More re: “Orgies for Free” (OfF)

(The below won’t make (much) sense if you haven’t read Welcome / Read First.)

OfF features a set-up subplot.

From Story:

When a Central Plot’s Inciting Incident must be delayed, a setup subplot may be needed to open the storytelling.

. . . A setup subplot dramatizes the Central Plot’s exposition so that it’s absorbed in a fluid, indirect manner.

OfF’s setup subplot is designed to yield two key spin-offs (i.e., two startup comedies that will spin-off from OfF).

Re: the second spin-off

• will combat the second-biggest threat to (Medium’s variant of) The Opportunity Services Group (OSG): anti-competitive regulation of the AI-CE industry
• will center on the fictional making of The Wired, a fictional variant of 2002–2008 HBO series The Wire (“routinely called the best television show ever”)

— Planned title —

F*ck a Re-Up: The Making of “The Wired”

— Re: F*ck a . . . —

From season 5, episode 9 of The Wire:

Police officer: So this is a re-up.

Lester Freamon: Fuck a re-up, son. This, here, in the middle of nowhere — miles from anywhere these mopes meet — this is re-supply.

— Re: The Wired —

• set in the near future
• depicts a next-gen variant of the poverty trap depicted on The Wire

The next-gen trap derives from anti-competitive regulation of the AI-CE industry.

— Re: anti-competitive regulation —

From 2010 book The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires:

“Again and again in the histories I have recounted, the state has shown itself an inferior arbiter of what is good for the information industries.”

“Most of the federal government’s intrusions in the twentieth century were efforts at preventing disruption by new technologies . . .”

“The federal government’s role in radio and television from the 1920s through the 1960s, for instance, was nothing short of a disgrace. . . . Government’s tendency to protect large market players amounts to an illegitimate complicity . . . [particularly its] sense of obligation to protect big industries irrespective of their having become uncompetitive.”

From the May 2018 article on BusinessInsider.com titled “Netflix and others warn about the end of net neutrality rules”:

As the Federal Communications Commission was readying its repeal of net-neutrality rules towards the end of 2017, and picking up more speed in recent months, dozens of companies have warned in regulatory filings about the threats to their businesses. The warnings come from startups and tech giants alike, including Spotify, Snap, Dropbox . . .

As a result of the repeal of net neutrality “coupled with potentially significant political and economic power of local network operators, we could experience discriminatory or anti-competitive practices [my emphasis] that could impede our growth, cause us to incur additional expense or otherwise negatively affect our business,” Netflix warned in its annual report.

— Re: The Wire depicts a poverty trap —

From the 2010 article on Slate.com subtitled “Why so many colleges are teaching The Wire.”:

Professors at Harvard, U.C. — Berkeley, Duke, and Middlebury are now offering courses on the show.

Interestingly, the classes aren’t just in film studies or media studies departments; they’re turning up in social science disciplines as well, places where the preferred method of inquiry is the field study or the survey, not the HBO series, even one that is routinely called the best television show ever. Some sociologists and social anthropologists, it turns out, believe The Wire has something to teach their students about poverty, class, bureaucracy, and the social ramifications of economic change.

. . . One of the professors teaching a course on the show is the sociologist William Julius Wilson — his class, at Harvard, will be offered this fall.

. . . Asked why he was teaching a class around a TV drama, Wilson said the show makes the concerns of sociologists immediate in a way no work of sociology he knows of ever has. “Although The Wire is fiction, not a documentary, its depiction of [the] systemic urban inequality that constrains the lives of the urban poor is more poignant and compelling [than] that of any published study, including my own,” he wrote in an e-mail.

For Wilson, the unique power of the show comes from the way it takes fiction’s ability to create fully realized inner lives for its characters and combines that with qualities rare in a piece of entertainment: an acuity about the structural conditions that constrain human choices (whether it’s bureaucratic inertia, institutional racism, or economic decay) and an unparalleled scrupulousness about accurately portraying them. Wilson describes the show’s characters almost as a set of case studies, remarkable for the vividness with which they embody a set of arguments about the American inner city. “What I’m concentrating on is how this series so brilliantly illustrates theories and processes that social scientists have been writing about for years,” he said in an interview.

Re: leveraging Adver-ties and the Amazon of AI and CE to prevent anti-competitive regulation of the AI-CE industry

From 2007 book The Populist Vision, published by Oxford University Press:

“[T]he Populist revolt [in the U.S. during the 1890s] reflected a conflict over divergent paths of modern capitalist development.

. . . By the 1880s, two firmly entrenched parties dominated the political scene. At the national level, Democrats and Republicans held much in common as they shared a conservatism that was acceptable to the financial and corporate establishment.

. . . Progressive Era legislation in the first years of the new [i.e., 20th] century expanded the role of government in American life and laid the foundations of modern political development. Populism provided an impetus for this modernizing process, with many of their demands co-opted and refashioned by progressive Democrats and Republicans.”

“The Farmers’ Alliance [was] the largest and most important constituency of what would become the Populist coalition [of the 1890s].

. . . From its earliest stirring [in the 1870s], the Farmers’ Alliance defined itself as an educational movement.

. . . The farmers needed to organize for self-education to better engage the complex problems of modern society . . . To get people reading and thinking required what [Alliance president Macune] described as a modern educational machine. The engine driving this machine was the reform press.

. . . By the late 1880s, the Alliance had grown to an intellectual enterprise that stretched across much of rural America . . . [The Alliance] built lecture circuits across thirty states and a network of approximately one thousand weekly newspapers.”

“The Farmers’ Alliance . . . realized that without the political levers of control, even the best-laid business plans would come to naught. . . . Convictions about . . . political action flowed directly from business strategies.

. . . Most of the Populist ‘revolt’ took place not in the streets but in lodge meetings and convention halls, where participants pored over problems of commerce and government and adopted resolutions for the creation or expansion of state and federal agencies, institutes, commissions, departments and bureaus.”

“A Texas experiment provided the most widely imitated prototype . . . The Texas Farmers’ Alliance Exchange . . . would offer Texas cotton growers all the advantages of a centralized and regulated market, with a rational structure and direct access to credit and to the commercial centers . . . From Georgia to California the Farmers’ Alliance set up state exchanges.”

From 2016 book This Is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century:

After two years of research, Chenoweth crunched the numbers. Examining the first data set of 323 campaigns [i.e., social movements], she . . . found a direct correlation between the success of a campaign and the popular involvement [in it.]

. . . Chenoweth found that, in fact, “no campaigns failed once they’d achieved the active and sustained participation of just 3.5 percent of the population[”] . . .

This is not an insignificant number: in the United States, 3.5 percent of the population would mean gaining the support of some 11 million individuals.

. . . Spurring people to this level of engagement is not easy.