72 (16)
In that book [Reading Television, 1978], the term ‘bardic function’ was coined to describe the active relationship between TV and viewers, where the book argued, TV programming and mode of address use the shared resources of narrative and language to deal with social change and conflict, bringing together the worlds of decision-makers (news), central meaning systems (entertainment) and audiences (‘vertically through the social scale’) to make sense of the experience of modernity.”

73-76 (17-19)
“Blaming the popular media for immoral, tasteless, sycophantic, sexist, senseless and disreputable behaviour is nothing new.” Taliesin, Chief Bard of Britain, criticised newcomers / new art perhaps as far back as the sixth century.

78 (N/A)
The antecedents of popular entertainment with political import go as far back at least as the medieval bards, heralds, minstrels and troubadours whose job it was to ‘broadcast’ the exploits, ferocity, largesse and (mis)adventures of the high and mighty.”

82 (23)
“It should be noted that the order of bards and popular television alike are specialised institutional agencies for delivering the ‘bardic’ function in a given culture. They take it on and professionalise it within evolving historical, regulatory and economic contexts, and of course in so doing they tend to narrow its potential, to exclude outsiders (the general public) from productive or creative participation, not least to maintain the price of their skills, and to restrict the infinite potential of semiosis to definite forms with which their own institutionalised ‘mechanism of translation’ can comfortably cope. These institutional agencies can optimise storytelling’s scale (a story can be reproduced many times) and its diffusion (a story can be heard by many people); but they also increase both formal and bureaucratic rigidity (‘transaction costs’) in narrative production and thus reduce adaptability to change.” Beginning is applicable to EA, but the rest is about broadcasting. He then says that the ‘bardic function’ needs to be reinterpreted.

84 (24)
“The challenge [of today's "dance"] is to understand how such a diffused system might work to propagate coherent sense across social boundaries, among different demographics and throughout social hierarchies. In other words, how does a fully distributed narrative system retain overall systemic unity? If everyone is speaking for themselves, then who speaks for everybody?” Two things:
1. This is a challenge for EA -> is the solution that there is none? -> that the old audience simply has to die out and a new generation of audience will renegotiate storytelling/narrative with EA?
2. EA answers this partly: an entarch is a professional service provider -> everybody can create with everybody, all good, but somebody will probably be successful as a mass entertainer/artist, as a star -> entarchs stand the chance of becoming the stars!

84f (25)
“As with democracy, so with musical or dramatic storytelling – the challenge is to find a way to think about, to explain and to promote mass participation without encouraging splits, divisions, migrations and anarchy on the one hand, or an incomprehensible cacophonous plurality of competing voices on the other, or an authoritarian/elitist alternative to both. The challenge is also a negative one – how not to associate ‘more’ with ‘worse’; mass participation with loss of quality.”

86 (26)
“Kings and knights were not known until praised.”

86 (N/A)
“Fame followed flattery – not the other way around.” You have to be praised by others to be famous, only then wants the world to sleep with you.

87 (26)
“For humans, storytelling itself is a form of schooling in the capabilities of language. It teaches us how to think (plot), what to think about (narrative), the moral universe of choice (character) and the calculation of risk (action), motivated by desire for immortality (fear of death).”

(33)
“Thence the most interesting question is what digital media might be used for. We should wait and see, not fall for the temptation of hurling abuse at the latest upstart medium that poses some sort of competition to the entrenched professionals of the day, just as the mythical Taliesin did in his own diatribe against strolling minstrels.”

(33f)
3 options for professional storytellers now:

1. The Taliesin function (“I’m a bard and you’re not”).
2. The Gandalf function (“I’m a bard and this is how it’s done”).
3. The eisteddfod function (“We’re all bards: let’s rock!”).

Gives very PRACTICAL advice: specific numbers, costs, prices, positions, tasks, etc.
Mentions transmedia 3 times.
Quite radical from a filmmaker’s perspective. I specifically mean indies, who always seemed to see themselves as a smaller Hollywood -> Hollywood’s concepts / business models / etc. should also work for them. Which they never did. But now it’s becoming more clear that they don’t and perhaps never will.
Not radical enough from my perspective. It’s a filmmaker sharing his insights from his struggles within the film industry. It’s not a step back to reassess the big picture.

29-36
Define who your film is for (hopefully not for yourself) and how you will reach it.

37
“The new 50/50 is as follows:
50 percent of your time and resources should be devoted to creating the film. 50 percent of your time and resources should be devoted to getting the film out to its audience, aka distribution and marketing.”

45-52
A good “overview of rights, markets and windows”; how they have been and how he reconceptualises them.

53-59
Know what YOU want to achieve and think about how to get there.

61-72
He describes “the bare minimum” of team members you need, and some more recommendable positions if you have the money.

127-131
His “Introduction to Transmedia” is less than 5 (!) pages short.

128
“media consumers don’t consume in one unified pattern anymore.”

129f
Definition “extradiegetic”:
“This material is called “extra-diegetic” and includes all content that is not part of the final released film, especially material that is created but never intended to be part of the final released film. However, as our understanding of film expands, there will not need to be a separate classification between diegetic and extra-diegetic; it will all be part of a seamless whole.”

133-136
Chapter 13: Redefining the Theatrical Experience
His new Definition-theatrical:
“It is time for filmmakers to reclaim the meaning of a theatrical release so that it is inclusive of a multitude of live-screening event scenarios. The theatrical experience needs to be redefined as people watching “films” with other people. Any place. Any time. Any media.”

143
“Unfortunately, due to contract obligations, IFC is currently only set up to do VOD day-and-date with their Festival Direct Program.”

151
“[...] Chris Hyams (the head of B-Side) did the research and found that all films (studio and independent), on average, lose money from theatrical.”

171
“I believe that incorporating aspects of an event into your screenings is the future of independent live event/theatrical releases.” A bit of a nonsensical sentence, but it goes back to stressing experiences.

172-174
“Ways to create a sense of an event:

1. Personal Appearance by the Filmmaker/Cast
2. Personal Appearance by a Celebrity
3. Parties
4. Partner with an Organization
5. Sell Advance Tickets
6. Live Audience Participation Part 1 (?)”

