AE: Annalee Newitz: A Futurist's History of Sexual Technology

We got stuck in traffic, so missed a large part of a speech I wanted to hear. Sad. :/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annalee_Newitz

She has ideas of sensors that can remap sexual inputs. For example, she could have sensors that would note her orgasm and then send a txt message to her lovers saying something sexy. Similarly, you could have a sensor that would note muscle contractions and then send those pulses to another insertable in someone else - true teledildonics. You could hook this in with virtual worlds like Second Life and change the interfaces so that when she is getting aroused in the real world, her unrealistic Second Life form (an octopus? a dragon?) would change in a realistic way for that form, etc etc. An MRI could become a sex toy as we map the brain's arousal functions and learn to induce them without direct stimulation.

We will transform our sexual signals in whatever way choose using whatever tools are necessary.

This is more about extending the body. This is not about becoming the lonely person with her drugs and her octopus porn... this is about sharing my drugs and my octopus porn.

Question from the audience wonders, with the corporate structure, will we have to rent orgasms in the future? She responds more that she is worried about how this stuff will be commodified. The more this happens, the more control corporations will have over how we get pleasure.

When asked about the negative repercussions of some of these technologies... her response is that as the greater culture gets more conservative, people are more wont to stay home anyways, so staying home and cruising isn't exactly what is making people want to stay home.

AE: Thomas Ballhausen: Push It! Fragments from the History of Adult Remakes

Thomas Ballhausen

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Ballhausen
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Ballhausen&sa=X&oi=translate&resnum=1&ct=result&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dthomas%2Bballhausen%26num%3D20%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Doff%26sa%3DG - this is the Google translation. Uh. Yeah. "Barking trichloroethylene tables" indeed.

He starts with a disambiguation of terms, explaining what "pornography" means. Pornography as archive of social history. He quotes from a film dictionary that says porn has no artistic or social values and is only for getting off, and disagrees with the definition. "Blockbuster" is a film with huge commercial success. During the 70s and 80s when the age of the blockbuster began, the idea of the pornographic blockbuster emerged. Along with this, remakes came along to exploit earlier success of former blockbusters.

Thomas' presentation is dense with references. I wish I could catch them all. When I sent in my application to speak, I was asked if I could provide a written talk ahead of time. Since I was doing a panel, this wasn't relevant for me, but hopefully there will be a written record of Thomas' talk so I can catch all the people he's quoting. It's very interesting, but hard to take notes on.

Saturn-Film was the first Austrian film production company to produce erotic films. They would go about through Europe and give screening nights. Similarly, a doctor was filming his autopsies that included nude female corpses. These films were banned in 1903, but were eventually allowed as Saturn productions so long as the words "for gentlemen only" were stamped on the films.

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_Film
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_Film&sa=X&oi=translate&resnum=2&ct=result&prev=/search%3Fq%3Djohann%2BSchwarzer%26num%3D20%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Doff%26sa%3DG

After this, Saturn became synonymous with pornography, and consumers would request films with "Viennese themes" or just more films from Saturn. In 1911, censorship shut down the Saturn company. 21 of their films were forbidden and destroyed (though some remain, and we are shown a clip of one of these). Much of what they did was remakes of previous French films.

Contemporarily, many films remake blockbusters such as Edward Penishands or Porn Wars, In Diana Jones, etc. One of the things this accomplishes is that it shields porn from some of the criticism sent towards it previously - by remaking non-sexual films, porn becomes less "porn" and more "adult entertainment." Video labels have started to crave prestige labels and public respect for the industry, so it becomes essential to add other features.

He gives us some visual examples from Star Wars/Porn Wars - he shows us first the Star Wars scene and then the Porn Wars scene. The scrolling text, different text. The defeat of the young Jedi with him kneeling by the Emperor is replaced with a young female Jedi giving head. We go through similar scenes in Pirates of the Caribbean and Pirates and Sin City and Sex City. It's fascinating how exactly the directors attempt to mimic the original scenes, but with added sex. They stayed within the same genres, and also preserved the formal and narrative strategies. With costume design, there is at least a visual thread to follow, even if the porn film costumes are somewhat ... less.

