I love the white mirror positive angle, but disappointed you’re making government the bad guy. Not what we need right now, it’s glaringly red-coded, and there are many many examples of major innovations created and supported by government, that could not have happened otherwise.
Well, I don’t write an awesome newsletter and have the same skills, so hard to say :-)
But agree you need conflict. Maybe it’s a cabal of legacy companies who stand to loose from new tech, colluding with regulators—like a public-private partnership of sorts to block innovation. Good guys are entrepreneurs with beneficial new tech—mrna-type stuff?— working with a darpa-type org in another part of the government—the good part—to get their product to market despite regulatory capture and industry buying politicians. cross those lines.
I‘m an avid reader though and look forward to hearing more—good luck!
The problem with having Big Tech be the bad guy is that it's a cliché, and it's the same problem again: Why would the tech be bad?
The government being bad is very common too in science fiction, from Star Wars (the Empire!) to The Hunger Games, to 1984. I'd say in all 3 cases, they're caricatures of government. That's not what I want to do. There's a reason why regulations are what they are. Their existence is not bad, their details are what's overcautious. But for that nuance to emerge, you need to have the 2 sides to confront each other, and expose each other's flaws.
Perhaps start by introducing one of the entrepreneurs as a flawed character (overly lavish wedding, perhaps he fires someone who is struggling but not performing their job) and build him up by showing how he behaves when tested. Have him be somewhat wealthy to begin with.
The main entrepreneur might make the most sense as a secondary character that the audience has to warm up to. Perhaps the initial protagonist could be someone honorable and mildly idealistic who helps the government pass growth restrictions, for reasons that are somewhat understandable at the time. This person could have a run-in with a self interested party using the government to do crony capitalism and be forced to take a job in the private sector.
Ordinary workers who come to your desert city need to have screen time, to deliberately show the viewer how innovation/capitalism creates prosperity at the lower levels of the income ladder.
John is correct that this trailer is very “red-coded”. Gives Atlas Shrugged; you’ll need to hook your audience better before delivering the pro-growth message.
I think this is the key issue. I've already read Atlas Shrugged and just thought it came off as Nerd Revenge Porn. Really careful plotting and character design (and few to zero lengthy philosophical monologues) will help you avoid the worst of this.
Good points. I actually wasn't thinking big tech--more like the taxi industry opposing Uber. But I hear you.
Perhaps what I was trying to say was, it could be possible to have good and bad, and ambiguous in all the major players. I've known great people at oil companies (an industry I abhor), sociopaths at startups (a sector I adore), good bad and meh folks in government, etc.
Your last sentence there lands--if nuance emerges, that would likely feel right and real.
The state institutions / structures are the problem in China and places like Iran (if they are sources of inspiration as yo umention) -- but the corporate ones, the "broligarchy" and the greed based on which they are operating are the real problem in the US, at least at this moment, but it will certainly have consequences in the longer run. If you misrepresent that, you're falsifying the real story.
I mean - Amazon are not keeping their workers on salaries that make them dependent on food stamps because of any law or political structure. They perefer to bribe the administration instead of paying their workers, because of their intrinsic philosophy.
China and Islam are definitely there, even though I'm sure those who belong to these cultures might disagree that they are problematic. In that same way, there are blind spots in the beliefs of Westerners, and I'd like to help expose them.
Amazon is a great example. You're right that they are tough with their blue-collar employees. But also with their white-collar ones. And the result is one of the best companies in the world, that brings tremendous value to everybody. You can get virtually anything, anywhere, at a reasonable price, by pressing a button! And I'd argue that the benefit of hundreds of millions of people are worth the effort of the hundreds of thousands who do this.
Can they be less brutal? Yes, of course. Maybe it should be easier to take a pee break. But also, who decided that policy? What data did they see to make that decision? How much was the previous policy abused? It's hard to judge without the specifics.
And that's a lot of what I want to do with the series. It's too simplistic to say "X policy is good/bad". But if you have 2 characters fighting it off, and you can see the consequences of their actions, you can get a much deeper understanding of the problem.
Also, I do think the West has problems inside, like degrowthers and watermelons.