174f
“Transmedia Aspects to Screenings

1. Live Musical Remix
2. Live Film Mixing [Peter Greenaway]
3. Add Live Storytelling Elements to Your Screening [Head Trauma]“

175-177
Other options:

• One-Night Events
• The Film Tour

195
“The alternative theatrical grassroots screening model has shown the way to democratize and return a shared film experience to the control of individuals and groups,. With that newfound power, people will continue to find new ways to exhibit and congregate in order to watch films.”

243
“I think transmedia has tremendous potential for how narrative filmmakers can find new audiences and engage with them. Again, this is not just about marketing, it is about finding and engaging the audience for your film and your oeuvre.”

244
“Audiences don’t consume media as they once did. They have their own preferences, whether it is a movie theater, DVR, their iPhone, Xbox console, etc. Audiences have media and art form preferences. You can’t bend them, you must accommodate them.”

245
“Part of the death of DVDs has been due to people realizing that they didn’t need to watch a film more than once. Transmedia creates a life beyond the one viewing of a film.” -> Not sure about that. Isn’t transmedia even more ephemeral than a traditional movie?

275
“merchandise can be points of entry for films or narrative extensions – so they can be important to a transmedia strategy.”

289
“Television’s core business is repeat viewers.
It is difficult for television to command repeat viewers with individual films. When there was a plethora of fledgling channels such as HBO, Starz, Showtime, AMC, etc., they needed to buy movies to fill their schedules. But as those networks have matured, they have turned to series to bring back repeat viewers. Even indie stalwarts IFC and Sundance are buying fewer films in favor of series programming.”

296
“Ways to monetize your digital rights”:

• “Fees Charged Per Download, Rental, or Viewing”
• “Ad Revenue Share”
• “Subscription Fee”
• “Merchandise Sales”
• “General Promotion/Theatrical Launch”
• “Ad Sales/Banner Ad Sales”
• “Branded Entertainment/Product Placement”
• “Sponsorship”
• “Pay What You Want/Online Tip Jar”

299
“There is an argument I have heard on panels lately: Most filmmakers have a greater problem with anonymity than with piracy. I think this is a false argument.” If nobody wants to pay for it, perhaps nobody wants to see it, so perhaps the film is simply shit or doesn’t have an audience. -> Market it properly!

347
“Dentler observes that if you look at the history of consumer media, you always have different models for different types of publications. Some things are free, some things you pay for. He uses print media as an example, pointing out the difference between the Wall Street Journal and the Free Press.“

TOC

1. Beyond Utopia
2. New Frontiers of Social Change
3. The Obsolete Monetary system
4. Resource-Based Economy
5. Motivation, Incentive & Creativity
6. The Human Aspect
7. The Venus Project

2
Definition-BIM
BIM is “The process of creating and using digital models for design, construction and/or operations of projects.”

21
“For decades, aerospace, automotive and shipbuilding companies have designed their complex products virtually, working closely with their suppliers, and used the models to drive their fabrication equipment. In effect they build the product twice, once virtually to ensure optimization, then physically in exact compliance with the model, at a high level of quality and production efficiency, in safe clean conditions with a skilled and well-trained workforce. This has contributed enormously to improved productivity, safety and product quality in those industries.”
“The Key Concepts of BIM
Most of the important benefits of BIM can be tied to three fundamental concepts:

1. Database Instead of Drawings
2. Distributed Model
3. Tools + Process = Value of BIM”

22
I would call it the increasing level of use of BIM. It starts with a simple model, goes on to a model in time (the virtual construction process of a building), adds project management, then links costs to to those project elements, allows photo realistic illustrations, and provides a model the owner can use for maintenance purposes.

• “Design models – architectural, structural, MEP and site/civil
• Construction model – breaking the design models down into construction sequences
• Schedule (4D) model – linking the work breakdown structure to project elements in the model
• Cost (5D) model – linking costs to project elements in the model
• Fabrication model – replacing traditional shop drawings and driving fabrication equipment
• Operations model – for turnover to the owner”

24
“Although it can be said that we are still in the “wonder years” of this industry transformation, one thing is clear, we are not going back.”

Says ARG has become a term used for everything and has therefore lost its meaning.

Definition “ARG”:
“In fact, ARGs are not defined by what they are, but what they are not. ARGs are not videogames or computer games. They are not casual games. They are not traditional sports games, or board games, or playground games. But they are essentially everything else that involves some sort of game-like experience or play, and that is why we are seeing such a confusing collection of things being called ARGs.”

“I think that the term ‘ARG’ is an umbrella term de facto used for the class of games that do not fall under traditional game definitions, and the reason why it is gaining such prominence and momentum is because of a blossoming of non-traditional games.”

“In time, better sub-classifications will crystallise out of our experimentation, and genres of ARGs will emerge, just as the genres of videogames are now well-known. For now, though, we should recognise and savour the happy confusion that exists, and embrace the freedom that this wholly alternate class of games gives us.”

A comment by a developer probably:
“An ARG is a game that requires a greater-than-average intellectual and imaginative wattage from its players if they are to get from the experience as much as the creator hopes they will.
Which doesn’t bode well for the chances of them ever going mainstream…”
I think they CAN go mainstream, but they have to become easier accessible.

mssv.net (11.05.2010)

They argue that marketing has to be remodelled entirely:

1. Pull not push: Don’t try to push people into doing something, but encourage/strengthen already existing natural pull mechanisms that spread ideas and behaviour.
2. Understanding the tides: Understand what’s going on and go with the flow, don’t try to work against it.
3. Understanding the landscape: Understand who you’re dealing with, who do you want to address?
4. Lighting lots of fires: You can’t do only one thing and expect it to be the right one, do many things and hope one or more will work out.

Societies and business models get more and more complex until (because of the law of diminishing returns) any added complexity causes pure costs (and no benefits). Such complex models can’t become less complex even if they wanted to. They have to collapse.
Examples: Romans, Mayans, ATT, and now TV executives.

He is sad about the intellectual state of cultural studies (while he acknowledges that the institutional state is healthy). Cultural studies has lost its sense of provocation and going new ways. It is in the same situation economics was 100 years ago. Today it seems logical for cultural studies to use its (unexpected) closeness with evolutionary economics to become exciting and purposeful again.

5
“These preoccupations with social structure (class inequality), textuality (constructions of meaning), identity (the politics of the personal) and structural Marxism (base and superstructure) have driven cultural studies ever since. It retains a structuralist interest in systems (in which oppositions can be identified) rather than an evolutionary interest in ‘cumulative sequence’ and change. And it has modelled ‘macro’ change as exogenous not endogenous – it would come from revolution (external shock) not evolution (cumulative sequence).”

