Welcome / Read first

Re: said program

https://blog.medium.com/medium-seeks-partners-to-launch-new-publications-6d7df0b05159 (published March 19, 2019)

The program is separate from Medium’s pre-existing Partner Program.

Re: this publication’s Creative Commons license

You can use/adapt/share the information (that’ll be) provided in the publication.

Re: said praise

Links below.

Re: said design (part 1 of 2)

• fixes the fatal flaw of 2003 “sensation” BlogShares.com
• will yield a next-gen variant of LinkedIn (i.e., the most popular implementation will equate to NGVL)
• is a free part of my freemium business model
• is a product of my focus from 1992 to 2005 on leveraging computer science, data science and IT to expand opportunity and customize education

Re: said design FITS Medium

NGVL will facilitate ideal matches of writers and readers.

— Summary (details below) —

Activity at NGVL will yield information that’s very/maximally predictive of users’ future performance at work. Some of this information will facilitate crowd-sourcing that yields top recommendation engines (REs). Other information from said activity will be a key input to REs that match writers and readers. Much of said information (both kinds) will become available because NGVL will advance “hyper-specialization.”

Re: providing NGVL via producing serial novels

— Summary (details below) —

Several/many BIG companies (will) want to provide NGVL (e.g., LinkedIn, which is owned by Microsoft).

A key to disrupting/outcompeting these companies is producing and popularizing a serial novel that:

• motivates readers to become equity-crowdfunders (i.e., part-owners) of the serial-producer(’s implementation of said design)
• raises awareness of the s-p’s implementation
• showcases users of the implementation (e.g., writers who become staffers of s-p’s serial via using the implementation)
• yields spin-off serial novels that motivate readers to part-own complements of s-p’s implementation (e.g., part-own REs)
• . . . audio . . . streaming-video/TV . . . spin-offs from said spin-offs . . .

Precedents for serials of said kind

From a 2015 issue of a newsletter about podcasts:

Gimlet, your friendly neighborhood podcasting company that narrates its own emergence [on its podcast titled StartUp] . . .

[A]ccording to the StartUp episode that dropped last Thursday, Graham Holdings invested $5 million into the $6 million round [raised by Gimlet], with the remainder split between some existing investors upping their commitment and a crowdfunded pool [via StartUp listeners] that was mediated through Quire, the equity crowdfunding platform [my emphasis] . . .

From a 2018 article on VentureBeat.com (my emphasis):

Shark Tank’s billionaire investors . . . have routinely had their investees do follow-on [equity] crowdfunding rounds immediately after putting their money in the deal [e.g., after millions of people became aware of the investee by watching ST on ABC].

Re: an ideal premise for Medium’s first serial of said kind (e.g., a serial that Medium pays you to co-write)

Flow is the neurochemical state that enables top performance/problem-solving. Often, flow via collaboration — “group flow” — sparks romantic attraction. NGVL will give rise to MANY flowmances.

Details below.

Re: this publication

Another free part of my business model.

Links to said praise for my design

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2005-02-13/one-more-thing-on-43-things (cached by Google)

http://blogmaverick.com/2005/01/31/grokster-and-the-financial-future-of-america/#comment-7049

Re: said design (part 2 of 2)

• hasn’t been coded/implemented
• can be coded in a few programmer-weeks (4–6, most likely)

The 1.0 site/app will feature:

• a market for the advertisement spaces on solo-blogger blogs (e.g., portfolio blogs) [1]
• a virtual currency (cash transactions will be supported also)

Prices in the virtual currency (VC) will contain/reflect only truthful peer ratings of work samples. Ratings of this kind are a top predictor of work performance, according to a much-cited meta-analysis of 85 years of personnel-selection research (4908 citations as of May 12, 2019) [2]. Other top predictors of work performance are often unavailable (e.g., test results). So VC prices will be ideal for ranking people within individual job/skill categories. These rankings will make it much easier for Jane Q. Upwardly-Mobile to identify others who (can) best complement her (ditto for John Q.).

Full details about the design coming ASAP.

[1] Each writer’s site on Medium can be thought of as a kind of portfolio blog. An ad space sold for VC will typically be on the homepage (i.e., front page) of the seller’s blog; key reasons: 1) sales of spaces for VC will occur via weekly auctions, 2) per week, each blogger will be able to sell only one ad space for VC (which space is sold can vary weekly). Keywords re: said auctions: sealed-bid, second-price; combinatorial auctions via fractional allocations, so each week’s auction will provide a “spot” market and an “up-front” market; traders will make these markets “information-efficient”; amassing a track record of profitable trades using VC will be an ideal way to get certain jobs (e.g., talent scout, media-planner/-buyer).

[2] From 2015 book Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead, by the then head of “People Operations” at Google:

. . .

From the Schmidt-Hunter paper linked-to above:

Name of my planned implementation of the design

Adver-ties

Re: Adver-ties will be a debugged version of BlogShares.com

From a 2003 article on rediff.com:

The latest sensation that’s grabbing the attention of netizens is BlogShares . . . an online stock market in which you get to speculate on the future of your favourite blogs. . . . Every player gets 500 BlogShare dollars upon signup.

. . . How you play BlogShares depends on what you want from it. For some, the objective is to get their blogs on the Top 100 Index.