Your Socotra entrepreneurs are described as asking for some form of concentrated, unaccountable power over a commons: money, force, water, land, other species. That is what law and justice as institutions exist to constrain; not because institutions are cautious by temperament, but because history's answer to "will the people holding unchecked power abuse it" is close to uniformly yes, whoever they are. -- Your own series of historical materials from virtually everywhere around the world is showing exactly that.
You are asking that question about the security force ("But would the security police never abuse their power?") as a plot hook, which can be understood (drama vs propaganda).
But political theory doesn't treat it as a hook, it treats it as the whole reason for having law prior to power, not law as an obstacle power runs into afterward...
Environmental and biotech regulation exists largely to handle externalities, costs one actor imposes on people who never agreed to bear them (a habitat destroyed, a species altered, a climate pattern shifted "with unintended consequences on some countries"), which you mention once, then seemingly drop - but I am aware this is just a trailer and a preliminary write-up. That is a basic problem markets don't solve on their own.
From my point of view, the structural problem with your show is that "freedom" is written as freedom from interference (negative liberty, do what you want if you're not visibly bothering someone). Institutions are written as the opposite of "freedom" rather than as republican liberty's actual claim: freedom from domination, which requires exactly the checks the Socotra founders are fleeing. Those are two coherent, competing traditions in political philosophy and based on all I've seen you writing before I expected you to be more balanced about it. :D
The trailer was much more nuanced, and nobody understood it. So I had to make it more explicit. What you say is right but inmpossible to communicate in 3min!
I agree - a lot of the people commenting are implicitly referring to your previous materials. So you got propely good feedback from people who like your message overall, which is brilliant. :)
I always wish to see (in shows) how a corrupt government official got that way or how a seemingly good politico becomes closer to oppressive ... it creates that tension that there are real people in those positions and their back story fascinates people only bc they can never see themselves as the bad guy.
So maybe develop the characters to the point where people have to really wrestle w why the "good guys" are at the point of fleeing interference and building their techtopia. And what really will keep them from becoming the "bad guys" there? Location and tech and freedom may change in their new home/life but the one thing that didn't change was - people.
I would love to see this fully developed. It is far more than 1 season series!
Institutions work differently in different political structures, that's what I'm trying to suggest (my background is in sociology and I teach IR, so you know where I'm coming from :D ).
If "institution" in your story is one undifferentiated antagonist type, the friction in every arena ends up feeling the same, a bureaucrat says no, instead of textured by how that particular system actually generates resistance.
I would also like to know if any "institutional character" gets a legitimate, non-fearful reason to object, or if they're structurally cast as obstacles from the outset - or if there are any positive takes on istitutions (because there is resistence in each of the systems you;re presenting and it looks different based on what tools it can use and what can effectively generate as a result -- e.g. Islam isn't a state-type institution at all).
Of course it has to be different in each arena, otherwise why have different arenas?
China is the CCP's aim of social uniformity for harmony.
The West pushes to preserve individualism, while banning anything that might cause harm
Islam is the fight between a conservative view that harks back to the 600s, and a modern one that struggles to launch Islam into the 21st century.
All institutional characters get legitimate reasons to object. Even the point made in the trailer, "No individual should own the infrastructure of civilization", is a very legitimate perspective.
Surprising that Atlas Shrugged is not in the inspiration list. The 'regulations bad' plot line along with 'smart entrepreneurial people band together to build the new society away from the old world' reminds me of this book quite a bit. Are you familiar with the works of Ayn Rand?
I read it, but it's way too mickey mouse to me. It's too one-sided, and John Galt & co leave to "do business freely"... but what exactly? I found that boring. They were escaping from, not trying to build something new.
It's also horribly politically coded, which is a net negative.
As a long time reader of yours, I agree you could make good TV narratives, though the dialogue and scenes are often the trickier part. I love the enthusiasm, and I'm a big fan of GOT and The Expanse.
Winning the $2.5million would be a great boost, but a show like you are describing would seem to be more expensive( GOT season 1 was around $50-60 million).
With that being said, I have written a few sci-fi screenplays, one about a more China-like US government, and another about a scenario involving gene editing. One of them won an award and allowed me to be mentored by the creator of the Apple TV show WeCrashed( about WeWork). If you need a pair of eyes to look at any of your materials I'd be happy to do it for free, since I've read so many of your articles
I will know if I need to write it in the coming couple of days or so. If I do, your eyes would be useful. Can you reply to one of my newsletter emails so I have your email address?