9
Explains the DCMS ‘creative industries’ mapping document from 1998, its downsides, upsides, and reactions to it from all over the world.

xii
“That is our general theory, namely that the analysis of rules is the explanatory basis of the nature and the causes of wealth in consequence of the coordination of rules, and that economic evolution in rules is the explanatory basis of how this wealth changes.”

xiii
“both behaviors and technologies co-evolve and mutually adapt to each other, a process that invariably results in both micro and macro structural change.”
Definition: “Our general theory of economic evolution is therefore intended as an integrated generic framework to define the rules of an economic system, how they are coordinated, and the causes and consequences of their change.”

xv
“Knowledge builds knowledge, and the consequence is economic evolution, both as an extent structure of knowledge and as a historical trajectory of knowledge.”
” We require micro analysis to study how individual carriers originate, adopt and retain novel rules, and to analyze the change in micro structure that results. We require meso analysis to study how populations of rules change and the transformations in industries, markets and institutions that result. We require macro analysis to study how meso units themselves are coordinated into a macro whole and the historical logic of growth and development as sequences of macro trajectories.”

1
Definition “economics”:
“evolutionary economics is best defined by what it is not – i.e. it is not a mechanistic analysis of economic coordination and change. It is not the study of the consequence of things already known, nor of their exogenous disturbance.”

2
Definition “economy”:
An economy can be defined “as a complex open system, or more specifically, as a non-linear, quasi-entropic, differentially replicative, partially stochastic, non-integral, non-computable, non-equilibrium, boundedly rational, learning focussed, behaviourally conditioned, self-organizational, strategically interactive, path-dependant, environmentally composed, institutionally structured, co-evolutionary, discovery-based, enterprise driven, technology and resource dependant, topologically complex adaptive ongoing process of variation, selection and replication in the growth of knowledge.”

3
“The complete axiomatics of evolutionary realism can be summarized as follows:

Axiom 1: All existences are matter-energy actualizations of ideas
Axiom 2: All existences associate
Axiom 3: All existences are processes”

4
“Evolutionary reality is composed of populations [axiom 1] and structures [axiom 2] of idea-actualizations (i.e. process-structures) that change with time [axiom 3].”
“Economic evolution is therefore not ‘just a metaphor’ from biological evolution. Rather both economic and biological evolution, along with all other evolutionary subject domains, share common properties represented by the three axioms of evolutionary realism.

5
Definition “evolution”, “economic evolution”, “subject”, and “object”:
“Evolution is the process of the adoption and embodiment of ideas into new carriers and in economic evolution that carrier is primarily the human mind.”
Subjects are “processes that centre about the human mind”.
Objects are “processes that relate to the external environment of things”.

“Subjects are not objects because objects have no mind, and, therefore, play only a secondary role in the process of economic evolution.” Capital is way less important than humans/knowledge.

6
“The human mind is [...] the seat of economic evolution.”

8

“Economic evolution is the co-evolution of subject and object rules. [...] Economic evolution is therefore a complex generic process at the nexus of subjects and objects. This makes an obvious difference between, for example: (a) engineering, which is the pure study of technological rules; (b) sociology, which is the pure study of social rules; (c) ethology, anthropology or behavioural psychology, which is the study of behavioural rules; and (d) cognitive psychology or neuroscience, which is the study of cognitive rules. Economics is the study of subject and object rule co-evolution, and therefore involves (at least) all of these.”

9

10

11
“All rules have carriers in the same way that all existences are composed of an idea and a matter-energy actualization of that idea. Carriers and operations are the material reality of a rule.”
“Schumpeterian economists ever since [Schumpeter] have centred their analysis about trajectories, and in particular technological trajectories.” Very good references!

12
“a rule process in three distinct phases:

Phase 1: Origination of a novel rule
Phase 2: Adoption of that rule into a population of carriers
Phase 3: Retention of that rule in a population of carriers”

“A trajectory is the process by which a novel rule is originated, adopted and retained in a carrier population, such that it eventually becomes coordinated in the economic system resulting in a new economic order.”
“The population sum of micro trajectories for a single rule through time is a meso trajectory, and a meso trajectory is the basic dynamical unit (i.e. process) of economic evolution.”

13
“[Evolutionary economics] shares with biology the fundamental ontological premise that it is ideas (or rules in analytic language) that evolve. But in economic evolution, these rules are generic in that they are created by the human mind, and neither the product of genetics or any other exogenous factor. For this reason, evolutionary economists emphasise that the locus of the wealth of nations is the human mind and its propensity to originate, adopt and retain new ideas.”
‘Idea’ in analytic language: ‘rule’.
‘Actualization’ in analytic language: ‘carrier’.

14
“economic evolution is both a self-organizing and creative-destructive process of a novel rule trajectory.”

16
“The fundamental questions in economics are not, in this view, the problems of choice in markets or efficiency in firms, but rather the coordination of the whole economy and how this changes.”
“So although we maintain that evolutionary economics is ultimately for macro analysis, we allow that the definition of macro may be scalable to ‘macro units’ smaller than the whole economy.
We call this partial evolutionary economic analysis [...].”

21-24
Meso must be at the centre of evolutionary economics.
There is no direct relationship between micro and macro.
There is a relationship between micro and meso, and meso and macro. (see p26)
Therfore evolutionary economics needs a double methodology: methodological individualism for micro-meso, and methodological pluralism for meso-macro.

24
“Indeed, the global macroeconomy is quite possibly the most complex system in the known universe, and certainly at least as complex as the human brain or the global ecosystem. Yet although no neuroscientist would describe the mind as a simple neuron- to-behaviour aggregation, and no ecologist would describe the ecosystem as a simple gene-to-ecosystem aggregation, the current mainstream paradigm of economic analysis is analogously that, namely the supposition that micro operations sum to aggregate economy.”