. . . At the end of a three-week phase of beta testing, there were a staggering 40,000 listed blogs. Over 5000 active players carry out thousands of transactions every day . . .

Re: the fatal flaw of BlogShares

The price mechanism was easily gamed. From the rediff.com article:

[Inbound] links are the assets that drive valuations.

More precedents for Adver-ties

• Google’s PageRank search algorithm (first use of hyperlinks to inform search results)
• peer assessments associated with popular MOOCs (massively open online courses)
• LinkExchange.com

PageRank 1.0 was based on insights from social network analysis that were decades old when PageRank was conceived. (Similarly, LinkedIn et al. could’ve product-ized said personnel-selection research long ago.)

From a 1998 paper co-authored by Google’s founders:

There has been a great deal of work on academic-citation analysis [Gar[19]95]. Goffman [Gof71] . . .

Number of search engines launched before Google: 20.

2013 paper “Tuned Models of Peer Assessment in MOOCs,” co-authored by several employees of MOOC provider Coursera ($210M raised):

Peer assessment — which has been historically used for logistical, pedagogical, metacognitive, and affective benefits . . . — offers a promising solution that can scale the grading of complex assignments in courses with tens or even hundreds of thousands of students.

From the 1998 article in The Wall Street Journal titled “Microsoft Buys LinkExchange For About $250 Million in Stock”:

LinkExchange . . . places ad banners on about 400,000 Web sites, though many of those sites are obscure personal home pages [e.g., blogs] . . .

LinkExchange, founded in 1996, has taken a unique approach that has allowed it to grow its network of sites very quickly. The company allows member Web sites to advertise for free on other sites throughout the LinkExchange network — provided they agree to return the favor.

Re: bloggers will be able to parlay a high and/or fast-rising ad rate in Adver-ties’ virtual currency into cash via sales of other ad spaces, and via subscriptions

Keywords re: ad $: influencer marketing (IM), antidote to the epidemic of IM fraud.

From said praise for the design of Adver-ties

[From a 2004 email sent to me by Amazon.com’s first Director of Personalization:]

Frank, I just spent about an hour surfing around your website with a bit of amazement. I run a little company . . . We are a team of folks who worked together at Amazon.com developing that company’s personalization and recommendations team and systems. We spent about 1.5 years thinking about what we wanted to build next. We thought a lot about online education tools. We thought a lot about classified ads and job networks. We thought a lot about reputation systems. We thought a bit about personalized advertising systems. We thought a lot about blogging and social networking systems [my emphasis]. . . . I guess I’m mostly just fascinated that we’ve been working a very similar vein to the one you describe, without having a solid name for it (we call it “the age of the amateur” or “networks of shared experiences” instead of CLLCS [i.e., customized lifelong learning and career services], but believe me, we are talking about the same patterns and markets, if not in exactly the same way). Thanks for sharing what you have — it’s fascinating stuff.

Re: Adver-ties 1.0 can be implemented in a few programmer-weeks

From a 2015 article on BusinessInsider.com:

Most people have a vague idea of the the story of Facebook’s origin: It was initially built by Zuckerberg in a week when he was a student at Harvard . . .

From a different 2015 article on BusinessInsider.com:

Frind told Business Insider he started Plenty of Fish in 2003 “as a way to improve my résumé.”

“At the time there was a new programming language called ASP.NET, and I don’t like reading books, so I just went and created the site in two weeks, and then people started signing up, much to my surprise,” he said. “And it blew up from there.[”]

From a 2007 article on ReadWrite.com:

Plenty of Fish, a leading online dating site that is run by a single person [i.e., Frind had no co-workers from 2003 to 2007] . . .

From the latter 2015 article on BusinessInsider.com:

Plenty of Fish sold to Match Group [in July 2015] for $575 million in cash.

Re: top recommendation-engines (REs) are (partly) crowdsourced (part 1 of 2)

From the 2009 article on Wired.com titled “How the Netflix Prize Was Won”:

[T]he contest’s goal [was] to improve the Netflix movie recommendation algorithm by 10 percent.

. . . [The] competition has proffered hard proof of a basic crowdsourcing concept: Better solutions come from unorganized people who are allowed to organize organically.

Re: hyperspecialization facilitates/advances crowdsourcing

From the 2011 article in The Harvard Business Review titled “The Age of Hyperspecialization”:

TopCoder chops its clients’ IT projects into bite-size chunks and offers them up to its worldwide community of freelance developers . . .

TopCoder developers are becoming increasingly specialized.

. . . Some have discovered a talent for putting together software components that others have written. [my emphasis]

From a 2013 interview of Paul Graham, co-founder of leading “startup accelerator” Y Combinator:

Programming in the last 10 years is much more system administration. It’s largely installing things and piecing them together. You used to have libraries you’d have to call and stuff like that, but now you build your app by piecing together these big chunks of open source code that other people have written.

Re: top REs are (partly) crowdsourced (part 2 of 2)

From 2017 book Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future, co- authored by MIT economist Erik Brynjolfsson:

For the crowd, the counterpart is the core: the knowledge, processes, expertise, and capabilities that companies have built up internally and across their supply chains . . .