Musk made a new fashion to accuse anything standing in his way be a civilisation-ending conspirator. The rest of the oligarchy is following fast: preventing them from getting more power = back to stone age.
Stay away from these absolutists, man. The only absolute there is a few guys' insatiable hunger for more power.
Oh and if you want Americans to stop fearing new tech and embrace progress, it starts by taming the harmful sides of existing tech. AKA, against the interest of the new oligarchs. Or at least their short-term interest.
Preliminary: I wish all the best to your series, and I do hope to be able to see it. However, you have two major story plots flaws, IMHO.
- Why would a government "ban" all technology or the most relevant of them (i.e. healthcare). There is no reason. And throughout history, while there were anti-tech movements (and of course the luddites are the most obvious example) 1) they had practical reason to protest and get the government to act (protecting lobbies, preserving some other resource, you name it) and 2) they lost. Always. No government would be so stupid to ban a technology that improves the life of its citizen (and the economy, and the taxes, and the electorate, etc. etc.) and survive long. On top of that, many technologies simply become "de facto" part of the fabric of society, wether the government wants it or not (electricity is a good example). Only small communities of idiots can allow to ban useful technology and think to survive. But this takes the major lever of the story out, i.e. why would the founders take up and leave.
- the Atlas Shrugged effect. Please get some time to read it. It's an awful series of book that could have been essentially a 100-page assay (which is also present under the form of speech at a certain point, btw), and that understood exactly nothing of the motivation of people and governments, even though it pinned down useful mechanism and character arcs for your plot. And I am saying read it, and don't just convert it into an AI podcast, because you need to see how flawed the idea of "the philosophical hero who rejects corrupt society and found an utopian community" is when you compare it to reality. (But then again, you like Srinivasan's rethoric about crypto, so maybe this will also fall flat )
I made a comment after watching the trailer before reading on for your explantion. You wanted feedback, good, bad, or indifferent, so I tried to give you that. Thanks for the entire article. I've written books and know how complex that is. I've no interest in doing further such projects but am fascinated with you younger folk who are out there swinging away with good hearts and great skills to improve experience for yourselves and the rest of us. I'm imspired to forward your description of this experience to this point to my friends who are still in the trenches punching away. Your detailed explantion is very helpful. I'm sure anyone who reads you in general, and of course specifically this recent new project effort, cheers you on and wishes the best for you, your family, and this specific cinema series. We'll do what we can to help.
As a windsurfer that scours the globe in search of wind, I'm sorry to bring bad news: you missed one crucial aspect: Socotra is so damn windy that even walking is hard. Forget about any outside activity for months on end.
I've only ever been to Masirah island, which is in Oman, and further up the monsoon path. Because of its position in the monsoon path, Masirah gets less wind, for less amount of time.
But Masirah is still the windiest place I have ever visited. During the summer monsoon, the wind is relentless, day and night. Anything not bolted down flies away. Walking is difficult. I've had enough of it after 10 days. And that's coming from someone that has moved to Canary Islands in search of wind.
Based on the monsoon maps, Socotra gets it way worse.
Also would love to see currents of future evolutionary tensions among the good guys – such as between Singapore’s land-as-a-commons model for microstates, purely private communities, and nomadic phyles.
Another front for dramatic tension in the series could be tools and challenge offers by off-planet ventures to help Earthbound folks become more free.
Look forward to seeing you at the September 25 Moonshots in Los Angeles!
Visually impressive but horribly bias against government and laughably romanticised in favor of AI companies/founders. The alternative storyline is possibly: https://ifanyonebuildsit.com/
"Every technology we ban, they build anyway: we're hunting an idea."
I love this work's concept and think there is huge potential to create a real epic, but this quote is a thread from which I think I can unravel some issues.
● Frankly: it is too contrived, and unrealistic.
【hunting an idea】 simply isn't something a statist would ever admit to themselves, let alone others: they're hunting mad scientists who will destroy the world and commit great crimes against humanity at an unprecedented scale or selfish oligarchs who prioritize expediency and control over temperance and collwctive health or safety; mavericks who are eroding the boundaries of decency & justice for profit.