25
“The reason these otherwise naturally meso concepts have remained static and exogenous − even when it is observationally unambiguous that markets change, that industries change, and that technologies change, and moreover that the most immediate and pressing economic problems that agents face is in dealing with such change − is that the aggregate logic of the micro-macro framework cannot have it otherwise. It is the theory not the reality that is wrong.”
“As every entrepreneur and World Bank economist knows, it is ultimately the analysis of the problems of change that reveal the qualities of a good framework. The micro meso macro framework is, we argue, geared precisely toward the analysis of such change.”
“Evolutionary micro analysis, then, is the study of individual rules, carriers or systems that compose a meso unit. And evolutionary macro analysis is the study of coordination and change in the structure of all meso units as a whole.”

26
There are two foci of evolutionary economics: “a micro–meso focus about agent carriers and rules; and a meso–macro focus about rule populations.”

29
Definition “Homo Sapiens Oeconomicus”:
“Homo Sapiens Oeconomicus is generic man. It differs from the classical notion of Homo Oeconomicus in the sense that it explicitly recognises the element of Homo Sapiens, namely the ‘wise man’, and not just as a tool-making and tool- using animal, but as a rule-making and rule-using animal that experiences generic change. Homo Sapiens is capable of knowledge, and Homo Oeconomicus is capable of economic operations. Homo Sapiens Oeconomicus is capable of new knowledge for new operations and, therefore, is the carrier of economic evolution.”

30
“The uniqueness of Homo Sapiens Oeconomicus lies in these higher order abilities as manifest in the creation of 2nd order rules for changing and developing 1st order rules. The creation and transmission of these “generic rules” is the basis of what we call culture, a point that resonates across the social sciences, but it is also the foundation of economic analysis from the evolutionary perspective.”

31
“We now effortlessly live in cold climates, hunt fish, and fly at night, and that has nothing to do with biological evolution of the human organism, but rather is a consequence of economic evolution in our ability to originate, adopt and retain knowledge. Economic man is a generic animal.”
“The ideology of evolutionary economics, then, is neither the perfectibility of man or society imbued in the concepts of “rational man” or “socialist man”, but closer to the spirit of “renaissance” man with respect to the optimistic prospects of new knowledge and to the goodness and naturalness of both an open society and an open mind.”
Definition “agency”:
“The generic ability to use and adopt knowledge is not limited to agents however, but also extends to firms, organizations, households, networks, and other socially organized systems of agents, which we shall call agencies.”

32
“Technical change moves the economy, but so too does change in the rules that organize people. Evolution in social rules, including agencies, is also essential to economic evolution.” Sandberg was talking about the same when he said that technology changes faster than the consumers’ understanding of them.

33
“Agencies organize agents into structures of knowledge that otherwise do not exist through
any aggregation of those agents, but rather through the emergence of specific connections that yield generic value.”

36
“Economic evolution originates in a micro trajectory, as the process by which a micro unit acquires a new generic rule and thus changes its knowledge base.”

37
“In most cases, what is originated, adopted and retained is not a rule but a rule complex of subject and object rules.”
Definition “micro trajectory”:
“We define this process by which a micro unit becomes generically different as a three-phase structure – origination, adoption, retention – over two types of carriers – agents and agencies – in terms of three orders of rules – 0th, 1st, 2nd – and over four types of rules – CBST. This generic micro 3×2×3×4 space is analytically appropriate, we suggest, for the representation of any rule in any micro unit at any point in space and time in order to provide a useful micro foundation for meso and macro analysis of economic evolution.”

38
Definition “global/local generic novelty”:
“Global generic novelty is the first carrier of a novel generic rule. Local novelty is the first carrier of that in each new environment.”

41
“Learning is adaptation to a world, whereas adoption is a generically marginal process that changes the world. Learning is a process of adaptation, but adoption is a marginal process of differentiation and progress. Learning stabilizes known advances, but adoption drives them. Adoption, not learning, is therefore the core mechanism of microeconomic evolution via generic change in micro units.”

42
“Rule adoption into an agent or agency is also conditional upon the ability of the carrier to cope with the uncertainty of the event, to manage the process of change and to finance the resource cost involved.”
“To adopt a new rule is to become generically different. And generic difference is the driver of economic evolution.”

47
There are four aspects of creative destruction:

1. “A rule that cannot be generically communicated (i.e. encoded and decoded) is just a person with an idea; it is not entrepreneurship and it is not innovation.”
2. “This will often mean that the entrepreneur makes two contributions: (1) the ‘discovery of the opportunity’, often in the form of a new technical rule or a new use of existing technical rule; and (2) the creation and organization of the necessary accompanying rules for thinking, behaviour and social organization to render the novel rule viable. This may involve campaigns of persuasion that endeavour to change other agents’ thinking and behaviour, the provision of organizational and financial structures to make these changes possible, and the creation of new market structures to facilitate these changes.”
3. Natural (good) monopoly: “the entrepreneur [is] creating or opening up a new market about a new generic rule and then being the first to occupy it.”
4. “meso 1 proceeds in a fog of uncertainty with the expectation of profit. [...] Expected profit is not a necessary incentive to undertake this endeavour, but it is often sufficient.”

49
“Meso 2 therefore begins with high uncertainty, but toward the end of the adoption process the cumulative effect of experience and experiment will have greatly reduced that uncertainty and knowledge of the rule will settle into understandings.”
Meso 2 / competitive enterprise “is a competitive process in the literal sense of a race in which no one knows who wins until the end, although with the twist that there is no end to the race, only participant or player exit. Meso 2 is the exhilarating phase of market capitalism at its best and at its worst, both creative and destructive and ordered and chaotic all at once, creating new solutions for some, and new problems for others. This is the normal run of generic competition and the cutting edge of economic evolution as ideas are tried and tested. Competitive enterprise is competition to innovate and therefore the powerhouse of economic evolution.”

50
“By meso 3, the rule has formed into an institution, such that the carrier population replicates and the structures it requires are maintained.”
“By meso 3, uncertainty has been transformed into risk and generic profits have been extracted. The size of the market is revealed and good strategies have been learnt. Prices will become stochastic as the information conveyed by them is fully expropriated.11 Stable patterns of activity will predominate and transactions costs will fall as risk premiums vanish and efficiencies of scale and scope are produced. Maintenance and service niches will open up, and expertise will be well-defined. Expectations about the rule will converge, and any environmental, cultural or political implications will become pronounced. The rule will become embedded in material artefacts and human behaviours. Cognitive and behavioural rules will normalize into habits and routines, and social and technical rules will become dominant and standard. Meso 3, as such, will begin to look a lot like the world that neoclassical economics describes. Yet the difference is that this world is explained in generic analysis whereas in neoclassical analysis it is simply assumed.”