He concludes with these observations: big productions are on the rise; conventions of genres are preserved; formal and narrative strategies of the oroginal are preserved; possible loss of subversive material replaced by sex. It uses irony when it is given in the original, but adding sex to these films causes us to reinterpret their original themes. Still, like Star Wars takes itself very seriously, so Porn Wars does too (at least in the dialog).

AE: Amanda Williams: Sex and Computation in a Material World

Amanda is an old friend of mine. I met her in German class at my community college several years ago. She was working as a human computer interface specialist at Xerox, had just graduated from Stanford. She has a fabulous story about how she got into grad school - she blogged an in-depth review of a book she was really interested in, and when the author Googled himself... he found her review and invited her to come be his grad student. Good stuff. It's so great to see her again.

http://www.metamanda.com/
http://sexualinteractions.org

She says she will be speaking at the space around porn.

A couple of years ago, she was given a Sinulator as a gift by a boyfriend that they intended to use in the context of a long distance relationship. The website is kind of creepy, offering to let anyone control your sex toy over the internet! Um. Ew. There were a lot of cam girls offering to let you control their vibrator, etc etc. The interface for the Sinulator is really hideous... it's a "cockpit."


The heterosexism involved is pretty creepy as well, it's all constructed as a way for the active make to perform actions on the passive female.

"It really made me think... if I telefuck my partner, it's sex, but if I telefuck a stranger, it's porn plus plus?"

She references the panopticon. Watching these women and acting invisibly is an act of power, and in this context becomes a problem for gender studies. She quotes a theorist (Laura Mulvey http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Mulvey ) who writes about mainstream narrative cinema and how it provides options to watch women using the cinematic male gaze. She shows a clip from Fast Times in Ridgemont High, how a voyeur watches a woman and provides a fantasy about how she moves and interacts, and then in reality she is more of an awkward sixteen year old girl.

There is the construction of the spectators as being men watching, active male protagonists and then the passive viewed woman. It's an active/passive heterosexual division of visual labor. She quotes Walter Benjamin and Susan Buck-Morss on the flaneur and viewing. She is trying to argue that some acts are culturally coded as masculine and feminine, whether or not they are directly gendered acts. Attempting to design interfaces for sexual use, these cultural codes need to be considered.

Audacia Ray's book talks about teledildonics, and wonders why more women are not interested. Amanda says that cultural context matters, and the cultural context of the Sinulator's context is a sticky residue that clings to it no matter what better purpose she may use it for later.

Mulvey's views hold less true for television, and even less true online because it is so interactive, it's much more difficult to completely create a panopticon when the viewed can speak back. When getting a webcam, she began to consider some of these issues. She quotes tsenft. The use of webcams allows the subject to control her visibility, and not only her visibility, but the visibility of any aspects of self. The dialog between performer and audience really shifts. Even with a fairly anonymous audience, the relationship between viewed and viewer becomes more intimate.

Amanda lives far far away from her lover, and so they tried using a webcam for sexual interaction. She had thought it might be a transparent medium, but instead the webcam proved itself to be an awkward third party. Having a small mirror on the screen was very distracting. It is impossible to create the illusion of eye contact - you really can't look at the camera and the image of the other person on the screen at the same time. You can fake it well enough for a meeting with the cam on top of the monitor, but for more intimate contexts it is really lacking. She found the potential for creativity to set up strange images of herself with .jpg tattoos and stuff like that, or to delete the images she found less attractive... but ultimately, that divorces the experience from intimacy. Instead, she and her partner developed a really intimate language of eroticism between them, little body features that are beloved, big spaces meaning missing the partner, etc. The image is as much about invoking shared memory and imagnings as it is about the image itself. It was close enough to remap to haptic communication.

Nimio is a project that she made that glow when close together, ways of having objects that interact so that when two people are apart, these two objects can interact and become intimate and create intimate feelings for distanced partners. She shows us several other artists' work who create distance-touching objects. Thecla Schiphorst and Susan Kozell made this: http://lab.v2.nl/projects/whisper.html. Accessories for Lonely Men by Noam Toran http://www.noamtoran.com/.

Designing for erotic experience is a multisensory design problem. This is one of the ways in which designing for people with disabilities can become useful for people without those disabilities.

AE: Rose White: When correctly viewed, anything is lewd: An unintended consequence of Web 2.0

Rose is a friend of a friend, and she's super fabulous. This is the second time we've met. My wireless is down right at the moment, so not sure if I'll be able to get links or not.