● What idea is being hunted exactly & why?
If this idea is 【people should be free to build】, then conceptualizing that and rejecting it would suggest a clarity of oppression and psychological utilitarianism that would prevent her from coloring it in a gentle way like describing it as an "idea": it is a 【threat to peace】.
● She seems too simple, make her a mastermind.
Evil can also foster sophisticated strategists and deep thinkers who inexplicably mirror many of the virtues a genius rational protaganist would probably embody. Making her a more poignant and convincing intellect while retaining an authoritarian socialist worldview that seems dichotomous with her mental virtues would likely create a more dynsmic & refreshing plot.
● "we ban it" to "they make it"
This chronology entails a relationship of defiance and subversion of socialist intent, wherein capital or tech mavericks are skirting the influence and dysphoria of statist policies and injustices... but the way that you have depicted it seems far too cut-and-dry—clean & emphatic~ it is missing the messy realism of a state that hypocritically uses technology by state sanction that it bans others' use of; in order to fulfill special needs or tool state control & efficiency *the sort of approach it would take to have a management or adminstrative behemoth capable of confidently troubling itself with runaway/defecting big brains. The point is: scrambling for technological dominance whilst persecuting 'technocrats' requires a level of delicacy and machination that was too oversimplified.
In conclusion, I love the possibilities of 【breaching new horizons in a claustrophobia-inducing world whose safetyrails have turned into prisonbars that are slowly chasing you around the cell and converting themselves into nooses in realtime】... but there is a certain superficiality and subtle dramatic naïvete × lack of a truly compelling & inspiring anchor character.
*
I am confident I can give you more positive suggestions... particularly: create a positive framework for the concept that delivers a deeply caustic challenge to your plot-chronology thusfar, which basically just means offer an alternative that still looks like your concept to make you think deeply and thoroughly-consider your comprehensivity; if you want my help—I am interested & willing to challenge.
Maybe there's only so much you can put in a trailer, but this could use just a little bit of subtlety and gray area. Right now your heroes appear to be fighting against the government of Harrison Bergeron, and that story only works once (and was probably actually a send up of lack of subtlety in Atlas Shrugged).
Real people in government aren't evil, they're mostly just people, most even trying to do good, but not wanting to do anything that will rock the boat or get them fired. Maybe one of them even has some kind of personal vendetta because their relative died testing out a new technology (a la the 2000 french gene therapy leukemia cases), or because of lack of government regulation (a la thalidomide). These are dated examples and likely not the best, just the first ones that popped into my head. You have to make a real case for why the government works the way it does in order to show why it's still wrong. And on the other side, the capitalists can't all be good. Some drama can be made between thier different visions for Socitra, and one of them should turn out to be the progressive stereotype of a self-interested nihilist, in order to show your real heroes are able to handle that.
As might be expected from you, the choice of Socotra is great, I started off thinking your heroes had to build this island with some crazy technology only to find out it is real, and based on your research makes a lot of sense. Very well done.
Maybe you already planned this, but I think your first season needs to narrow your focus to just your origin story and just 2 or 3 factions - no mars yet, and probably no China. Just your billionaires vs the careful establishment, and maybe incorporating the inhabitants of Socotra when the time comes, although I'm not sure how to make that plot interesting, except to have the establishment try to block the billionaires from buying it by diingenuously convincing the inhabitants it will be bad
I love the white mirror positive angle, but disappointed you’re making government the bad guy. Not what we need right now, it’s glaringly red-coded, and there are many many examples of major innovations created and supported by government, that could not have happened otherwise.
How would you approach it?
Well, I don’t write an awesome newsletter and have the same skills, so hard to say :-)
But agree you need conflict. Maybe it’s a cabal of legacy companies who stand to loose from new tech, colluding with regulators—like a public-private partnership of sorts to block innovation. Good guys are entrepreneurs with beneficial new tech—mrna-type stuff?— working with a darpa-type org in another part of the government—the good part—to get their product to market despite regulatory capture and industry buying politicians. cross those lines.
I‘m an avid reader though and look forward to hearing more—good luck!
Thanks!
The problem with having Big Tech be the bad guy is that it's a cliché, and it's the same problem again: Why would the tech be bad?