55
“The meso unit in a market can be usefully further characterized by its generic scale and velocity. Some ideas are bigger than others, and some ideas happen faster than others.”

56
“while technical rules may be fast and easy to adopt, new behavioural rules may take much longer, effectively slowing the entire process. A novel generic rule is adopted at the velocity of its slowest component, and so the complexity of a rule over the rule taxonomy will matter.”

59
“Entrepreneurship is most valuable in meso 1 and 2, but management is most valuable in meso 3.”
“Venture finance drives meso 1 and 2, but standard savings and investment drive meso 3.”

63
“Finance is an evolutionary enterprise that can only exist in the context of novel generic rules, and therefore in the face of uncertainty. Savings and investment are both generic and operational notions; but finance is a purely generic property, such that it has no role outside of an evolving economy and, in turn, no meso trajectory can happen without finance of some kind or other.”

67

68
“At the deep level, macro 1 involves the de-coordination of the extant logic of rule associations due to the new rule upsetting existing structures of what was known to be feasible, true or reasonable. The conventional response is at first to deny or attack it, then to adapt to it through awkward adjustments of position, then finally to assert that that was what was believed all along.” That’s what Hollywood has always been doing, see VHS and the Boston Strangler for example.

69
“Macro 2 changes things: it changes what people think and do, and also the systems they form.”

70
“The state of macro 3 is the state of macro order, a process that is both ever-embedding knowledge and ever-regenerating those rules so as to retain and maintain the coordination of the once-novel generic rule within a new macro order. By macro 3, the meso rule is embedded into the macro order at all levels and it is at this stage that the broader implications of the rule play out.”

76
“Phase 3 of a cluster is the ongoing retention and stabilisation of the operations of the cluster. The two extreme states of this are, first, that the entire cluster will be absorbed into a very large firm in order to internalise all the connections between the constituent rules and hence to more efficiently control or exploit them. And second, that the entire cluster may become controlled by government through regulation, planning, sponsorship, or direct ownership. This may then further be tied to policies relating to regional development, innovation, education, infrastructure and trade. Actual outcomes will invariably fall somewhere between these states, with some mix of private and public provision of connections.”

77
“We defined a macro trajectory as the effect of a meso trajectory on the system of all other rules. This was then analytically represented as a three phase process of decoordination, recoordination and ongoing macro coordination of both the deep generic order and the surface generic equilibrium. We examined the ways in which coordination failure can occur at each of these phases as a failure of rules or populations to connect. And we then further developed this to consider the co-evolution of systems of meso rules explicitly in terms of emergent clusters of meso units and trajectories. Overall, we sought to unpack the complexity of generic coordination in an open evolving economic system in consequence of a meso-macro trajectory.
We have argued in this chapter that economic evolution is a process of change and recoordination. A meso trajectory is the driving process of change, but a macro trajectory is the process of decoordination and recoordination that results. This process consists of a reconfiguration of the associations between rules (deep structure) and of the populations of carriers (surface structure).”

78
“The coordination of economic systems is a consequence of human cooperation and the imagination that sustains it. But the evolution of economic systems is a consequence of human imagination and the cooperation that sustains it. The macroeconomy can, therefore, only be understood as a co-evolutionary process.”

80
“Regime: Rule + Carrier population + Trajectory”

85
“Our theory of rules is as follows:

• Rules are originated by human minds
• There are two major classes of rule – subject and object
• There are four minor classes of rule – cognitive, behavioural, social and technical
• There are three orders of rules – 0th , 1st, 2nd
• There are three phases to a rule trajectory – 1 2 3
• Each rule can have many carriers – this is the rule population
• There are two types of rule carrier – agents and agencies”

85f
“So far, then, we have built up a theory of economic evolution that begins with a novel idea in a single agent that then develops into a theory of the meso unit as the rule is adopted and retained by a population of carriers. Such a meso trajectory disturbs (i.e. decoordinates) the macro order and engenders a process of recoordination that over a macro trajectory results in a new macro order. This process occurs in parallel, as multiple meso trajectories unfold at once, and in series, as one meso trajectory leads to the next. These meso-macro processes are defined respectfully as the coevolution of many meso and the process of regime transitions from one trajectory to the next. And that, in abstract, is our theory of economic evolution.”

86
“The statement that there is currently no general theory of coordination will surely annoy just about everyone [...].”

93
“Homo Sapiens Oeconomicus does not just inhabit an environment and then adapt to it, as did Robinson Crusoe, but actively seeks to change that environment in order to
explore both its generic capabilities and its generic potential. Economic man has knowledge. But it is not the case that he will never be satisfied with that knowledge, but rather that he never can be, because other agents will create new ideas and those will, eventually, compete with everything he has. The solution therefore is to continually develop new knowledge.
The study of economic evolution is the study of this process, which we think can be analysed as a micro meso macro process.”
“economic systems evolve when a new idea creates a new environment that opens a path to create further new ideas.” (summary about Hayek)

94
“all policy is intervention into the economic order to promote welfare.”

95
“We may therefore distinguish three levels of generic policy as based about the three orders of rules: 0th order constitutional rules; 1st order operational rules; and 2nd order mechanism rules (see 1.4.2 above). Policy that seeks to effect coordination and change in constitutional rules is 0th order generic policy. Policy that seeks to effect coordination and change in operational rules is 1st order generic policy. And policy that seeks to effect coordination and change in mechanism rules is 2nd order generic policy.”

98
“Difference is the elemental driver of economic evolution, and societies that are tolerant of different ideas and rules carried by micro agents possess a necessary condition for economic evolution.”

99
“Open societies drive economic evolution through the creation of space for novelty and the possibility of micro units becoming generically different. Freedom is not therefore just a moral, civic or political quality, but also a fundamental economic quality in the possibility of opening the future to new generic potential. The value of freedom is the possibility of novelty, and the power of novel generic ideas is that they are what endogenous growth theorists call ‘nonrival’, i.e. they can be adopted and used by other agents without operational cost to their originator. But generic ideas are operationally costly to originate, adopt and retain. New knowledge is neither free nor given, but requires generic investment in rules resulting in the de-coordination and re-coordination of the economic order, an ongoing and natural evolutionary process that Schumpeter called ‘creative destruction’, but which we have defined and given further analytical precision with the concept of a ‘meso trajectory’.”
“It is the possibility of novelty that is the origin of all wealth, and it is the market system – along with other institutional mechanisms of generic freedom, including rules for origination, adoption and retention – that constitutes the process of ongoing generic construction. This is the basis of all freedom, the origin of all wealth, and the central unit of evolutionary economic analysis.“

The quotes from the conclusion (380-398) are very concise!

