Tag: crowd-sourcing

Why ‘Mein Kampf’ in 2016 will be more ‘readable’ than ever, not less

The first four fifths of this article are fascinating. It’s titled “The future of Mein Kempf in a meme world”. Though I’ve not consumed historically significant events with consistent interest, World War II has been an exception by far. And belonging to the generation I do – the so-called Millennials – I resent the article’s conclusion that when the book’s copyright lifts next year and the “original” annotated version becomes available, its size alone will deter younger readers from picking up a copy.

Mein Kampf is Adolf Hitler’s account of his years growing up in Germany and Austria. Its greatest accomplishment has been to offer a peek into the mind that lead the world into one of history’s worst conflicts and more dreadful tragedies. Hitler wrote it – rather, dictated it to his minion Rudolf Hess – when he’d been imprisoned for the failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. His actions in the Second World War consequently lead to a new world order, resulting in a geopolitical power structure that continues to shape global politics in the early 21st century.

In 1945, the book was banned by law in West Germany, which identified it as Nazi propaganda. The copyright remained with the Bavarian state government – and that copyright is set to expire in 2016. For the occasion, the Institute of Contemporary History said in 2010 that it would release an annotated version of the text.

Now, it’s been almost 70 years since the end of the War and much has definitely happened. But it’s hard to investigate the causes of many aspects of the present – especially the technology – without finding a part of their foundations rooted in the indignation and exigency of the first half of the previous century. And if the author of the piece – Gavriel Rosenfeld – had argued that Mein Kampf‘s relevance in 2016 among the teens and tweens was contingent on the relevance of these aspects, he might still have constructed a better argument than to say the size of the book would drive this demographic away.

His example of Otto Strasser not having read the book also sports a glaring error. Strasser says few in the Nazi Party had read the book in 1927, when Mein Kampf‘s measure of greatness was only in terms of what Hitler had accomplished until then: trivial compared to what would come after. Today, the book depicts incidents that shaped the most terrible head of state in recent history, and likely even differs in how it is significant among neo-Nazis and the civilized.

Rosenfeld may have been misled by a deception akin to the one at play with a $10,000 Apple Watch. With that price tag, Apple is targeting only those people who think spending $10,000 on it is a good idea, not anyone else – including people with $10,000 to spare but not for a smartwatch. Similarly, those who are afraid of hefty tomes from the past have already turned away from them, but it’s facile to think it entirely an acceptance of 50-KB memes and in no part a rejection of 2,000 pages of text with 5,000 annotations.

In fact, the author’s secondary mistake through writing the piece may have been miscalculating what the memetic endeavors flooding the Internet are founded upon: an industry that continuously makes all kinds of information easier to consume and easier to share. Few will contest Rosenfeld when he says the book will not be consumed widely in its original form. However, its physical original form is irrelevant.

It will be made consumable in parts by many groups of people, many journalists, teachers, historians and an ensemble group of enthusiasts, who will upload the fruit of their efforts to the web, who will make the book searchable and shareable. In due course, and with a measure of interest that’s only to be expected, the book’s contents will be available for everyone – young and old. Who knows, even an annotation of the annotations that Mein Kampf will be released with will revitalize flagging debates on historiography. The book will ultimately be more accessible than it ever was.

And Rosenfeld’s primary misstep? To assume those who consume information in 30-second bits have no way to access what’s available in 2,000-page chunks, that they may not be interested at all because they wouldn’t be appealed by it. If anything, the Millennials’ engagement with social attributes like memetics, network effects and virality has only revealed more efficient methods of knowledge-dissemination its producers weren’t able to leverage even a decade ago.

We live in a time when anything is susceptible to become appealing to anyone with the right alterations. Why would Mein Kampf be immune to this?

Crowd-sourcing a fantasy fiction tale

What if thousands of writers, economists, philosophers, scientists, teachers, industrialists and other many other people from other professions besides were able to pool their intellectual and creative resources to script one epic fantasy-fiction story?

Such an idea would probably form the crux of an average to poor book idea, but the story itself would be awesome, methinks.

Here’s an example. Every great writer, most notably Asimov, whose works of sci-fi/fantasy I’ve read has speculated upon the rapidly changing nature of different professions in their works.

The simplest example manifests in Asimov’s 1957 short story Profession. In the story, children are educated no longer within classrooms but almost instantaneously through a brain-computer interface, a process called taping.

Where are the teachers in this world? They, it seems, would come later, in the guise of professionals who compose and compile those information-heavy tapes. Seeing as Profession is set in the 66th century of human civilization, the taping scenario is entirely plausible. We could get there.

But this is one man’s way of constructing a possible future among infinite others. Upon closer scrutiny, many inconsistencies between Asimov’s world and ours could be chalked up. For one, the author could have presupposed events in our future which might never really happen.

However, such scrutiny would be meaningless because that is not the purpose of Asimov’s work. He writes to amaze, to draw parallels – not necessarily contiguous ones – between our world and a one in the future.

But what if Asimov had been an economist instead of a biochemist? Would he have written his stories any differently?

My (foolish) idea is to just draw up a very general template of a future world, to assign different parts of that template to experts from different professions, and then see how they think their professions would have changed. More than amaze, such a world might enlighten us… and I think it ought to be fascinating for just that reason.

The cloak of fantasy, the necessity of stories to engage all those professions and their intricate gives-and-takes and weave them into a empathetic narrative could then be the work of writers and other such creatively inclined people or, as I like to call them, ‘imagineers’.

This idea has persisted for a long time. It was stoked when I first encountered in my college days the MMORPG called World of Warcraft. In it, many players from across the world come together and play a game set in the fictitious realm called Azeroth, designed by Blizzard, Inc.

However, the game has already been drawn up to its fullest, so to speak. For example, there are objectives for players to attain by playing a certain character. If the character fails, he simply tries again. For the game to progress, the objectives must be attained. That’s what makes a game by definition, anyway.

 

My idea wouldn’t be a game because there are no objectives. My idea would be a game to define those objectives, and in a much more inclusive way. Imagine an alternate universe for all of us to share in. The story goes where our all-encompassing mind would take us.

The downside, of course, would be the loss of absolute flexibility, with so many clashing ideas and, more powerful, egos. But… play it.