From said 2009 article on Wired.com:

[T]he most outlying approaches — the ones farthest away from the mainstream way to solve a given problem — proved most helpful towards the end of the contest . . .

Re: prices in Adver-ties’s virtual currency will facilitate crowdsourcing

Certain AVC prices will help employers hire crowdsourcing specialists. Other prices will help these specialists source from the crowd.

Re: Adver-ties will advance hyperspecialization

Activity in a market generates new kinds of knowledge. This knowledge typically increases specialization.

From Machine, Platform, Crowd:

From 2014 book Complexity: A Very Short Introduction:

Niche formation through co-evolution

. . . When we look at realistic niches, whether they be market niches . . . we see a complicated re-circulation of resources and signals [e.g., price signals] . . .

How did this complex network of interactions evolve?

The short answer is co-evolution through recombination of building blocks [e.g., (open-source) software modules]. . . Cascades of increasingly specialized agents result [my emphasis]. As is nicely described by Samuelson in his classic text Economics, there is a multiplier effect in cascades . . . The multiplier effect in a typical cascade may be 4 (or more), indicating that the initial payment has the effect of four separate injections of cash . . .

The multiplier effect that accompanies the re-use of resources in a cascade typically drives the occupants of a niche to increasing specialization.

From Machine, Platform, Crowd (my emphases):

The first person to clearly point out this benefit [i.e., new knowledge via activity in markets], and thus to become a kind of patron saint of the crowd, was the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek in his 1945 article “The Uses of Knowledge in Society.”

. . . Hayek’s paper, which anticipated many of the ideas of what would coalesce into complexity theory later in the twentieth century . . .

Re: AVC prices will be inputs to REs that match 1) writers seeking to work with other writers, 2) writers and employers of writers

From 2016 book The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future, by the founding executive editor of Wired magazine:

Over half the connections made on LinkedIn arise from their follower recommender . . .

Re: several/many BIG companies (will) want to provide NGVL (e.g., via cloning Adver-ties)

Full details coming ASAP. Excerpt:

Summary of my business plan (details below)

The GRAIL:

• providing loans to AI consumers [individual people, not businesses]
• learning continuously as a means of lowering the interest rates of AI loans

. . .

— Re: providing these loans —

A prerequisite will be owning a popular online market for AI and CE [i.e., customized education], in part because profits from owning the market will be a source of money for lending

[FUN fact: Purchases of CE to train AI can be expected to increase steadily/rapidly in the years ahead (e.g., it’s likely that soon many/most people will 1) own AI, 2) customize the training of their AI via purchases of software, data and/or services, 3) update/augment their AI often).]

. . .

Re: popularizing Adver-ties will be foundational for popularizing OSG’s market for AI and CE

[OSG is an acronym for The Opportunity Services Group, the name of my planned startup.]

— End of excerpt from details that are coming ASAP —

Re: a key to disrupting/outcompeting said BIG companies is producing and popularizing serials of said kind

Full details coming ASAP. Excerpt:

Keys to disrupting these BigCos will include:

• developing software that complements Adver-ties
• systematically spinning-off the product groups that develop the complements [1]
• excelling at helping these spin-offs raise equity crowdfunding

This spinning-off and excelling will make joining one of said groups MUCH more attractive to TOP software developers than working at any monolithic BigCo that clones Adver-ties. Via attracting TOP devs: top complements of Adver-ties . . . more Adver-ties users . . . Adver-ties attracts more TOP devs . . . more top complements . . .

From 2019 book Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World:

[T]he “10X” coder . . . describes a programmer who is provably better, multiple times so, than the average code monkey.

. . . Bill Gates once said, “ . . . a great writer of software code is worth ten thousand times the price of an average software writer.”

. . . When I ask venture capitalists and founders whether 10Xers really exist, many immediately say: Oh yes. Hell yes.

“I think it’s probably 1000X,” . . . Marc Andreessen . . . cofounder of Netscape . . . tells me.

From a 2014 article:

“One top-notch engineer is worth 300 times or more than the average,” explains Alan Eustace, a Google vice president of engineering.

Said excelling at helping will equate largely to excelling at creating, writing and producing startup comedies. [Details in the next section.]

[1] Each spin-off will continue to develop its complement(s).

— End of excerpt from details that are coming ASAP —

Re: startup comedy

Precedent for excelling at creating, writing and producing startup comedies

Alloy Entertainment is the book packager that was acquired for $100M in 2012 by the Warner Brothers Television Group. Re: Alloy, via a 2009 article in The New Yorker:

Millions of girls have consumed Alloy Entertainment’s products, but the company’s name does not appear on the spine of its books. Rather, it packages about thirty novels a year for publishers, and also generates television shows and a growing number of ideas for feature films. In order to do all this, Alloy has developed a process with an industrial level of efficiency. Ideas are typically suggested in weekly development meetings and, if they gain the approval of Morgenstein and Bank, are fleshed out into a short summary by an editor. A writer is asked to create a sample chapter on spec; if Alloy executives are happy with the sample, they put her (or, on occasion, him) on contract. The writer hashes out a plot with Bank, one or two other editors, and Sara Shandler, Alloy’s editorial director — an alumnus of Seventeen, who, at the age of nineteen, put together the anthology “Ophelia Speaks,” in which young women respond to the best-selling book “Reviving Ophelia.” The group spends days brainstorming in the conference room, in the manner of television writers developing a series. The writer then goes off and completes the “first act” — roughly, the first ten chapters of the book. When the first act is in good shape, it is sent to potential publishers.