Rose is speaking about Flickr perverts - people who use Flickr to find erotic images that the photographer may or may not be intending for such. One day, she found that a self portrait of hers had been added as a favorite by someone she didn't know. One person who had added it was a partner of hers, but the other was someone she didn't know at all. She looked at his favorites and saw that they were all images of women in silk scarves or bondage. It appears to be a fetish for this guy. This has happened to her with knee-high socks, which is apparently also a fetish for some. Among her photos, socked feet have been the most popular. Someone is going to jack off to her photos. As often happens... someone else's fetish turned into a paper, and here we are at AE.

These people finding and favoriting her photos are doing nothing wrong. In fact, they are model images of Flickr - they post photos of their own, look at other people's images, comment, friend people, etc etc. That said, a number of people find this creepy. A girl whose image was favorited by someone who appears to have a fetish of pretty girls wearing seatbelts in the backseats of cars got upset and blocked the guy. Similarly, a site called Plumpr uses Flickr's API to take public photos of plump women and posts them to admire because he finds them attractive. The creator of the site says he removes images when requested, but people are still upset about it. A woman who was upset by it responded by saying that the man should have asked first. Someone else said that it's public, but she responded that even publicly posting a picture to her Flickr account is different than publicizing it, and someone else publicizing it falls into the realm of creepy.

Posting pictures to Flickr is not like posting them to a personal webpage, but the whole Web 2.0 thing turns this into a social question.

There were Brazilian users of Orkut scouring the site looking for images of children, and then creating new accounts and posting these images claming that the photographed child is the creator of the profile. A lot of parents found this deeply disturbing, and essentially friends-locked their images so that "bad people" would not use their childs' images. Similarly, an active user of Flickr locked all her images because "perverts, weirdos and thieves" have been using her images. She had tried not to use child-related tags, but found that this did not change things.

Most users of Flickr enjoy sharing their images, a way of making new contacts, etc. Tagged content is visible content, and even if it's not tagged - if it's titled or described at all, it's searchable. Several people told Rose that they don't tag or comment on their own images at all so that perverts don't find them. With Web 2.0, security through obscurity loses any relevance as everything becomes searchable.

The sock people are having quite the controversy over some people finding these issues sexual. Another group has a rather interesting discussion: FOOT - No Kids, No Animals, No Objects, No Penises / Discuss - one foot fetishist suggests that others should not make sexual comments on non-sexually-intended images of feet, while others disagree.

She's yarnivore at Flickr, and invites anyone to contact her on this, rwhite@gc.cuny.edu.

Someone asks, "I've often seen the attitude that porn is bad, so looking at it is bad, but these pictures of socks are Not Porn so it's ok - your wife won't hate you, God still loves you, etc. Have you explored this?" Rose responds saying that a lot of these people are at least aware of their sexual interest in the images that they add as favorites, and if they are pretending to others that this is not an erotic interest, it's not apparent. A member of the audience asks if some people may be protesting innocence with the presumption that there won't be an issue with their Flickr account, a fear that admitting to sexual interest would potentially cause one's account to be reviewed or deleted. Rose says that Flickr seems not to do this, so while it might be a general sense of wanting to deflect attention, it's not from a specific experience.

What is interesting is that users of Flickr sometimes behave as if it is a somewhat private space, like a salon or a living room - but it's still the public web. In person, it would be inappropriate for someone random to approach you and say "I want to lick your boots" - but we've seen people on websites think that this is an absolutely acceptable thing to comment on someone's photos.

AE: Katherina Zakravsky: A Brief History of Cultural Genitals

We got food, and fabulous company, so we missed Thomas Edlinger's presentation on Porn and Art. Sad, but I think the break was worthwhile. Simiiarly, we arrived in the middle of Katherina's presentation on cultural genitals.

Here's one of her papers: http://www.peripherie3000.de/projects/colloquium-contributions/peripher_paper.doc/view

She is proposing extending Haraway's theories of the cyborg onto the genitals and gender in general.

Calling the body a function of the genitals (Freudian thoughts) is to call the line between production and reproduction into question - similarly sex and gender, body and sex. The fixation on genitals is a cultural issue.