4
“Like some human arts, dolphin air art involves design but not representation. Without representation, fiction—and indeed much song and dance or painting and sculpture—would be impossible.”

7
“As we will see, unique aspects of human parent-child interaction, a special instance of our species’ singular capacity to share attention, hold a major key to the origin of art. Here the father engages his son’s attention to change his mood. He thereby affects the mood of others, whose appreciation in turn alters his own mood. The feedback of action, attention, reaction, and the refinement of action to shape further attention and reaction provide an exclusively human basis for art.” An entarch allows for that kind of feedback, broadcast doesn’t.
“in our own species the impulse to art develops reliably in all normal individuals.”

10
“That is what I want to explain in evolutionary terms: our impulse to appeal to our own minds and reach out to others for the sheer pleasure of sensing what we can share even in an unprecedented new move.”

11
“I’ll believe that computers can think not when they can beat a Kasparov at chess, with its rapidly proliferating but after all calculable permutations, but when they can be fed something as unexpected as the photograph of “Ralph, come back, it was only a Rash” daubed on a wall, and can read the words, deduce the story, then laugh at the joke they have recognized for themselves.”

14f
“Humans uniquely inhabit “the cognitive niche”: we gain most of our advantages from intelligence. We therefore have an appetite for information, and especially for pattern, information that falls into meaningful arrays from which we can make rich inferences. Information can be costly to obtain and analyze, but because it offers an invaluable basis for action, nature evolves senses and minds to gather and process information appropriate to particular modes of life. Like other species, humans can assimilate information through the rapid processing that specialized pattern recognition allows, but unlike other species we also seek, shape, and share information in an open-ended way. Since pattern makes data swiftly intelligible, we actively pursue patterns, especially those that yield the richest inferences to our minds, in our most valuable information systems, the senses of sight and sound, and in our most crucial domain, social information.”

15
“We can define art as cognitive play with pattern. Just as play refines behavioral options over time by being self-rewarding, so art increases cognitive skills, repertoires, and sensitivities. A work of art acts like a playground for the mind, a swing or a slide or a merry-go-round of visual or aural or social pattern. Like play, art succeeds by engaging and rewarding attention, since the more frequent and intense our response, the more powerful the neural consequences. Art’s appeal to our preferences for pattern ensures that we expose ourselves to high concentrations of humanly appropriate information eagerly enough that over time we strengthen the neural pathways that process key patterns in open-ended ways.”

19
“our minds and behavior are always shaped by the interaction of nature and nurture, or genes and environment, including the cultural environment.”

23
orature = oral literature
“The extent of human cultural differences has been made possible by the evolution of the mind. Without the complex shared architecture of the mind, culture could not exist. Because of that shared design, there are many universals across cultures: there is a human nature.”

25
culture = “the nongenetic transmission of behavior, including local customs and even fashions”
“Evolution has allowed humans to develop our singular capacity for culture because culture helps us track changes in the environment more rapidly than genes do.”

27
“”We have not escaped evolution [because we humans have a culture], as so commonly assumed. We experience evolution in hyperdrive.”" Culture is faster evolution.

28
“any group can compete more effectively against other groups by minimizing within-group fitness defferences.”

32
“if there is inheritance, and we know there is [...]; if there is variation, and we know there is [...]; if some variations are more successful than others, and we know they are [...], then in a world of limited resources and competing interests, not all will be equally successful in producing offspring that themselves produce reproductively viable offspring.”

33
“”Darwinism is not a theory of random chance. It is a theory of random mutation plus non-random cumulative natural selection.”"

34
“Genetic drift – chance changes in frequency in genes not under strong selection pressure – can have consequences, especially in small, isolated populations, but drift is directionless, as much back or sideways as forward, unlike the steady compounding of advantages under selection pressure.” The film industry was drifting for many years and now there is selection pressure.

36
“an adaptation need not be perfect to establish itself; it needs only to perform better on average than the available competition. If further variation can generate a still better refinement, this will in turn predominate, so that design may continue to improve.”

40
“We come into this world prepared especially to learn from and share with each other [...]” Children can imitate a smile already an hour after birth. They know subconsciously which muscles to use for example. Nobody taught them. Evolution put that knowledge in their DNA. The DNA of all living things is the immense memory of evolution/the world.
This is evolutionary psychology in the broadest sense?

47
“In the severely limited space of working memory, we process information not unconsciously or implicitly, but consciously or “explicitly,” and not in parallel but in series [...]” When consumers see entertainment content that they feel they know already, they process it in the backs of their minds and can do other things at the same time. If they see something they think is new, it becomes their main and only thing to think about. Perhaps kids today feel like they’ve seen everything that’s on TV or the Internet and that’s why they watch TV, surf the net, and text at the same time. If we gave them something new, would it become their sole occupation? I don’t think this reasoning can be extended that far.

50
“By developing our ability to think beyond the here and now, storytelling helps us not to override the given, but to be less restricted by it, to cope with it more flexibly and on something more like our own terms.”

52
“”Selfishness beats altruism within single groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups.“”

53
“although genetic mutations can spread only over generations, cultural changes with significant effects on the relative fitness of groups can spread within a single generation.”

56
“even in the most cooperative of relationships competition is inevitable, [this is] why the powerful emotions engendered by family loyalty and conflict saturate stories from Genesis to The Sopranos.”

57f
“For altruism to work robustly a whole suite of motivations has to be in place: sympathy, so that I am inclined to help another; trust, so that I can offer help now and expect it will be somehow repaid later; gratitude, to incline me, when I have been helped, to return the favor; shame, to prompt me to repay when I still owe a debt; a sense of fairness, so that I can intuitively gauge an adequate share or repayment; indignation, to spur me to break off cooperation with or even inflict punishment on a cheat; and guilt, a displeasure at myself and fear of exposure and reprisal to deter me from seeking the short-term advantages of cheating. [...] Rather than merely taking these emotions as givens, we can account for them as natural selection’s way of motivating widespread cooperation in highly social species.” In the end we are egoistic/selfish, we only cooperate because it helps ourselves in the end.

