Maximum Jailbreak: A new space media project
We’re excited to present our new space media project “Maximum Jailbreak,” with a magazine and Virtual Reality (VR) events for space enthusiasts like you. You are invited to participate.
A few weeks ago I drove from LA to Santa Cruz, through the awesome Big Sur, to meet Yalda Mousavinia and Marc M. Cohen. We discussed the role of space media and started planning a new media project.
Popular media have a unique potential for energizing whole generations with compelling space dreams and establishing a global, vibrant pro-space culture to drive public science policies and budgets, as well as private funding for space.
No public administration or business can ignore what the people really want.
In the sixties, kids wanted to be engineers and astronauts. In today’s world, too many kids cannot set their sights so high as more immediate challenges — rising living costs, student debt, and political strife — obscure the horizon. We intend to help them realign their vision and realize their aspirations.
First we looked for a catchy, inspiring and unique name for our project. It was Yalda who thought of “Maximum Jailbreak,” the title of a perceptive 2013 essay by Benedict Singleton. I loved the name at first sight and and wrote a review of Singleton’s essay.
Singleton elaborates on the ideas of Nikolai Fedorov and other Russian cosmists like Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, noting that “cosmism’s foundational gesture was to conceive of the earth as a trap. Its duty was therefore to understand the duty of philosophy, economics and design to be the creation of means to escape it.”
“This could be regarded as a jailbreak at the maximum possible scale, a heist in which the human species could steal itself from the vault of the Earth.”
Maximum Jailbreak: We want to break free of Earth’s gravity and go out there among the stars. We want to start now. We want to go back to the Moon to stay, then to Mars and other planets and moons in the solar system, and then to the stars. We want, we can, and we must.
We contacted Singleton, who graciously gave his blessing to the project and agreed to participate.
Maximum Jailbreak will go live in a few weeks at maximumjailbreak.com, with a space magazine and associated social media. A VR space for talks, events and informal gathering will follow. We’ll use the publishing platform Ghost and the VR platform High Fidelity.
We’ll cover news and views from the public space sector, the space industry, and all mainstream space actors. At the same time, we’ll especially focus on the emerging, decentralized movement of citizen scientists and space hackers.
We’ll also cover the emerging space economy, and sci/tech news relevant to space, including highly imaginative sci/tech for future space explorers and colonists. And we won’t forget science fiction and space art.
Make no mistake, this is a very ambitious project. We’ll strive to create a top media venture that will carry the voices of top space thinkers, experts, leaders, and enthusiasts. In particular, we want to carry, amplify and promote YOUR voice.
Please consider contributing to Maximum Jailbreak. We‘ll welcome and review your posts, videos, artwork, and suggestions. Being acutely aware that active contributors must be compensated, we’re designing and will implement a compensation scheme.
We’re launching a logo design competition for Maximum Jailbreak, with a reward to the winner. Please join the Space Decentral forum and chat to participate.
Cover picture from Wikimedia Commons.