To be in heaven is perfect lust, so the question of genitals in the afterlife is still interesting when we are not able to reproduce. St. Augustine apparently thought on this topic, and decided that we will in fact have genitals, but they will just be ornaments.

The American fixation on size is a type of animorphosis, an obsession with swelling and erecting more than the body itself. Interestingly, the commodification of the female genitals stays focused on the breasts, not so much on the vagina or vulva. There is no desire without an object, but the object is not alone - it stays involved in a game of relations and touching. Hitchcock said he could not make a porn film until they invent a new genital.

One of the modes of the cultural genitals is to invest the hands with this.

AE: Aaron Muszalski: Behind The (Green) Screen Door: Exploring the Untapped Potential of Digital Vis

Aaron Muszaleski is a digital effects artist, and rather a large internet presence. sfslim is pretty easy to Google, should you wish to find him.

http://www.fluxdesign.com/

We differentiate between visual effects and special effects. Special effects involve stuntmen and on-screen acts, while visual effects are post-production.

He shows us a picture of Jar Jar Binks in the movie, and then one of an animated version of him fucking a naked woman with giant breasts. This is renderpr0n. It's cheap, non photo-realistic, typically still images, often fetish-based or impossible (something you can't get an actor to do). Straddling the uncanny valley indeed.

Blue & green screen shooting is much cheaper, so this is sort of a hybrid between digital and non-digital actions. It's cheaper than building real sets or location shooting, and the action can take place anywhere. Another effect is that you can paint things out frame by frame - dust, logos, guide wires, scratches on props, tattoos. Yet another effect is the ability to splice scenes, so if a director doesn't like both actors in a single take, two takes can be stitched together so that the good take from one actor can meet the good take from the opposite actor. Similarly, they can remove continuity effors or stray crewmembers.

Digital cosmetic enhancement is important, given that HD reveals previously unseen skin imperfections. It can do blemish removal, augmentation scar removals. For porn - you could do condom removal. Since porn seems to sell better without condoms, but industry performers would prefer to work with condoms. This is one way that visual effects could be really useful for porn.

Digital doubles can do things that are impossible for a person to do or a camera to film. You can switch mid-scene from actor to digital double. Once you make the investment in developing, you can animate forever after. It can look like anything or anyone - this can be photorealistic and any sort of creature. This technology can be used in future porn in numerous way. Perhaps in the future when sex is more accepted in regular films, actors who don't wish to perform sexually could act in the rest of a movie and have sex scenes done by digital doubles.

Editpr0n is a way of remixing pornographic versions of mainstream, non-porn films - you could put in a copy of say Harry Potter and a hardcore sex program and it could remix it to create Hardcore Harry Potter. Digital Hentai could create photo-realistic tentacle porn (mmm hott).

One of the stranger areas this leads into is virtual morality. If you can create any photorealistic sex scene you want, then you have to start wondering what is and is not ok. In the recent version of Lolita, they used a fourteen year old actress. They wanted sexuality to be obvious, but the actress was illegal. They filmed her wearing a body stocking over her breasts with black marks where her nipples would be, and then filmed again with an 18 year old body double. A digital artist cut the legal breasts and stitched them onto the illegal actress. Now that you can create images of illegal sex acts without actually doing anything illegal... how can we handle this?

Recent porn Pirates had a budget said to have exceeded $1 Million and used over 300 VFX shots. The released it in both X and R rated versions. It was still an hour and a half long even with all the hardcore sex cut out. The packaging looks very much like Pirates of the Caribbean, so it was intended to piggyback on that success. In its release year (2005), Pirates outsold all other adult films 2 to 1, and it's the most awarded title in AVN history. It was also one of the first adult films on HD-DVD (they wanted to do Blu-Ray but Sony said that they won't do porn, this is really dumb of them).

Why don't they do this more often. Typical film budgets are huge - regular blockbusters are usually about $150M. Pornographic DVDs are usually at 100k or less, and renderpr0n is super cheap. Most typical indie, big films, and mid-range features all seem to make about 7 times their cost. Pirates made about 15-20 times its cost - which is a good ratio, but given that regular porn is much cheaper to make and often goes very quickly, this is still fairly low in terms of porn.