Re: flow (part 1 of 2)

From 2017 book Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work:

[W]e crossed the country for a trip to the Googleplex. We were there to talk flow states with engineers . . .

[W]e . . . attend[ed] the opening of their new multimillion-dollar mindfulness center. . . . Google had realized that when it comes to the highly competitive tech marketplace, helping engineers get into the zone and stay there longer was an essential . . .

We’ve been collaborating with some of the top experience designers, biohackers, and performance specialists to help develop the Flow Dojo . . . a learning lab dedicated to mapping the core building blocks of optimum performance.

In the fall of 2015 we had the opportunity to bring a prototype of the Dojo to Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters and engage in a joint-learning project. For six weeks, a handpicked team of engineers, developers, and managers committed to a flow training program, and then capped that off with two weeks in a beta version of the training center.

Re: group flow

From the chapter titled “Group Flow” in 2017 book Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration:

Patagonia was an early adopter, but soon after, Toyota, Ericsson and Microsoft made flow integral to their culture and strategy.

From 2014 book The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance:

In jazz, the group has the ideas, not the individual musicians . . .

When performance peaks in groups . . . this isn’t just about individuals in flow — it’s the group entering the state together . . .

Re: often, group flow sparks romantic attraction

From The Rise of Superman:

[T]here are extraordinarily powerful social bonding neurochemicals at the heart of both flow and group flow: dopamine and norepinephrine, that underpin romantic love . . .

From 1997 book Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration, by eminent scholar Warren Bennis:

Great Groups are sexy places.

. . . [During Apple’s early years, Steve Jobs mandated that] employees share [hotel] rooms when they were at conventions and other professional meetings . . . to limit bed-hopping . . .

From the 2017 article in Wired titled “The Ins and Outs of Silicon Valley’s New Sexual Revolution”:

In Silicon Valley, love’s many splendors often take the form of, well, many lovers.

. . . Some workplaces (coughGooglecough) have quasi-official poly clubs . . .

Re: flow (part 2 of 2)

From The Rise of Superman:

“Flow’s two defining characteristics are its feel-good nature (flow is always a positive experience) and its function as a performance-enhancer. The [neuro]chemicals described herein are among the strongest . . . the body can produce.”

“A ten-year study done by McKinsey found top executives reported being up to five times more productive when in flow. Creativity and cooperation are so amplified by the state that [a] Greylock Partners venture capitalist . . . called ‘flow state percentage’ — defined as the amount of time employees spend in flow — the ‘most important management metric for building great innovation teams.’ ”

“Surfers [experiencing flow] frequently report becoming one with the waves; snowboarders become one with the mountain. ‘It was like I reached a place where clarity and intuition and effort and focus all came together to bring me to the highest level of consciousness,’ says professional kayaker Sam Drevo. ‘A level where I was no longer me; I was part of the river.’

. . . It was Jefferson University neuroscientist Andrew Newberg and University of Pennsylvania neuropsychologist Eugene D’Aquili who gave us our first real insight into this experience. Back in 1991, they were investigating a different kind of oneness . . . In deep contemplative states, Tibetan Buddhists report ‘absolute unitary being,’ or the feeling of becoming one with everything, while Franciscan nuns experience unia mysica, or oneness with God’s love.”

“Flow feels like the meaning of life for good reason.”

Comedy opener of my serial-novel/startup-comedy/flowmantic-comedy

“Ten states,” I said, “have legalized recreational marijuana. A lot of partying happens away from home. Smoking weed gives people the munchies. Many popular nightspots don’t serve food. So there is greenfield opportunity at the intersection of mobile storage, weed storage, and food storage. Specifically, opportunity for SC [i.e., the fictional version of OSG] to patent my design of clothing-pockets that close via Ziploc.”

Rashida’s eyes widened for an instant. Then her lips formed a thin smile.

“I see you’re worried about developing laugh lines,” I said. “You shouldn’t be. Laugh lines are no match for modern cosmetic surgery. After all, cosmetic surgery is getting so advanced that, soon, it will be a simple matter to make a woman’s face after surgery appear completely different than her face before surgery.”

Then I tried to appear struck by a flash of insight.

“Which means,” I said, “that soon millions of Caucasian women will find it impossible to get a date! Unless . . .”

I picked up the handset of my desk phone, then appeared to dial an extension.

“It has come to my attention,” I said into the handset, “that SC can profit obscenely by purchasing the rights to develop and market the only DNA test that enables a woman to prove she’s not Lorena Bobbitt!”

Rashida laughed.

I restored the handset to its cradle, then used my laptop. A new presentation slide appeared on the wall-mounted screen:

From a 1978 article in The New Yorker:

“When it comes to saving a bad line, [Johnny Carson] is the master” — to quote a tribute paid in my presence by George Burns.

. . . One sometimes detects a vindictive glint in Carson’s eye when a number of gags sink without risible trace, but [Tonight Show writer Pat] McCormick assures me that this is all part of the act . . .