The government being bad is very common too in science fiction, from Star Wars (the Empire!) to The Hunger Games, to 1984. I'd say in all 3 cases, they're caricatures of government. That's not what I want to do. There's a reason why regulations are what they are. Their existence is not bad, their details are what's overcautious. But for that nuance to emerge, you need to have the 2 sides to confront each other, and expose each other's flaws.
Perhaps start by introducing one of the entrepreneurs as a flawed character (overly lavish wedding, perhaps he fires someone who is struggling but not performing their job) and build him up by showing how he behaves when tested. Have him be somewhat wealthy to begin with.
The main entrepreneur might make the most sense as a secondary character that the audience has to warm up to. Perhaps the initial protagonist could be someone honorable and mildly idealistic who helps the government pass growth restrictions, for reasons that are somewhat understandable at the time. This person could have a run-in with a self interested party using the government to do crony capitalism and be forced to take a job in the private sector.
Ordinary workers who come to your desert city need to have screen time, to deliberately show the viewer how innovation/capitalism creates prosperity at the lower levels of the income ladder.
John is correct that this trailer is very “red-coded”. Gives Atlas Shrugged; you’ll need to hook your audience better before delivering the pro-growth message.
I think this is the key issue. I've already read Atlas Shrugged and just thought it came off as Nerd Revenge Porn. Really careful plotting and character design (and few to zero lengthy philosophical monologues) will help you avoid the worst of this.
Good points. I actually wasn't thinking big tech--more like the taxi industry opposing Uber. But I hear you.
Perhaps what I was trying to say was, it could be possible to have good and bad, and ambiguous in all the major players. I've known great people at oil companies (an industry I abhor), sociopaths at startups (a sector I adore), good bad and meh folks in government, etc.
Your last sentence there lands--if nuance emerges, that would likely feel right and real.
Maybe add few common people genuinely scared about how new technologies can change the world they know and love.
Or put an entire grassroots luddite movement into the mix.
Different governments.. the bad the lame the good.
Only through good governance to we have a prayer. John is right
The state institutions / structures are the problem in China and places like Iran (if they are sources of inspiration as yo umention) -- but the corporate ones, the "broligarchy" and the greed based on which they are operating are the real problem in the US, at least at this moment, but it will certainly have consequences in the longer run. If you misrepresent that, you're falsifying the real story.
I mean - Amazon are not keeping their workers on salaries that make them dependent on food stamps because of any law or political structure. They perefer to bribe the administration instead of paying their workers, because of their intrinsic philosophy.
China and Islam are definitely there, even though I'm sure those who belong to these cultures might disagree that they are problematic. In that same way, there are blind spots in the beliefs of Westerners, and I'd like to help expose them.
Amazon is a great example. You're right that they are tough with their blue-collar employees. But also with their white-collar ones. And the result is one of the best companies in the world, that brings tremendous value to everybody. You can get virtually anything, anywhere, at a reasonable price, by pressing a button! And I'd argue that the benefit of hundreds of millions of people are worth the effort of the hundreds of thousands who do this.
Can they be less brutal? Yes, of course. Maybe it should be easier to take a pee break. But also, who decided that policy? What data did they see to make that decision? How much was the previous policy abused? It's hard to judge without the specifics.
And that's a lot of what I want to do with the series. It's too simplistic to say "X policy is good/bad". But if you have 2 characters fighting it off, and you can see the consequences of their actions, you can get a much deeper understanding of the problem.
Also, I do think the West has problems inside, like degrowthers and watermelons.
Your Socotra entrepreneurs are described as asking for some form of concentrated, unaccountable power over a commons: money, force, water, land, other species. That is what law and justice as institutions exist to constrain; not because institutions are cautious by temperament, but because history's answer to "will the people holding unchecked power abuse it" is close to uniformly yes, whoever they are. -- Your own series of historical materials from virtually everywhere around the world is showing exactly that.
You are asking that question about the security force ("But would the security police never abuse their power?") as a plot hook, which can be understood (drama vs propaganda).
But political theory doesn't treat it as a hook, it treats it as the whole reason for having law prior to power, not law as an obstacle power runs into afterward...
