked former soldiers who dealt drugs using the access their ranks provided.

When it comes to experiences, I’ve had a few. I applied for the Coast Guard after 9/11. I took the ASVAB test and sat next to two young Hispanic 18-year-old men from the hood, who admitted that the best option for them to get out of the ghetto they grew up in, was to go into the army. “Afghanistan or Iraq is better than where we grew up.” They signed up for infantry, so they would be the first to enter hostile territory. The reason I didn’t sign up, was about a month into the process, a senior recruiter I’d like to document and write about what’s happening and although he thought it a great idea, he also assured me I’d probably end up in Iraq with a weapon in one hand and a pen/paper in the other.  We were at war and that was the reality. I had other options and chose not to enlist.

The second was creating a production company at 22, and putting on dance festivals – underground rave at the time - every weekend for over a year. I was also intensely training for the NFL and trying out for pro teams every other weekend. Staying out all night, doing some form of dancing and imbibing every once in a while, then showing up to run drills, run the 40 and do what I could to impress the coaches, was fun, and I was in my early 20’s so it worked.  I was with the Redskins for about a week, but did not make any cuts. That was a great George Plimpton experience I had.

The third was meeting Ronald and Nancy Reagan when I was 10. Nice lady, rather large head.

The fourth was going on a game show and winning $210K.

The fifth was winning a car on the internet.

The sixth was sitting on a 5-hour flight immediately behind Muhammad Ali, as he asked me the craziest questions and told me multiple stories about his life and detailed excerpts from the Quran. From a distance, he was a man deeply affected by Parkinson’s. Up close, he told several stories, with comedy, timing and wit that left me buzzing and gave me a glimpse of what the world experienced during the decades that Ali ruled the world.

What drew me to tech was the reality of creating worlds that I saw growing up watching  sci-fi films and TV shows like Star Wars, Terminator, Quantum Leap, V, Transformers, and reading comic books.  The difference between a writer and a tech founder is not  much in artistry, but where a writer is recording and retelling history, the tech founder is creating it.  

I am as equally informed and influenced by Eugene O’Neill and James Baldwin, as I am by films like Predator, The Breakfast Club, and the X-Men and its verisimilitude to the Civil Rights era.  I was a child in a time where the social activism and intense push for ethnic awareness and identity was slowly lulled to sleep by a “greed is good” mentality.  Capitalism and Reaganomics became the prevailing theme, and generationally speaking, as a youth, we never thought about the extinction of all human life and possibly all life on Earth, until recently.  Climate change gives human beings an expiration date, as generations ahead of us had very serious issues and threats, but their exposure was limited to racial genocide, nuclear weapons, violent regimes, and manmade threats. Today, we live in a society where man has pissed off and ruined mother nature so violently that she‘ll eventually end our occupation here.  Our instant access to violence and the knowledge of these events here and around the world, informs our personalities and thoughts every day. There is a lot to contend with outside of just wanting to be happy and healthy. 

My dichotomous existence started in college, as a theatre/film major and football player. Living two distinct lives: one surrounded by arts, painting, acting, writing and emotional expression, the other: a true Neanderthal approach of you insult me, I’m gonna fuckin insult you back, ya heard.  To be in touch with both preternatural extremes gave me access to emotions, feelings, and my expressive self that humans are rarely in touch with.  Every day, I was pulled to the extreme.  On the field, I was in touch with the cunning, cave man, violent, masculine and action/reaction athlete, while hours later, I was filled with empathy, artistic expression, subconscious through conscious, meditative, deep thoughts of the human condition-affected-artist that actually exists in us all.  This Dr. Jeckyl and Mr Hyde existence has informed my technology platform’s approach to a sharing economy.

I can attribute this extreme existence to helping me attack every situation like a rabid animal. I intend in every situation, where there’s a potential positive outcome, to seek the end of the line, and go to the farthest depth of analysis and investogation imaginable within the realm of probability, so I can see all sides of the coin.

The best thing about my first two jobs out of college, was working with Jerry Seinfeld and Donald Bellisario, both of whom sought the truth. Seinfeld’s observational humor and Bellisario, a Marine, fictionalized the stories we saw in the headlines. Both did their jobs better than most.