— End of comedy opener —

Re: the making of my serial novel

— Summary (details follow) —

I have what some neuroscientists call comedy-writer brain (i.e., my neuroanatomy enables non-conscious processes of my brain to reliably identify remote associations).

Keys to maximizing yield from comedy-writer brain:

• likable comic persona
• craft/artfulness in one’s chosen medium/form/genre(s) (e.g., online serial novels that blend startup comedy and flowmantic comedy)

Developing a likable comic persona was my focus from 1992 to 2005.

Developing said craft/artfulness has been my focus since 2006.

Re: comedy-writer brain

From 2014 book Ha!: the Science of When We Laugh and Why, by a cognitive neuroscientist:

[I]t’s worth noting that no single brain region is responsible for this type of creativity. One scientific review of seventy-two recent experiments revealed that no single brain region is consistently active during creative behavior. There is, however, something special about people who make novel connections or imagine the unimaginable. What sets them apart is the connectivity within their resting brains. This finding was discovered by a team of researchers from Tohoku in Japan, who observed that people with highly connected brains — as measured by shared brain activity over multiple regions — are more flexible and adaptive thinkers. Connected brains are creative brains.

From 1999 book The Entertainment Economy:

Re: non-conscious processes identifying remote associations

From Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work:

Carhart-Harris set out to take real-time pictures of the unconscious [using neuroimaging technologies (e.g., fMRI)] and when he did, he saw the unconscious actively hunting for new ideas.

Re: developing a likable comic persona

My approach consists of 3 steps, with one corollary:

S1: Select a problem that’s causing many people a lot of distress.

S2: Try to solve the problem.

S3: Mine the experience for comedy.

C1: The more effective I am at solving (part of) the problem, the more likable my persona will be.

Re: developing a likable comic persona was my focus from 1992 to 2005

Given C1, a key to maximizing likability is becoming an expert at solving (part of) a problem of said kind.

Re: developing craft/artfulness of said kind has been my focus since 2006

Title of a 2007 paper in The Journal of Creative Behavior:

Ten Years to Expertise, Many More to Greatness: An Investigation of Modern Writers.

Re: my serial novel needs a rewrite (e.g., via a team funded by Medium)

My adaptation of the design of Adver-ties seems likely to yield the first “killer dapp” of “Web 3.0” (dapp is short for decentralized-application). Details below.

Re: Web 3.0

From the June 30, 2018 issue of The Economist (my emphases):

[A] sense of a new beginning is also in the air. The buzz at technology conferences today is reminiscent of 1995, shortly after the birth of the world wide web, when a new piece of software called a browser took the web mainstream, and the internet with it. At today’s events startups are pushing ambitious plans, often based on blockchain technology (immutable distributed ledgers of the sort that underlie Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies), promising to “re-decentralise” the online world.

. . . To achieve their objective, they will have to overthrow an existing digital regime, called Web 2.0 . . . the new world of Web 3.0 . . .

Re: the FIT between Web 3.0 and startup comedy

Crowd-investment in Web3 ventures increased from $90 million in 2016 to $6.2 billion in 2017 to $7.8 billion in 2018 (so a total of ~$14.1B from 2016–18, raised via initial coin offerings (ICOs)).

Bonus motivation for said rewrite, en route to said adaptation being implemented

The dapp could HELP to popularize Adver-ties.

BIG companies that want to provide NGVL might not clone the dapp.

Web 2.0 offerings the dapp could decentralize

Sites/apps that facilitate sugar-dating (a.k.a. compensated dating)

Name of my planned implementation of the dapp

Adver-tease

Re: Adver-tease could be the first killer-dapp of “Web 3.0”

Full details coming ASAP. Excerpt:

Sugar-babies conceal their identity on sugar-dating sites/apps (i.e., babies’ user-names are pseudonyms).

Said sites/apps maintain computerized records that link each pseudonym to a baby’s true identity.

Hackers can steal user-data MUCH more easily from online offerings that are centralized (e.g., Facebook) than they can from decentralized offerings.

Precedent for such theft: 2015 hack of SeekingArrangement.com, then a site for married people seeking to have an affair. The hack outed millions of users, led to suicides, etc.

Four criteria for an app that decentralizes sugar-dating:

1. must allow names of users to be pseudonyms

Will work best when:

2. each user pays for each user-account s/he sets up (i.e., each user is disincentivized from misleading other users by creating multiple accounts)

3. each user pays each time s/he uses the app to interact with other users (i.e., each user is disincentivized from mistreating other users via the app)

4. the app enables an/the ideal kind of peer-to-peer policing (i.e., enables users to police each other, as users will have to in the absence of a Facebook-like “central authority” that can ban users, etc.)

These criteria would be satisfied by Adver-tease.

Note: Centralized sugar-dating imposes many fees on users.

— End of excerpt from details that are coming ASAP —

Re: Adver-tease could HELP to popularize Adver-ties

Many software developers will be interested in the first killer-dapp of Web 3.0 (e.g., interested in developing complements of the dapp). Adver-tease could show ads for Adver-ties. Attracting blockchain-savvy devs to Adver-ties would attract many employers.

From a February 2019 article on ComputerWorld.com:

There’s been a 517% increase in demand for software engineers with blockchain development skills in the past year, according to a new report from job search site Hired.

