After seeing the movie The Motorcycle Diaries, a 2004 film celebrating a young Che Guevara, traveling in South America, and developing his political views, I started a new blog entitled Bizmo Diaries.
I couldn’t see myself traveling North America, or anywhere else for that matter, on a motorcycle, but I was anticipating a Nomadland lifestyle (a much later movie, 2020) centered around a bus or van.
We conventionally call these “RVs” or “recreational vehicles” and associated them with elderly folks enjoying their retirement. I was imagining a working lifestyle however, in the sense of not retired, and so “business mobile” (or bizmo for short) made the most sense.
I wasn’t to be the only wandering Bizmo fleet pilot and crew however. We would caravan. We would recruit. We would go to areas needing assistance with logistics and resource coordination, and provide services.
In the background would be our patrons, our sponsors, clued in by video streaming and aware of our circumstances. Each bizmo would be a source of engaging programming. Donors could see exactly how their donations were being used. Sponsors would get their products placed, and see how they performed in the field.
These patrons might be young people with aspirations to join us in the field eventually. Older people would likewise be looking for next tours of duty.
In the meantime, when not joining us in the field, the viewer-investors (speculators, not just spectators) do their homework in order to figure out which projects seem the most worthy, and channel their donations accordingly.
If all these templates seem familiar, and conjure images of Kickstarter and so on, that’s no accident. These dreams of the future have all materialized. By 2023, we have a lot of this infrastructure already in place.
But where do viewers find the wherewithall to make donations? Usually the most well off get to think in terms of donations and journalists speak of the “donor class” as the one politicians must please to be elected to, and to stay in, their offices.
My model wants to give everyone a sense of steering the action by donating funds.
By recording donations to one’s profile, one develops a persona, a reputation, around one’s chosen projects and causes, facilitating networking with other like-minded.
Many states have implemented computer game gambling, meaning games of chance that might also involve skill, such that the state gets most of the proceeds. Players get rewarded once in awhile, incentivizing them to keep playing. The state, recipient of a net positive income from all these computer games, gets to decide how to spend the funds.
In this new parallel model, the player gets to channel the winnings, based on credits earned, often with matching and/or amplifying funds.
The higher a player’s score, the bigger the hero, the more the donation going to whatever team in the field a player chooses, quite possibly a bizmo crew.
Whereas one might easily imagine playing these philanthropic games from home, thereby building one’s profile, my fantasies have focused on what I call “coffee shops”. The imagery hearkens back to Paris, France and the existentialist movement.
In Britain too, coffee shops represented a neutral ground where cronies could meet and compare notes, while sharing advice and philosophies.
These shops would have an arcade flavor. Indeed, we have a prototype in the neighborhood known as QuarterWorld. The place has a full bar, in addition to coffee. Oregon does not yet permit the purveying of some categories of controlled substance, but these laws have been changing.
My plans for arcade-like charitable game playing extend to commerical office space situations, where we install game pods in place of cubicles. We have shared restrooms and cafeterias. Gyms. Gift shops.
The games themselves often serve a didactic function, i.e. they focus on various topics, such as chemistry, biology, geometry (STEM), history and theater (PATH).
When I worked at McGraw-Hill in the educational games department, as someone who assessed what indie game designers sent in (this was in the 1980s), I saw a lot of promising simulations.
For example, I remember one of the games was about fighting the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). It came on a floppy disk and maybe only used 256 colors, yet it taught the player about T cells and all the rest of it. Scaled up, in terms of complexity, and updated to 2020s technology, one could easily imagine teaching much of organic chemistry, or anatomy and physiology, or public health, by these means.
High scores translate into research funding over which the players have some discretionary powers. Learn by giving.
So are we blending institutions here? Is a video poker bar starting to sound more and more like an investment bank plus university. Yes, that’s the idea.
Mix and match existing templates to form some new institutions, taking up some floorspace in the process.
Another part of this vision: the screens. Brian Eno’s Ambient Music for Airports was an inspiration, but here we’re providing ambient animations. This is where my idea of a “hypertoon” fits in.
Imagine a “geometry cartoon” that starts with a ball, which morphs into an icosahedron, which then becomes the nucleocapsid of a virus with RNA or DNA coiled up inside. That’s called a “scenario” connecting key frame A (the ball) to key frame B (the virus).
The hypertoon consists of maybe hundreds of such morphing scenarios (edges) connected any number of nodes (key frames). The “play head” travels within this network (graph) somewhat randomly, as each key frame is likewise a switchpoint where many scenarios meet. The segues are smooth.
The viewer sees repetition but nothing so simple as a loop. We call this a “reverie” i.e. a sequence of scenarios selected on the fly at the many switchpoints.
Hypertoon reveries might be about anything. However the ones I’ve been working on and prototyping tend to explore the space of Synergetics, i.e. R. Buckminster Fuller’s “explorations in the geometry of thinking”.
These help set the mood in our Coffee Shops Network and connote “philosophy happening”. A positive futurism is implied.
Fuller’s geometry touches on the microarchitecture of the virus, as well as on carbon-60 and world maps showing global data. We say “geometry” but we also mean “geography” and Spaceship Earth, our global university.
For more on the Coffee Shops Network idea, with more detailed business plans, check out this blog.