Again, a mistaken idea that beauty and truth are somehow identical, and that if you find beauty you’ve found truth.  The thought that beautiful storytelling can’t be true is a mistake, but most certainly, if it’s beautiful, the truth is usually very far away. Beautiful tv shows, reality shows, crap. I like to get to the core, warts and all. I like to unravel and go deep until there’s nothing more.  The opposite actually exists in tech, as platforms need to be flawlessly designed, zen like, minimal, yet effortless and effective. This is what I learned after Hampton while studying computer science at Harvard. Writing down just the logic in a line of code is an excellent exercise in learning how write minimally.  

A popular writer once said, the world is never simply one thing. The most important point in every epistemological breakthrough that the human race has made is always, to some degree or another, centered around this discovery, that you can’t read the world fundamentally. That you simply become a fool if you do this, that the world produces meaning and the meanings are always internally contradictory and dialectical and paradoxical, and that is simply, as Wallace Stevens says, “the honey of earth both comes and goes at once. And there’s no escaping that condition.”

I believe that political action can change the world, and I believe that activism can change the world. But I don’t think art, action and tech are the same thing. I think that they’re fairly distinct forms of activity.

What’s great about the arts, is that artists can see life and the world the way we saw it as a child. The very sun that shines in our eyes, shines into the eyes, heart and soul of a child. The sun hasn’t changed, we have…unless you can see the world through an artist’s eyes. Storytelling lets you peel back the layers of adulthood, go inside of your mental fort and imagine the best that our creative thinking can conjure up.. Look at nature as a backdrop that fits a comic or dramatic piece.  In the arts is perpetual youth.

In the wake of IBM’s AI losing to Harish Natarajan in a debate, Einstein’s quote, “One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man,” makes more sense as machines are good at pattern matching, but the human brain’s ability to learn unlimited patterns keeps the brain ahead of AI…for now.  This is what is so stimulating and electrifying about technology, the direct correlation to our imagination, which can be more compelling and capable than our knowledge, talents or facts.  We use imagination everytime we leave the Earth’s atmosphere, explore the depths of the ocean, which I’ll dive into in my next essay, how the last unexplored frontier, one that is so complex and vast, that we have only touched the surface on understanding it, yet we are connected it, because we cannot exist without it, and that is the brain. The next 10 years in technology are going to change the way we interact, the way we approach business, banking and politics, the way we interact with each other, and if it’s not done with an artist’s empathy, we could head down a very dark path.

  

Technology has developed in such a way, that as it becomes more prevalent, the less we actually have to deal with the world.  The opposite happens when it comes to art and the responsibilities of the artist and viewer, Shakespeare says: the relationship of the unconscious to the dreamer, the deal that’s being made—that you can, if you choose, forget everything that you’ve seen – tough to do - or remember it years later, or interpret it in any way you want, or confront it in all of its realness and unrealness, but you have a freedom to understand or misunderstand or forget what you’ve been shown, and that freedom is a part of the power of the work. It requires your participation. It’s not just advising you. It requires your active participation in the business of understanding it, and that energy becomes part of its meaning.

Contrary to popular belief, a Liberal arts education is important. I did my undergraduate studies at Hampton University. Learning how to write a play or learning how to act or learning to sing or paint gives you an introduction to human nature and empathy. Empathy is one of the most important things we have. To be able to look at a situation and do your best to feel how the other person feels and what they’re going through.

As we become a society who is more inclined to view and love live events, non-fiction storytelling is becoming more popular. I am obsessed with this in kind of an irritating and ugly way with Harpers Ferry: The John Brown Story, and the whole question of whether historical fiction has to be exactly adherent to historical fact. In 1859, just as in 2019, we’re dealing with heterogeneous and infinitely vast thoughts about how the country should be run.  People try to either simplify and be glib about what should be done, or go to the extreme and believe the entire political system as it is, should be done away. What seems to always occur is the old Marxist line: the basic gesture of capitalism is commodity fetishism, to disguise that which is artificial as natural and to present what is dialectical as one-dimensional.

There’s a profound ego-anarchism (Ego-Anarchism is the negation of all fixed ideas: of homeland, state, religion, morals, property, belonging.) at work at the heart of the libertarian side of the political right. For the last thirty years, things that typically would have made you unelectable people are saying and not only getting away with it, but thriving.

The only real answer is an engagement with history and an understanding of the political valence, the political significance of remembering. That memory is not just a way of becoming coherent internally, that memory, cultural memory, is also a way of making sense of where you are.

Where do we go from here?