. . . [I]n December, LinkedIn revealed its top five emerging careers and found blockchain developer was number one.

. . . [B]lockchain engineering is the most in-demand skill on the Hired marketplace . . .

From a July 2018 article on the website of Application Development Trends magazine:

Freelancing Web site Upwork said blockchain is again the hottest technology on its quarterly skills index, marking the first time a skill has ranked №1 twice.

Attracting many employers to Adver-ties would attract many job-seekers beyond said devs . . .

Title of my serial novel

Orgies for Free (OfF)

Keywords re: orgies-for-free

sciences of flow, group flow, and complexity; “order-for-free” at “the boundary of order and chaos” (via complexity science); complementary “new science” re: “women, lust and infidelity”; women-FRIENDLY almost certainly

Re: MANY orgies (will) result from people adapting to particular evolutionary selection-pressures that are intensifying rapidly

For each of us, maximizing the amount of time we’re in the flow state is a key to thriving/surviving amid “superstar-biased technological change” (e.g., amid “winner-take-all” markets).

So keeping collaborators happy . . . polyamory . . .

From 2018 book Tell Me What You Want: The Science of Sexual Desire and How It Can Help You Improve Your Sex Life:

I will offer an analysis of the largest-ever survey of Americans’ sexual fantasies . . .

89 percent [of respondents] reported fantasizing about threesomes, 74 percent about orgies, and 61 percent about gangbangs. . . . [T]he majority of women reported having each of these sex fantasies . . .

More than three-quarters of the men and women I surveyed hope to eventually act on their favorite sexual fantasies.

Tell Me’s author has a PhD, is a former lecturer at Harvard and is a Research Fellow at the Kinsey Institute.

Re: the for-free in orgies-for-free

Full details coming ASAP. Excerpt:

Order-for-free is a proposed law of nature, hypothesized at book length in 1993 by a MacArthur Fellow(i.e., a “genius grant” recipient). Believers in the hypothesis include Nobel-Prize winners.

One type of order — complexity [1] — results from “networks of adaptive agents” (e.g., networks of people):

1. being subjected to selection-pressures that are new and/or are intensifying rapidly
2. adapting to these pressures

Adaptation that yields/increases complexity occurs at the boundary between order and chaos (i.e., in complex adaptive systems, agents are clustered at and around said boundary).

This clustering takes shape “for free” via “self-organized criticality” [2].

All told, complexity-for-free is shorthand for ‘complexity via adaptation via clustering-for-free’ [3].

Orgies-for-free is the variant of clustering-for-free that will (continue to) enable people to adapt to said particular selection-pressures.

[1] From a 2013 article on ScientificAmerican.com:

[Stephen] Hawking was asked what he thought of the common opinion that the twentieth century was that of biology and the twenty-first century would be that of physics. Hawking replied that in his opinion the twenty-first century would be the “century of complexity” [my emphasis].

Title of a 2005 book published by Harvard Business School Press:

Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics

Title of a 2014 book published by Oxford University Press:

Complexity and the Economy

[2] From 1996 book How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality:

The system had become “critical”! There were avalanches of all sizes just as there were clusters [my emphasis] of all sizes at the “critical” point for equilibrium phase transitions.

[3] From How Nature Works:

Self-organized criticality is so far the only known general mechanism to generate complexity.

— End of excerpt from details that are coming ASAP —

Possible variant of orgies-for-free, via humans’ closest primate relative

From 2018 book Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free (my emphasis):

[T]he bonobo, with whom we share nearly 99 percent of our DNA . . .

A 2017 study comparing human, chimp and bonobo muscles confirmed what previous molecular research had suggested: “Bonobo muscles have changed the least [from our common ancestor], which means they are the closest we can get to having a ‘living’ ancestor,” according to the research head of the George Washington University Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology.

. . . [P]erhaps the most remarkable thing about bonobos . . . Basically, they seem to have sex constantly throughout the day, with just about anybody. Meredith Small reports being in a room of three hundred or so primatologists and journalists of some early footage of bonobos in 1991, before much was known about them. Moments after the film began, the room fell utterly silent as the assembled took in the spectacle of these primates having sex more times and in more positions and combinations than most humans in any culture could even imagine.

. . . [B]onobos have sex to diffuse potential tension — when they come upon a cache of food, for example, or a new bonobo troop, having sex is a way to bond and take the stress level down. Parish pointed out that this was happening as we observed them being fed. Once the food was flung down to them, at least one pair of bonobos began to “consort” immediately. Only then did they get down to the business of eating.

Re: orgies-for-free will be women-FRIENDLY almost certainly

— Summary (details below) —

The link between professional success and polyamory is unlikely to favor a particular gender.

Again, a key to popularizing Adver-ties is facilitating the build-out of complements.

A big part of OSG’s facilitating will be advancing hyper-specialization (i.e., will center on maximizing the rate at which the business ecosystem that centers on Adver-ties complexifies).

Some/many of the hyper-specialists in said ecosystem can be expected to make flowmantic orgies women-FRIENDLY (i.e., can be expected to compete to make said orgies ever more civilized, artful, etc.). This can be expected in LARGE part because:

Amazon of CE . . . via popularizing Adver-ties . . .

Women are ~60% of recent college grads in many countries (e.g., the U.S.).