This seems like a good direction to go in, though, because it can broadening markets for pornography. Also, expectations of quality are increasing, so there is a need to differentiate yourself in a market saturated with cheap and free porn. The infinity of fetishes stabilizes the cheaper porn market, because the smaller the niche, the less potential market and budget for film.

This is likely to show up in the future because there's a greater demand for VFX and a lot more VFX artists who are trained for this. Because of the glut in the market for artists, wages are dropping and outsourcing and offshoring is becoming a big deal too. The more cheap artists looking for work, the more likely these people are to move into porn. The porn industry is ripe for VFX artists. They can join in on the ground floor and rise quickly.

AE: Timothy Archibald: Sex Machines: Photographs and Interviews. How small town inventors are changi

Timothy Archibald is a photographer who recently published a book on home inventors of sex machines.

http://www.timothyarchibald.com/
http://thesexmachinebook.blogspot.com/
http://www.amazon.com/Sex-Machines-Photographs-Timothy-Archibald/dp/0976082233

He wanted to do a piece on inventors, and wound up being interested in sex machine inventors. There's not too much to blog here because the presentation is mostly a slide show and quotes from his interviews, but his photographs are fucking fantastic and I highly recommend his book. It's a little under $20 on Amazon. He has 9 ratings - 8 of them all 5 stars, and one gave it 1 star because you totally don't see any naked women or sex and OMG it's all home made and where's the porn???eleventyone! Clearly a winner.

So yeah, buy the book because this is made of win. I got a copy from him tonight, and it's a really great book. The interviews are great, and the photographs are excellent (they remind me a lot of Lee Friedlander's work, and he's one of my favorite photographers).

AE: Panel: Thomas Roche, Violet Blue, Kyle Machulis, Johannes Grenzfurthner: Porn, Tech and Creativi

This is kind of the all-star panel of the weekend. Johannes is one of the main people who organized the conference, Thomas was on my panel last night, and Kyle and Violet have both given other talks that you can see my notes on elsewhere on my lj.

Thomas: http://thomasroche.com/
Violet: http://www.tinynibbles.com
Kyle: http://www.nonpolynomial.com/
Johannes: http://www.monochrom.at

They're speaking on how technology changes the erotic creative process.

Johannes sees himself less as a technician and more as a keen cultural observer. Nowadays it's nearly impossible not to be creative on one hand, but on the other hand we know that 95% of culture is bullshit. Something like YouTube for example - there's a little bit of utopia in this capitalist big money thing like YouTube because people can put stuff online. You have to try to find a way to do things without completely losing your face.

Thomas asks, would a conference like this even have been possible 20 years ago?

Johannes says back then, it would have been a much more narrow band of people - back then, I just used FidoNet, and it would have taken like an email a day or something.

Violet says we'd be talking more about books and films, not so much about machines or DVDs or any of that.

Kyle says that if we didn't have a conference like this soon, geeks like me are going to sit in our basements so far ahead of the rest of society... and then when we come out, the rest of the world is just not going to understand us at all. Everyone fucks! You should have an influence on it. It's worth bridging the geeks right now. He says he has worked with some digital artists who took a photograph of his face and animated it and made it 3d and made him look like he was speaking Japanese and sneeze, and it freaked him out. (This is an alarming possibility from Rose's Flickr perverts....)

Violet says that people doing erotic work are now running into distribution and terms of use problems. iTunes has corralled most podcasts now, and iTunes wants to toe the line so it's been a big problem for people who want to podcast. Similarly, Violet is having problems with self-publishing because companies don't want to publish or sell the content. Regular distribution channels have their exclusive distribution contracts. Violet wants to make an audio book, so she pitched it to her agents. They said "that's a little too racy" so she decided she could just do it herself. When she looked into it, it turns out that it's all done through several companies who all have exclusive contracts with each other, and it's all DRM'd and goes through Audible (a subscription service), and and and.... So she could do it herself, but without distribution, no one will hear it. A lot of the way she's been able to figure it out is by thinking about the end user, something that most people aren't doing. How cool would it be if you could do an audio book of all this hot read erotica that you could put on shuffle... but right now, audio books are all one big file and you can't do this. Within the next 5 years, she thinks that iTunes is going to be a much smaller player.

Thomas says that he's avoided iTunes because it doesn't work on his system, but he's luckily been able to find good podcasts without them.

