Sunday, June 7, 2009

House of M: Beware the Ideas of March

A lot of people have been talking to me about ideas.

Truth is, everyone has a lot of ideas. I have enough stories to last me 50 years of books, movies, TV series, comics and whatever else. I am sure the tea-lady in any office would also have infinite ideas in her brain. Our ideas, our dreams and our stories differentiate us from babboons.

The problem is whether it is appropriate for a particular project or setup, and who the hell is going to develop those ideas?

I've seen great execution of lame ideas, and flaccid implementation of great ones.

That's why I give my ideas freely. Usually, I get more ideas by sharing them with people. Hearing myself explain it to people help dispel the aura of invincibility it has inside my mind. It makes it stronger. Some ideas are only born from my subconcious when I tell it to people, almost automatically.

Idiots are terrified or intimidated by ideas. They are scared of idea people, and would try to devalue the worth of people with ideas.

One thing people don't understand is how ideas grow. When you say it or put it on a piece of paper, it changes form, and sometimes, content.

When you put an idea out there, it is in turn shaped by the medium, and by the respective perspectives of people who force their selves on the ideas.

Ideas are like Schrodinger's Cat. It is the perspective of the viewer who eventually forces the thing to be what form it can be.

In cyberpunk - a marriage of high tech and low-life - fiction, it is often demonstrated that something constructed for one thing usually gets used as something completely other.

The Internet was constructed to share information with the world. How many people who was involved with it had the realisation that one day it would be used primarily for porn?

High Speed Broadband was pushed in part by visions of teleconferencing and revolutionising the way people work.

Did they ever even suspect that it could give birth to a new form of prostitution - webcam whoring?

Cartoons were never meant to be made into hentai, but there you go.

Handphone's backlight was to ensure users can read what's on the screen. Not as a makeshift torchlight.

In the same manner a hammer was not meant to keep my balls cold.

The misuse and abuse of systems, tools and fundementally, ideas, is part and parcel of evolution and revolutions.

So a few weeks back, when somebody told me not to be so free with my ideas, lest they be stolen, I simply shrugged.

Without a complete understanding of the human psyche, cultural anthropology and psycho-history - which no one has, really - people who play around with ideas they do not fully comprehend risk only opening a Pandora's Box of stupid proportions.