Environmental and biotech regulation exists largely to handle externalities, costs one actor imposes on people who never agreed to bear them (a habitat destroyed, a species altered, a climate pattern shifted "with unintended consequences on some countries"), which you mention once, then seemingly drop - but I am aware this is just a trailer and a preliminary write-up. That is a basic problem markets don't solve on their own.
From my point of view, the structural problem with your show is that "freedom" is written as freedom from interference (negative liberty, do what you want if you're not visibly bothering someone). Institutions are written as the opposite of "freedom" rather than as republican liberty's actual claim: freedom from domination, which requires exactly the checks the Socotra founders are fleeing. Those are two coherent, competing traditions in political philosophy and based on all I've seen you writing before I expected you to be more balanced about it. :D
The trailer was much more nuanced, and nobody understood it. So I had to make it more explicit. What you say is right but inmpossible to communicate in 3min!
I agree - a lot of the people commenting are implicitly referring to your previous materials. So you got propely good feedback from people who like your message overall, which is brilliant. :)
I always wish to see (in shows) how a corrupt government official got that way or how a seemingly good politico becomes closer to oppressive ... it creates that tension that there are real people in those positions and their back story fascinates people only bc they can never see themselves as the bad guy.
So maybe develop the characters to the point where people have to really wrestle w why the "good guys" are at the point of fleeing interference and building their techtopia. And what really will keep them from becoming the "bad guys" there? Location and tech and freedom may change in their new home/life but the one thing that didn't change was - people.
I would love to see this fully developed. It is far more than 1 season series!
Yes!
Institutions work differently in different political structures, that's what I'm trying to suggest (my background is in sociology and I teach IR, so you know where I'm coming from :D ).
If "institution" in your story is one undifferentiated antagonist type, the friction in every arena ends up feeling the same, a bureaucrat says no, instead of textured by how that particular system actually generates resistance.
I would also like to know if any "institutional character" gets a legitimate, non-fearful reason to object, or if they're structurally cast as obstacles from the outset - or if there are any positive takes on istitutions (because there is resistence in each of the systems you;re presenting and it looks different based on what tools it can use and what can effectively generate as a result -- e.g. Islam isn't a state-type institution at all).
Of course it has to be different in each arena, otherwise why have different arenas?
China is the CCP's aim of social uniformity for harmony.
The West pushes to preserve individualism, while banning anything that might cause harm
Islam is the fight between a conservative view that harks back to the 600s, and a modern one that struggles to launch Islam into the 21st century.
All institutional characters get legitimate reasons to object. Even the point made in the trailer, "No individual should own the infrastructure of civilization", is a very legitimate perspective.
Surprising that Atlas Shrugged is not in the inspiration list. The 'regulations bad' plot line along with 'smart entrepreneurial people band together to build the new society away from the old world' reminds me of this book quite a bit. Are you familiar with the works of Ayn Rand?
I read it, but it's way too mickey mouse to me. It's too one-sided, and John Galt & co leave to "do business freely"... but what exactly? I found that boring. They were escaping from, not trying to build something new.
It's also horribly politically coded, which is a net negative.
I think it is still the closest reference for the storyline as a whole, just more focused on the regulation part than the technology part.
As a long time reader of yours, I agree you could make good TV narratives, though the dialogue and scenes are often the trickier part. I love the enthusiasm, and I'm a big fan of GOT and The Expanse.
Winning the $2.5million would be a great boost, but a show like you are describing would seem to be more expensive( GOT season 1 was around $50-60 million).
With that being said, I have written a few sci-fi screenplays, one about a more China-like US government, and another about a scenario involving gene editing. One of them won an award and allowed me to be mentored by the creator of the Apple TV show WeCrashed( about WeWork). If you need a pair of eyes to look at any of your materials I'd be happy to do it for free, since I've read so many of your articles
That would be super cool, Alan. Yes!
I will know if I need to write it in the coming couple of days or so. If I do, your eyes would be useful. Can you reply to one of my newsletter emails so I have your email address?
Yes, I will do that! Best of luck to you with this project.
Only a Sith deals in absolutes. As we all know.
Musk made a new fashion to accuse anything standing in his way be a civilisation-ending conspirator. The rest of the oligarchy is following fast: preventing them from getting more power = back to stone age.
Stay away from these absolutists, man. The only absolute there is a few guys' insatiable hunger for more power.