Johannes says he can't comment too much on the future, but it does seem like people will be avoiding technological restrictions like DRM and whatnot. There are many people thinking about content, and about technology, but not that many people thinking about distribution and contracts. The most interesting battles of the future are legal battles on the one hand, and on the other there's the battle to get people to actually do stuff. There's a culture of pessimism and fear, especially in America. On the one hand, it's bad to just say we'll just be all happy and do stuff and whatever, but on the other hand we can end up in total cultural pessimism and just give up.

Violet forgot to mention videoblogging - now that there are sites like YouPorn and etc... the things Fleshbot is getting a high response for is less and less traditional porn and more for the amateur stuff. She mentiones someone who was working on a Copy Left porn project.

Kyle says it seems like we will get to the point of peronalized porn. You're sort of throwing your movie or whatever out there and just hoping people will pay, but in the future there will be a sort of porn 'set' where you can plug in the parts that really turn you on.

Thomas talks about Poser porn, software that allows people to make rendered porn very easily. There are big communities that make this, share it, etc. Thomas started out writing porn novels when he was about 18. The marketing problems involved in this have really killed the erotic novel as a medium. The result is going to be more DIY porn, people who will get dayjobs and do what they want and give it away, etc. Sims erotica - he plays a clip for us. The point he makes about this is that it was made by a woman - for years we've been told that women don't like porn, don't look at porn, whatever... but the more DIY porn you get, the more that constructs a sexuality and a reinforcement of desire that is going to be really interesting.

Johannes says that a lot of what's on YouPorn is kind of awkward and not really that great, so it will take a couple of years before this sort of takes over the market. It might be an entirely different market.

Thomas says that people who write things just to turn themselves on, it tends to ape mainstream sex roles. People become visionaries by either just being really amazingly good at the mainstream roles, or more by coming up with a personal touch and something a little different.

Violet says that people are taking a lot of porn stereotypes and pushing them, playing with them. It's interesting that a lot of slash writers are female.

Thomas gives an overview of slash. These people are retelling stories from mainstream media, but they're twisting it and making it their own.

Violet says that, getting away from the 'women liking romantic porn' stereotype.. a lot of slash is very intense, sometimes even violent or transgressive. A friend of hers does Harry Potter slash doing chat to do fairly extreme sexual things to each other in chat... they had a meetup. It was her friend all in black, and a bunch of suburban housewives.

Kyle says that there are still people who really want to be these porn stereotypes too, people who really want to be the big-dicked guy, the big-titted blonde fucking in a car. Are people ever going to figure it out, or will someone have to help them?

Thomas mentions that trans identities get a lot of exploration through internet and net.sex -a lot of people play in cross-gendered spaces, and some people find that this is a good way for some to get comfortable with real-world trans identities.

Thomas says that the easy availability of the equipment to make porn seems to have changed the actual commercial porn that's made. It seems to be working somewhat away from features and towards more episodic and amateur-aesthetic work. Violet says that this is why she wanted to bring Eon McKai here, to talk to someone in mainstream porn who has been moving in a different direction. Johannes says this is just the beginning, this easy tech is just starting to change culture and sex.

Violet adds that fantasies are often much better than realities. People may experiment up to the point of trying out the reality, and possibly find ourselves not enjoying ourselves or just in an uncomfortable situation.... A lot of porn is fantasy that people really just don't want to interact.

Thomas reiterates his point from last night that porn can sometimes encourage people too much, it can get people a little too involved in something that may not be safe.

Violet says that one of the real worries is people not paying attention to safer sex precautions.

Johannes says that one of the reasons we're doing this conference is to talk about this stuff.

Thomas asks, what are (the panelists) most excited about that they couldn't have done a few years ago?

Violet answers, getting the type of porn that I think is hot that I want to put out into the world... what has me the most excited is to continue to break down the way that it's distributed and disseminated. She was the second female blogger.

Kyle says he wants to get tech as cheap as possible so people can automate whatever the hell they want.

Johannes says he's excited about going to sleep. Free mankind? Something. Heh.

Thomas says he is most excited about technology opening up the ability to make money writing with less and less effort.

Johannes talks about dead media, the death of media, and how that works. If you know that, then you have the brightest possible future.