Women can invest B-B-BILLION$ via crowd-investing (e.g, via equity- crowdfunding).

So Amazon of CE and AI via making Adver-ties POPULAR with women . . .

OSG can employ/REWARD specialists who make flowmantic orgies women-FRIENDLY (e.g., employ via raising equity-crowdfunding from MANY women).

Re: the link between professional success and polyamory is unlikely to favor a particular gender

From Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free:

[A] 2017 study shows that among women aged twenty-five to twenty-nine, group sex and threesome experience equaled that of men the same age, and women were nearly twice as likely to have gone to a dungeon, BDSM, swingers’, or sex party.

Untrue’s author is a woman who has a PhD from Yale and a background in anthropology.

From 2013 book What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire:

[R]ecent science and women’s voices left me with pointed lessons:

That women’s desire — its inherent range and innate power — is an underestimated and constrained force, even in our times . . .

[T]his force is not, for the most part, sparked or sustained by emotional intimacy and safety . . .

[O]ne of our most comforting assumptions, . . . that female eros is much better made for monogamy than the male libido, is scarcely more than a fairy tale.

What’s author is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and the author of five books of nonfiction.

From a 2012 book:

The most patient and thorough research about the hook-up culture shows that over the long run, women benefit greatly from living in a world where they can have sexual adventure without commitment . . . and where they can enter into temporary relationships that don’t derail their careers.

To put it crudely, now feminist progress is largely dependent on hook-up culture. To a surprising degree, it is women — not men — who are perpetuating the culture . . .

The book’s author is a woman who’s a national correspondent for The Atlantic.

From What Do Women Want?:

Terri Fisher, a psychologist at Ohio State University . . . asked two hundred female and male undergraduates to complete a questionnaire dealing with masturbation and the use of porn. The subjects were split into groups and wrote their answers under three different conditions: either they were instructed to hand the finished questionnaire to a fellow college student, who waited just beyond an open door and was able to watch the subjects work; or they were given explicit assurances that their answers would be kept anonymous; or they were hooked up to a fake polygraph machine, with bogus electrodes taped to their hands, forearms, and necks.

The male replies were about the same under each of the three conditions, but for the females the circumstances were crucial. Many of the women in the first group — the ones who could well have worried that another student would see their answers — said they’d never masturbated, never checked out anything X-rated. The women who were told they would have strict confidentiality answered yes a lot more. And the women who thought they were wired to a lie detector replied almost identically to the men.

. . . When Fisher employed the same three conditions and asked women how many sexual partners they’d had, subjects in the first group gave answers 70 percent lower than women wearing the phony electrodes. Diligently, she ran this part of the experiment a second time, with three hundred new participants. The women who thought they were being polygraphed not only reported more partners than the rest of the female subjects, they also . . . gave numbers a good deal higher than the men.

From 2011 book Chick Lit and Postfeminism, published by the University of Virginia Press:

“The overwhelming popularity of chick lit . . . can be traced to the social reality of its readership with regard to work . . . [Via chick lit’s] attempts at synthesis of work and love it shows the challenges of straddling both realms.”

“One of chick lit’s contributions as a genre is the production of what we might call a sexual theory of late capitalism . . .”

“The high number of sexual partners the chick lit protagonist experiences parallels the romance’s pattern of the questing hero’s confronting false or impostor versions of his eventual beloved.”

“Though an offshoot of popular romance, chick lit transforms it significantly, virtually jettisoning the figure of the heterosexual [male] hero . . .

Men are not really valued as individuals as much as means to a lifestyle . . .

Even texts that end with marital happiness present a predominantly depressing take on marriage.

. . . Chick lit heroines’ preoccupation with money . . . is normative with recent real-life social science findings: researchers . . . have found that the worst fear for single women . . . is having no money.”

Possible subtitle of OfF

Startup comedy meets flowmantic comedy meets disrupting Bill Gates meets . . .

Re: disrupting Bill Gates

As seen above, my work on startup comedy is “optimized” to:

• disrupt BigCos that clone Adver-ties
• prevent said BigCos from undoing OSG via anti-competitive regulation of the AI-CE industry

Another threat to OSG will be a competing startup that:

• clones OSG’s business model (i.e., clones Adver-ties, produces startup comedies, etc.)
• is funded initially by people who have VASTLY more personal wealth than OSG’s founders (e.g., is funded by Bill Gates and/or Mark Zuckerberg, both of whom have donated/invested A LOT to advance CE)

OSG disrupting this kind of startup will equate to OSG producing startup comedies that:

• are popular
• GatesZuckCo doesn’t clone (i.e., doesn’t produce would-be close substitutes of)

Precedents re: “doesn’t clone”

Before Fifty Shades of Grey the “big-six” publishers wouldn’t publish “erotic romance” (ER), even though ER was a big, fast-growing business.

From a 2015 article on the website of New York magazine:

Engler started playing around with her own ideas, including a book about a woman who becomes the sex slave of a barbaric alien. That book, The Empress’ New Clothes, was rejected, along with a few of Engler’s novels, by Harlequin, the imprint long synonymous with the genre, and the romance divisions of New York’s big-five (then, six) publishers. According to Engler, the feedback was uniform: No one wants to read anything so graphic. (Most C-words you can think of appear approximately 30 times each in Empress,and the oral sex that Engler found glaringly absent from earlier bodice-rippers is commonplace and reciprocal.) “I was like, Either I’m a sexual deviant, which is always a possibility, or they’re wrong,” says Engler of publishers’ reluctance to print raunchy material. She sips from a can of Grapeade. “Turned out they were wrong.”

