Value is like the sea

February 22, 2011 by cogixo in visual pamphlets | Comments Off on Value is like the sea

Now, the Frog in boiling water video uses an analogy. While he writes books instead of making videos, Cory Doctorow also works with analogies. In novels. That are free. It’s really too awesome to explain, check out his website and his other novels. I’m sure I’ll be coming back to his books in the future.

It’s an interesting way of explaining the relationship between value and money and how more money leads to inflation. Check out the book, the explanation is much longer than this.

“Sea-level” is a term that refers to the average level of all the world’s oceans. Think of the world as a giant bed-pan, filled halfway with water. You can blow on one part of the surface and induce some tiny waves whose crests are higher than the rest of the water. You can tip the bed-pan from side to side and cause the water to slosh around, making it higher at one end than another. But overall, there’s a single level to that water, a surface height that you can easily discern.

Same with the oceans. Though the tides may drag the water from one edge of the sea to the other — and really, there’s only one sea, a single, continuous jigsaw-puzzle-piece-shaped body of water that wraps around all the continents — though the storms may blow up waves here and there, in the end, there’s only so much water in the ocean, and it more or less comes to an easily agreed-upon height. Sea level.

Same with money. There’s only so much value in the world: only so much stuff to buy. If you got all the money in the world, you could exchange it for all the stuff on earth (at least all the stuff there is for sale). It doesn’t matter, really, whether the money is in dollars or gold pieces or mushrooms or ringgits or euros or yen. Add it all together and what you’ve got is the ocean. What you’ve got is sea level.

So what happens if someone just prints a lot more money? What happens if you just double the amount of money in circulation? Will the monetary seas rise, drowning the land?

No.

Printing more money doesn’t make more money. Printing more money is like measuring the ocean in liters instead of gallons. Converting 343 quintillion gallons of ocean into 1.6 sextillion liters (give or take) doesn’t give you any more water. Gallons and liters are measurements of water, not water itself.

And dollars are measures of value, not value itself. If you double the amount of currency in circulation, you double the price of everything on Earth. The amount of stuff is fixed, the amount of currency isn’t. That’s called inflation, and it can be savage.

The quote above is from his novel For the Win, that you totally have to read. It’s about the IWWWW, or Webblies. You can download it for free, and if you like it, donate a printed copy to a school or library! And of course the actual book makes a great present for your niece or nephew. For the Win is published under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license

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You are terrorist

February 22, 2011 by cogixo in visual pamphlets | Comments Off on You are terrorist

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdIA0jeW-24[/youtube]

Another German one, but this one comes with subtitles.

It’s very straight forward, not really dealing with anything too abstract. The graphics are working very well, nice and clean looking. The most notable point is the voiceover, explaining in a creepily hypnotic tone why all the surveillance is necessary and ho everyone is a terrorism suspect nowadays. Obviously, this perspective of pretending to be in favor of surveillance is the main device that makes this video work.

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Like a frog in boiling water

February 22, 2011 by cogixo in visual pamphlets | Comments Off on Like a frog in boiling water

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Diq6TAtSECg[/youtube]

Because the voiceover is German, here a quick summary: If you put a frog into a tub of boiling water, it’ll feel the heat and jump out. However, if the temperature is ok when you put it in, it will stick around. If the heat is now turned up gradually, the frog won’t notice and you end up with cooked frog.

Here it draws an analogy: Our society displays similar responses to a frog. If you would try and install a totalitarian surveillance state, people would protest. But surveillance is introduced at a low level, and then turned up gradually, with the same end result. Because we are getting used to it, we are in danger of not noticing when it’s getting too hot for comfort. A person who is watched adjusts their behaviour to this fact, and this can have severe effects, e.g. on the freedom of speech. If you are worried about being watched, you are more likely to not say what you think, especially if your opinion are not in line with the mainstream.

Simple but effective.

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One-Minute Guide to Planet Earth

February 22, 2011 by cogixo in visual pamphlets | Comments Off on One-Minute Guide to Planet Earth

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Eph6ClpGOQ[/youtube]

This video was a uni project. In our first term at film school, we got the brief to create a one minute video, about where we come from. The title of that project was Place. Years later, I still remember Armen’s One-Minute Guide to Planet Earth. The imagery is very evocative, going far beyond the mundane explanations. Here voice over and visuals create something more than the sum of the individual parts. The short, fast paced clip triggers a wave of associations and ideas each time I see it.

A fun to watch clip, which kinda explains things almost by raising questions rather than answering them. I like the attitude, it’s not very serious, but brings up a very interesting perspective. Also taking a step back and getting a fresh perspective on the everyday.

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The Big Brother State

February 21, 2011 by cogixo in visual pamphlets | Comments Off on The Big Brother State

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJTLL1UjvfU[/youtube]

The Big Brother State is a very well made video, explaining the use and dangers of cctv and other surveillance tools. Sadly the website at http://www.bigbrotherstate.com/ seems to not exist anymore.

It summarises the arguments for surveillance and then goes on point out some of the downsides. Visually it is very appealing, the pink and grey aesthetics are easy on the eye, the little bombs and hearts visually represent abstract concepts and ideas and make them more tangible, without making them too concrete. The pink ‘wallpaper’ background is a bit sickly sweet, but adds a self ironic element, which counteracts the somewhat dry and depressing subject matter.

It is made from a mix of footage of real people, 3D and 2D animation, creating a well paced, informative and entertaining little video.

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Visual Pamphlets

February 21, 2011 by cogixo in visual pamphlets | Comments Off on Visual Pamphlets

There are those ideas for projects that would be great to make, they keep nagging in the background, but there’s always something else happening and you never really get around to tackling them head on.

The idea to make short films about political key concepts is one of them. It first popped up during the Anarchist Bookfair in 2010. (Check out the Virtual Anarchist Bookfair over at Imc London.) We were chatting about how difficult it can be to communicate political ideas, especially more abstract concepts to a wider ‘audience’ (for lack of a better expression). Since the crisis, we keep reading about the market, the free market, debt, and the economy in general. But very few people (me included) actually have a firm grasp on what those terms mean. Even though they are affecting our daily lives very directly, they seem very distant concepts. Of course we are constantly told that we could not expect to understand things, and we should leave them to specialists. To make matters worse, these are the very same “specialists” who triggered the whole crisis. Being specialists and all.

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Mobile publishing

February 19, 2011 by cogixo in General | Comments Off on Mobile publishing

image

Just checking if this is working. Here is an awesome pic of a public toilet hidden in the backyard of the Camel and Artichoke at Waterloo. There’s no way anyone could ever find this. Also for some reason it makes me think of the Tardis. Maybe because the Tardis would be way less out of place in that spot.

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cogito ergo seditio

February 19, 2011 by cogixo in General | Comments Off on cogito ergo seditio

Here we are, let’s see where it takes us. I’ve tried starting a blog before. A few times. Some I never did anything with. Other’s prospered for a while and then fell apart. One reason was that I have been inherently incomfortable setting up a blog hosted on corporate services. It’s just so cumbersome. They log my IP address and I have no idea who they could be passing this information too. They also log the readers IP address. They could take down my blog or suspend it at any time, and there is no way to dispute this. All I would be able to do is appeal to their good will. While they can find out about me, including where I live and other personal information, I have to deal with an anonymous and unaccountable organisation. And it is a corporation. While I do not necessarily want to get paid for the creative work of writing and maintaining a blog, publishing pictures and video, I just don’t like the idea to let others make money on the back of this labour.

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