62
“We have evolved not to be “rational individuals,” profit maximizers, but social animals, holding others to fair dealings even at our own cost.” The dictator game: a “dictator” gets 100$ to distribute between himself and another person. If that person accepts its share, both can keep the money. If the distribution is not perceived fair by the other person, that person won’t accept the money, and they both won’t get anything. In different societies “dictators” offer different amount: between 15% and 58%, on average 50% -> this depends on the level of trust in the cultures.

63
“free-riding, taking benefits without paying the full cost, persists as the fundamental problem of social life.” -> Black Book
“The social monitoring already intense elsewhere in the primate line becomes still more intense for humans – and a powerful prompt for storytelling.” A LOT of good stories are based on a sense of un/fairness!

63f
“In small-scale societies, uncooperative acts were often punished through personal revenge, motivated by an evolved sense of outrage but often leading to destructive cycles of vengeance. Especially in larger societies, better means were needed. Centralized systems of justice, and eventually a police force, could detect transgressions, assess charges, and administer punishment. Depersonalizing justice could dampen incendiary emotions and diminish vendettas.” This system worked fine as long as societies/cultures lived relatively separately from each other. Now they interact A LOT but there is no institution in the world that represents the depersonalised justice. That’s why we have so many wars and “cultural vendettas”! -> Black fucking Book!

65f
“Evolution offers a much more complex and nuanced view of the social world than the artificial model of the rational individual of economics, or the romantic idea, common since Rousseau, of good people perverted by evil systems, or the paranoid Nietzschean or Foucauldian suspicion that all moral claims mask a lust for power.”

70
“Some philosophers of art claim that other times and cultures cannot have art because they lack “our” Western notion of art, the distinction drawn in eighteenth-century Europe between fine art for detached contemplation and mere craft. But the very concept that there is no non-Western art is a Western one [...].”
“if audiences appreciate, artists appropriate.”

78f
“the very flexibility of human behavior suggests that sexual selection has been an extra gear for art, not the engine itself.” Kind of a summary of the whole chapter, p69-79.

90
“if a stimulus remains unchanging, if the pattern can be predicted, the psychological process of habituation automatically switches off attention.”

94
“”the Internet is just one of those things that contemporary humans can spend millions of ‘practice’ events at, that the average human a thousand years ago had absolutely no exposure to. Our brains are massively remodelled by this exposure – but so, too, by reading, by television, by video games, by modern electronics, by contemporary music, by contemporary ‘tools,’ etc.”" Michael Merzenich quoted in Doidge, Norman (2007): The Brain That Changes Itself, quoted in Boyd (2009). The Internet has “massively remodelled our brain”, it is time storytelling adapts to these new brains. Will Boyd go on to say that? Is there an age limit to this remodelling? Will only young people enjoy this new storytelling?
“art can reconfigure minds only so long as it rewards us enough, like play, to hold our attention again and again.”

96
“art, as practiced by all in the days before it could become a status badge or consumer product, rewarded all, because it sharpened minds and skills.” Today, high art “serves no particular good, certainly not the exalted functions claimed for it.”

99
“Art dies without attention, as people since Aristotle have noted, both within and outside evolutionary explanation.”

105
“And despite video and sound recording we still respond more intensely if we form part of a larger audience that listens, claps, sings, sways, dances, laughs, or cries together.”

106
“Art, even if it diverts energy from immediate survival or reproductive needs, can improve cooperation within a group enough for the group to compete successfully against others with less inclination to art. We should think in the first place not of art galleries or concert halls (though these too raise community confidence and lower alienation), but of chants, drums, dance, body-markings, costumes, banners, and the like.”

115
“Religion, on the other hand, needs art as a precursor. Without the existence of stories that diverge from the true, without the first fictions, religion could not have arisen. Religion depends on the power of story.”
“Recent research shows we remember best those stories with characters that violate our categoric expectations, crossing one animal kind with another, or combining human and animal, or separating the psychological from its usual physical constraints.”

120f
Definition “Darwin machine”:
“They cannot find the right answer beforehand: there is no single right form of live, no single right antibody, no single right synaptic link, no single right move. But they can generate possibilities that the environment tests. Survivors generate new variations and face new rounds of tests, so that even without preplanning, success accumulates.”

121
“Art constitutes another Darwin machine, an evolutionary subsystem effectively designed, in this case, for creativity.”
“If a work of art fails to earn attention, it die. If it succeeds, it can last even for millennia.”

122
“Since repeating exactly the same thing over and over again guarantees it will lose its impact, art faces a consistent pressure for novelty.”

123
“In art understood as a Darwin machine, works are not somehow created to fit the cultural environment. Instead they are generated, unpredictably, in the minds or actions or artists, and selected first by them in accordance with their intuitions about their social world, and then by this world itself.”

129
“Why do we spend so much of our time telling one another stories that neither side believes?”

139
“We keep mental “files” on individuals without confusing them, in ways that make it easy for us – and extremely hard for computers – to track individuals in life or in literature.”

152
Definition “semantic/episodic memory”:
“Semantic memory stores general knowledge, like my knowledge of trees or words like tree, root, oak, deciduous, memories often overlearned, automatized, and rapidly accessible through parallel searches. Episodic memory records particular events that I remember as experienced, as mine, and can more or less locate to a specific place and time in my past, like my memory of climbing a particular macrocarpa in childhood, or breaking off a poplar branch to use as a knight’s lance.”

155
“When we combine our inferences about what others know with our sense of their character traits, we have at our disposal a powerful social calculus.”

156
“Mirror neurons, which fire in the appropriate part of our own motor areas when we see another perform an action, form the basis for the simulations that underlie our rich social cognition so central to narrative.”

159
“Aristotle, the first great analyst of narrative, called storytelling the imitation of an action.” Boyd also gives specific quotes from Aristotle’s Poetics.

163
“We know how [others] feel because we literally feel what they are feeling.” Mirror neurons.

164
“[...] we know that we often don’t know about particular items of strategic information; that others may know when we don’t know; and that we and they know what a difference it can make to know or not. We therefore listen eagerly to those with strategic information they think we will value.”