. . . Like Engler, Anson had been turned away from New York publishers for being “too racy.”

From 2012 book Fifty Writers on Fifty Shades of Grey:

At the 2011 Romance Writers of America Conference, I sat down with a traditional, female-owned publisher and pitched them an exclusive erotica line. They said they didn’t do erotica. However, after we revealed book sales and royalty statements for writers who were publishing in the digital marketplace they got excited. . . .

Then they wanted the dirty details.

Exactly what kind of books were these, they wondered. Well, BDSM, male-male, and ménage. For starters. Those are the digital bestsellers, the genres readers crave. But when we sent one of their romance editors some erotic manuscripts, she passed on the entire line and said it didn’t fit into their list. We knew it didn’t fit into their list; that’s why we approached them. It was something new and different. In the end, it was simply too different — too erotic.

Now? Just one year later, it’s all changed, and it’s all because of one English author, E. L. James, and her three naughty books.

. . . Romance is a multibillion-dollar business and erotic content is a huge part of that market.

Cover of a 2014 book:

More about the above

Coming daily to this publication.

Not coming to this publication

Information about the climax of OfF. This info can be purchased.

From 1998 book Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting, by Robert McKee:

Of the total creative effort represented in a finished work, 75 percent or more of a writer’s labor goes into designing story.

. . . [O]f the overwhelming effort that goes into designing story, 75 percent of that is focused on creating the climax of the last act.

. . . The Climax of the last act is your great imaginative leap.

Re: McKee’s estimates are credible

Title of a 2003 article in The New Yorker:

The Real McKee: Lessons of a screenwriting guru

From a 1998 article in Written By, the magazine of the Writer’s Guild of America (my emphases):

“The ideas [on Seinfeld] may be simple, but the execution is considerably more complicated.” [Staff writer] Shaffer continues: “It’s an intricately plotted show. The dialogue itself, that’s fun and doesn’t really take a long time to get into shape, especially when someone’s on the [rehearsal] floor. The part that can expand ’til however long you need to do it is the outline. It looks like we don’t have one — but that’s always been the hardest part. It’s like this sort of comic algebra, this comic math puzzle.”

“It is,” agrees [fellow staff writer] Berg, “but if you do it right, it’s a huge, huge payoff. There are shows where, when you get the outline right, you know it, and it makes the writing of it really, really easy, and makes the shooting really easy because everything just makes sense. So if you have a month to write a show, a lot of times you’ll spend all but three days on the outline, and then you’ll write the dialogue on top of that, and if the structure is there and everything is solid, it’s really easy to write.”

From said 2003 article:

“McKee has given the same screenplay course for twenty years — the same three-day, thirty-hour performance . . . Among the estimated forty thousand people who have taken the course are David Bowie, Ed Burns, Drew Carey (twice), John Cleese (three times), Kirk Douglas, Faye Dunaway, Emilio Estevez, Eddie Izzard, Quincy Jones (three times), Diane Keaton, Barry Manilow, Joan Rivers, Julia Roberts, Meg Ryan, Joel Schumacher, Brooke Shields, and Gloria Steinem. McKee is careful not to take direct credit, but he recently estimated that his alumni’s films have earned more than a billion dollars at the box office in the past year or so: he was thinking of the work of Andrew Stanton (who wrote and co-directed ‘Finding Nemo’), Peter Jackson (who co-wrote and directed ‘Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers’), Steve Koren (who co-wrote ‘Bruce Almighty’), and Zak Penn (who co-wrote the story for ‘X2’). . . . Pixar sends ten people to every McKee seminar in San Francisco; Miramax sent five or six to New York in 2001. Antonia Ellis, a producer of ‘Sex and the City,’ lists McKee’s course as ‘additional post-graduate course work’ on her HBO biography.

More re: the value of information about the climax of OfF

From Story:

Once the Climax is in hand, stories are in a significant way rewritten backward, not forward. . . . [W]e must work backward to support it [the Climax] in the fictional reality, supplying the hows and whys. We work back from the ending to make certain that by Idea and Counter-Idea every image, beat, action, or line of dialogue somehow relates to or sets up this grand payoff. All scenes must be thematically or structurally justified in the light of the Climax. If they can be cut without disturbing the impact of the ending, they must be cut.

If logic allows, climax subplots within the Central Plot’s Climax. This is a wonderful effect; one final action by the protagonist settles everything. When Rick puts Laszlo and Ilsa on the plane in CASABLANCA, he settles the Love Story main plot and the Political Drama subplot, converts Captain Renault to patriotism, kills Major Strasser, and, we feel, is the key to winning World War II . . . now that Rick is back in the fight.

If this multiplying effect is impossible, the least important subplots are best climaxed earliest, followed by the next most important, building overall to Climax of the Central Plot.

Big finish of this welcome to the publication

Thoughts? Questions? :-)

fruscica@gmail.com