I speak occasionally to Steven Lisberger, who directed the landmark motion picture, TRON. Naturally enough, the conversation usually comes around to cyberspace and how, as Steven puts it, “TRON came true.” Lately, we’ve been talking a lot about the role of story and storytellers in the networked world. Steven has a way of boiling things down to their essence. Sometimes I call him Obi-Wan. Here’s some Jedi from our most recent conversation:
Lisberger and Me
“For most of mankind’s existence, our subconscious mind has been hidden. Now it’s on full display in the network. Everything you can dream of is there and accessible instantly. And the question is, what are we going to do with it?”
“People need a new way in.”
“If one aspect of work, access to information, has gotten infinitely easier, the laws of physics tell us that another aspect, one that maybe we don’t recognize yet, has gotten infinitely harder. We expect things to always get easier, but that’s not necessarily true.”
“On one side of the equation you have the swarm, the hive mind, whatever you want to call it. And on the other, you have all these tools, and this demand for productivity. If you don’t know what you’re doing, it will get revealed quicker. So you have to really know what you’re doing. The swarm has to be grounded in capability.”
“The network and the tools are amazing. If people learn how to use the network and the tools, they’ll be amazing, too.”
“One result of networks is the democratization of quality. When all content is pumped out and made accessible, it creates a kind of middling format. It leads to a common denominator effect. This is why elitism matters. Not just anyone can tell a good story, or create a good design.”
“Intellectual bullying perpetuates the wrong argument.”
“With improvisation, you can do a scene where one person plays the landlord and the other person plays the tenant who’s behind on the rent. Then those two people reverse roles, and from that process, you learn how to go about resolving the problem. In business, that never happens. No one switches sides or changes roles. If you play for the Blue Team, that’s the team you stay on. If you’re on the Yellow Team, you stay on that team, and you argue for that side. And you just keep on having the same argument, and it’s terrible, because nothing changes, and nothing ever gets resolved.”
“What you’re doing with GameChangers is fracturing and realigning the sides of the argument so that problems can get solved.”
“The subconscious mind doesn’t recognize time. It exists in a permanent state of ‘now.’ In this sense the subconscious mind is like a child, who doesn’t know anything but ‘right now.’ When the subconscious mind makes itself visible and instantly accessible in the network, and everything exists in a state of now, it breeds immaturity. We begin operating at the level of awareness of an 11 year old. Maturity is something you can only get to over time. It’s linear in that sense. The ethics and perspective that come with time and maturity are what’s missing in this environment.”
“Maturity comes from mastery in the physical realm.”
EMAIL #1
“TRON came true,” says one of my geek friends, referencing the early 1980s film about a gamer played by Jeff Bridges who gets zapped into a digital universe inside the memory of a computer network. What my friend means is that today, entire populations are getting zapped into that digital universe. Avatars, auctions, blogs, social networks, and databases storing information about everything from bank accounts to medical records comprise primitive alter-egos that project our personalities and do our bidding — and if we command them to, they’ll do it while we’re walking the dog or drinking a Schlitz at the corner bar. 