165
“Just as our continued craving for sweet and fat reflects old circumstances, so our sometimes indiscriminate appetite for social information reflects a time when we were likely to encounter repeatedly everyone we heard about [and knowing about them helped us predict their behaviour]. And we especially ingest information about the powerful, because their decisions and actions could influence our lives, and about those who command attention, since those who could do so were usually social leaders.”

167
“In most forms of reciprocal altruism, the main temptation is not to repay the full value received.”

168
“the capacity to command attention in social animals correlates highly with status – and the incapacity to gain attention marks low status, the inability to avert negative attention augurs danger (mockery, reproach, attack, or punishment), and the withdrawal of attention (ostracism, isolation) constitutes a severe punishment in itself.”

177
“For children, direction, narration, and enactment flow readily and naturally into one another. So long as the play-story continues, consistency of medium or mode does not matter.” ENTAAARCH!

196
“And stories can help solve the problem of common knowledge: traditional stories ensure that all know and react to, and know that others know, the core values of the group.
The very nature of fiction makes it likely that storytellers earn least audience resistance and most admiration – the highest status – if they tell stories that appeal to values shared by the audience.”

199
Definition “fiction” or “the most important function of pure fiction”:
“By appealing to our fascination with agents and actions, fiction trains us to reflect feely beyond the immediate and to revolve things in our minds within a vast and vividly populated world of the possible.”

207
4 categories of stories:
low cost + high long-term benefit: proverbs, parables, fables
low cost + high immediate benefit: jokes
high cost + high immediate benefit: screen and print fiction
high cost + high long-term benefit: serious stories that provoke us to reconsider what it is to be human

209
“Art prepares minds for open-ended learning an creativity; fiction specifically improves our social cognition and our thinking beyond the here and now.”

215-231
4 essentials to keep the audience’s attention:

• Tradition and Innovation
• Character
• Event (goal, action, obstacle, outcome)
• Plot – the combination of Character and Event

230
“Storytellers need to balance audience benefits against audience costs in time and comprehension effort.”

251
“Throughout the Odyssey, Homer offers us the pleasure of anticipation and foreknowledge, by making us privy to the decisions of the gods and the decrees of fate, the pleasures of sympathizing with characters coping with their plight without the luxury of foreknowledge, and the pleasures of the unexpected.”

253
“A story’s appeal begins in character and plot. Art, like anything else catches our attention against a background of expectations: in he case of story, especially expectations of human nature (character) and experience (plot).”
But our expectations about

• the story form (generic)
• the storyteller (author-specific)
• the expectations generated by the work so far (work-specific)

“may drastically modify the way we attend.”

283
“Brains are “anticipation machines” whose task is to guess what will happen next in order to stay one step ahead.”

285f
“Life is what matters, and the only immortality worth wanting is in the memory of the living.” And if we are intelligent and think long-term we stand “our best chance for a long mortal life and a lasting memory in the minds of others.”

310
“If we wish to assess religion’s social benefits, its truth matters less than its power to motivate. So long as they are widely believed, false ideas can powerfully spur social cooperation: that the gods can watch every human move, that sooner or later they will punish infringements, that ritual can signal our respect for them and the precepts they safeguard.”

349
“Individuality is no late Western invention but a biological and psychological fact.”

357
“Even genius does not know quite where it is going until it arrives there, usually after a long cycle of generate-test-regenerate. But it gradually builds on its partial discoveries to arrive at substantial and often lasting solutions to problems it could not formulate before reaching them. It becomes an efficient system for generating significant novelty.”

376
“As I and others argue, all art serves creativity.”

378
“Once we understand clearly that we may not know everything relevant to a situation, we will often wish to seek out a deeper explanation.” It used to be religion, now it is science.

379
“Attention and meaning remain distinct from and irreducible to each other, but they feed off and into each other.” If storytellers want to be successful, they have to gain and keep attention and deliver meaning.

381
“Art in this broad sense is a human adaptation, its chief functions being

382
“creativity ultimately benefits us in producing a wider array of behavioral options, some of which will survive better than others under unpredictable selection pressures.” We might survive dangerous situations because we are creative.

382
“Storytelling appeals to our social intelligence.” Stories HAVE to be about inter-personal relations to be interesting to us.

383
“Fiction fosters cooperation by engaging and attuning our social and moral emotions and values, and creativity by enticing us to think beyond the immediate in the way our minds are most naturally disposed – in terms of social actions.”
Definition-storyworld / story world: “So long as s storyteller holds our interest, we will infer significance both from the story world – from characters and events – and from the storyteller’s intentions in recounting these events in just this way.”

386
“Evocriticism makes possible genuine and valid interdisciplinarity [...]” He is talking about literary theory, but evolution is generally a furtile common ground for interdisciplinarity.

389
“[An evolutionary approach] takes seriously the idea that the complex emerges out of the simple, mostly building slowly, by minute increments, in the design of species (the universal), in cultural tradition (the local), in personal development (the individual), and in artistic composition and comprehension (the particular).” biological evolution -> cultural evolution -> personal evolution -> particular storytelling situation evolution

392-395
He stresses the exceptional importance of ATTENTION.

396
“We can see authors as problem-solvers with individual capacities and preferences making strategic choices within particular situations, by shaping different kinds of appeals to the cognitive preferences and expectations of audiences – preferences and expectations shaped at both specieswide and local levels – and balancing the costs against the benefits of authorial effort in composition and audience effort in comprehension and response.” Every bit of this sentence is IMPORTANT.

403
“Like design, purpose emerges rather than precedes.” I can only purposefully move my arm, because evolution has already been working on the human arm for a very long time. Today, I have the purpose to move my arm and I do. But I can only do it, because I physically and mentally can (thanks to evolution).

407
“Norms help unambitious filmmakers attain competence, but they challenge gifted ones to excel. By understanding these norms we can better appreciate skill, daring, and emotional power on those rare occasions when we meet them.”

414
“Only when science began to offer alternative naturalistic explanations of the world did religion and art start to split right apart. When science offered a detailed explanation of natural design without the need for a designer – the theory of evolution by natural selection – that, more than any other single idea, stripped us of a world made comfortable by a sense of purpose apparently underwritten by beings greater than us.”
“We do not know what other purposes life may eventually generate, but creativity offers us our best chance of reaching them.”