Oh and if you want Americans to stop fearing new tech and embrace progress, it starts by taming the harmful sides of existing tech. AKA, against the interest of the new oligarchs. Or at least their short-term interest.
Preliminary: I wish all the best to your series, and I do hope to be able to see it. However, you have two major story plots flaws, IMHO.
- Why would a government "ban" all technology or the most relevant of them (i.e. healthcare). There is no reason. And throughout history, while there were anti-tech movements (and of course the luddites are the most obvious example) 1) they had practical reason to protest and get the government to act (protecting lobbies, preserving some other resource, you name it) and 2) they lost. Always. No government would be so stupid to ban a technology that improves the life of its citizen (and the economy, and the taxes, and the electorate, etc. etc.) and survive long. On top of that, many technologies simply become "de facto" part of the fabric of society, wether the government wants it or not (electricity is a good example). Only small communities of idiots can allow to ban useful technology and think to survive. But this takes the major lever of the story out, i.e. why would the founders take up and leave.
- the Atlas Shrugged effect. Please get some time to read it. It's an awful series of book that could have been essentially a 100-page assay (which is also present under the form of speech at a certain point, btw), and that understood exactly nothing of the motivation of people and governments, even though it pinned down useful mechanism and character arcs for your plot. And I am saying read it, and don't just convert it into an AI podcast, because you need to see how flawed the idea of "the philosophical hero who rejects corrupt society and found an utopian community" is when you compare it to reality. (But then again, you like Srinivasan's rethoric about crypto, so maybe this will also fall flat )
Love you and good luck! ;)
Thanks!
1. There are already lots of regulations that slow down healthcare in a way that is bad overall.
2. I read Atlas Shrugged! I agree it's so one-sided it's painful to read.
I made a comment after watching the trailer before reading on for your explantion. You wanted feedback, good, bad, or indifferent, so I tried to give you that. Thanks for the entire article. I've written books and know how complex that is. I've no interest in doing further such projects but am fascinated with you younger folk who are out there swinging away with good hearts and great skills to improve experience for yourselves and the rest of us. I'm imspired to forward your description of this experience to this point to my friends who are still in the trenches punching away. Your detailed explantion is very helpful. I'm sure anyone who reads you in general, and of course specifically this recent new project effort, cheers you on and wishes the best for you, your family, and this specific cinema series. We'll do what we can to help.
Thank you Jay, I appreciate!
Very ambitious Tomas. It does sound like a very compelling story.
As a windsurfer that scours the globe in search of wind, I'm sorry to bring bad news: you missed one crucial aspect: Socotra is so damn windy that even walking is hard. Forget about any outside activity for months on end.
I heard. Which parts, and at what part of the year? This is something I know I need to look into, but haven't yet
I've only ever been to Masirah island, which is in Oman, and further up the monsoon path. Because of its position in the monsoon path, Masirah gets less wind, for less amount of time.
But Masirah is still the windiest place I have ever visited. During the summer monsoon, the wind is relentless, day and night. Anything not bolted down flies away. Walking is difficult. I've had enough of it after 10 days. And that's coming from someone that has moved to Canary Islands in search of wind.
Based on the monsoon maps, Socotra gets it way worse.
windfinder.com has multi-year wind statistics:
* https://www.windfinder.com/windstatistics/masirah
* https://www.windfinder.com/windstatistics/socotra_airport_hadibo
This tells me Socotra is un-livable from May to October.
Inspiring trailer!
Also would love to see currents of future evolutionary tensions among the good guys – such as between Singapore’s land-as-a-commons model for microstates, purely private communities, and nomadic phyles.
Another front for dramatic tension in the series could be tools and challenge offers by off-planet ventures to help Earthbound folks become more free.
Look forward to seeing you at the September 25 Moonshots in Los Angeles!
So you'll be there? Nice!
Yes, there's a Mars colony!
Godspeed! Loved "progress finds a way"
It's an interesting project Tomas.
I'm an Engineer, and tend to think that problems are there for solving.
But I'm also mindful that change can result in winners and losers, including via technological progress.
Visually impressive but horribly bias against government and laughably romanticised in favor of AI companies/founders. The alternative storyline is possibly: https://ifanyonebuildsit.com/
Amazing project Tomas ! And it’s great you are participating in Peter Diamandis’s prize ;)
"Every technology we ban, they build anyway: we're hunting an idea."
I love this work's concept and think there is huge potential to create a real epic, but this quote is a thread from which I think I can unravel some issues.
● Frankly: it is too contrived, and unrealistic.
【hunting an idea】 simply isn't something a statist would ever admit to themselves, let alone others: they're hunting mad scientists who will destroy the world and commit great crimes against humanity at an unprecedented scale or selfish oligarchs who prioritize expediency and control over temperance and collwctive health or safety; mavericks who are eroding the boundaries of decency & justice for profit.
● What idea is being hunted exactly & why?
If this idea is 【people should be free to build】, then conceptualizing that and rejecting it would suggest a clarity of oppression and psychological utilitarianism that would prevent her from coloring it in a gentle way like describing it as an "idea": it is a 【threat to peace】.
● She seems too simple, make her a mastermind.
Evil can also foster sophisticated strategists and deep thinkers who inexplicably mirror many of the virtues a genius rational protaganist would probably embody. Making her a more poignant and convincing intellect while retaining an authoritarian socialist worldview that seems dichotomous with her mental virtues would likely create a more dynsmic & refreshing plot.
● "we ban it" to "they make it"
This chronology entails a relationship of defiance and subversion of socialist intent, wherein capital or tech mavericks are skirting the influence and dysphoria of statist policies and injustices... but the way that you have depicted it seems far too cut-and-dry—clean & emphatic~ it is missing the messy realism of a state that hypocritically uses technology by state sanction that it bans others' use of; in order to fulfill special needs or tool state control & efficiency *the sort of approach it would take to have a management or adminstrative behemoth capable of confidently troubling itself with runaway/defecting big brains. The point is: scrambling for technological dominance whilst persecuting 'technocrats' requires a level of delicacy and machination that was too oversimplified.
In conclusion, I love the possibilities of 【breaching new horizons in a claustrophobia-inducing world whose safetyrails have turned into prisonbars that are slowly chasing you around the cell and converting themselves into nooses in realtime】... but there is a certain superficiality and subtle dramatic naïvete × lack of a truly compelling & inspiring anchor character.
*
I am confident I can give you more positive suggestions... particularly: create a positive framework for the concept that delivers a deeply caustic challenge to your plot-chronology thusfar, which basically just means offer an alternative that still looks like your concept to make you think deeply and thoroughly-consider your comprehensivity; if you want my help—I am interested & willing to challenge.
How cool is this. The Black Mirror but White Mirror framing is great, we need more optimistic futures on screen.
Maybe there's only so much you can put in a trailer, but this could use just a little bit of subtlety and gray area. Right now your heroes appear to be fighting against the government of Harrison Bergeron, and that story only works once (and was probably actually a send up of lack of subtlety in Atlas Shrugged).
Real people in government aren't evil, they're mostly just people, most even trying to do good, but not wanting to do anything that will rock the boat or get them fired. Maybe one of them even has some kind of personal vendetta because their relative died testing out a new technology (a la the 2000 french gene therapy leukemia cases), or because of lack of government regulation (a la thalidomide). These are dated examples and likely not the best, just the first ones that popped into my head. You have to make a real case for why the government works the way it does in order to show why it's still wrong. And on the other side, the capitalists can't all be good. Some drama can be made between thier different visions for Socitra, and one of them should turn out to be the progressive stereotype of a self-interested nihilist, in order to show your real heroes are able to handle that.
As might be expected from you, the choice of Socotra is great, I started off thinking your heroes had to build this island with some crazy technology only to find out it is real, and based on your research makes a lot of sense. Very well done.
Maybe you already planned this, but I think your first season needs to narrow your focus to just your origin story and just 2 or 3 factions - no mars yet, and probably no China. Just your billionaires vs the careful establishment, and maybe incorporating the inhabitants of Socotra when the time comes, although I'm not sure how to make that plot interesting, except to have the establishment try to block the billionaires from buying it by diingenuously convincing the inhabitants it will be bad
You add elements little by little not all at once. That's for sure.
You know, I'm glad it's "too obvious" now, because 24h before releasing, it was "incomprehensible". The entire change was basically the cards!