Lately much of my work has been converging on mythology. This is kind of weird given that I’m a technology writer. But mythology, specifically the way mythic and non-mythic stories are structured, has cropped up in gamification, customer experience design, and even picking where to aim a business model. Before I can move on to those topics, I need an argumentative Lego block that I can plug into future arguments. This is that block.

There’s a reason why James Cameron’s Avatar made a ton of money. People accuse Avatar of having the same plot as Pocahontas, FernGully, Dances With Wolves, The Last Samurai, Titanic and many others, but this isn’t really accurate. Instead, Avatar and the others have the same structure: they’re all about a man who leaves home, discovers a new way of life, changes, and rejects his origins. This is a very old–and very reliable–story structure. In other words, a myth.

Today we think of myths as fairy tales–which is to say we think of them very little, and think very little of them. That’s a shame. Myths are narrative structures that often deliver worthwhile messages: don’t take candy from strangers, help people out when they’re hurt, and don’t ever give man fire. These stories aren’t factual, but in their fiction is truth about the human condition. They’ve survived for thousands of years because they deliver powerful messages competently.

It was in 1949 that English professor Joseph Campbell published The Hero with a Thousand Faces and unified almost all of mythology under one framework, the monomyth. Once you learn about the monomyth, an optional checklist of 17 plot points, you see it everywhere–here’s a quick overview that uses The Matrix as an example. But the monomyth is typically at the core of fantasy stories and most stories aren’t fantastical. If we strip away the fantasy elements, we’re left with a structure that’s about a person doing something new and changing. Dan Harmon, the man behind the outstanding TV comedy Community, has boiled the monomyth down to its core. By examining the plots of countless movies and television shows, Harmon has derived the eight steps that structure a satisfying story. If you watch the show you’ll probably agree that he’s on to something.

These structures are probably the product of something like evolution. Before we had the written word, myths had to be told and retold orally, and were invariably tweaked from generation to generation and teller to teller. Stories with bad changes weren’t retold, and those with good changes were told more. Our minds both crave and create meaning, and these narratives structure events into a causal order that makes sense to us and resonate powerfully–probably because our language and psychology evolved alongside the stories we tell.

Despite their ubiquity, myths are seldom acknowledged and rarely appreciated. But they’ve lept from static media like books and movies into interactive media like video games. Video games are at their core experiences, so it stands to reason that mythic structures have a place in the “consumer experiences” that marketers are now obsessed with designing in search of margin. It’s something vaguely similar to mythology that’s also resulting in the pile of bullshit that’s popularly referred to as “gamification.”

I’ll look at these topics in future blog posts, and probably use this thinking to make fun of Michael Bay.

There’s a problem with television that’s keeping us from enjoying our favorite shows on our own terms: the business model is really stupid. So stupid in fact that we should take a minute to reflect on just how stupid it is.

If your favorite show is on network TV, you are not that show’s customer. Production houses make shows and sell them to networks. Networks broadcast the shows they think can get them the largest or most valuable audiences. Networks then sell the attention of those audiences to advertisers. This means that there are two layers of middle-men adding cost between you and the shows you love. The problem with Hollywood isn’t the content, it’s the middle-men. Why not cut them out?

So here’s the idea:

Though it doesn’t yet get enough credit, but Kickstarter is a huge, huge deal. Kickstarter  has implemented the generic model of crowdfunding in a way that works for certain types of products. With some tweaking, we could collectively fund TV shows.

With Kickstarter, each project has just one funding threshold–this isn’t sufficient here. Instead, we need to break a television budget into a collection of sub-budgets and crowdfund each of them. For each category–writing, acting, production, editing, marketing and so on–three budget alternatives should be prepared: bare-bones, comfortable, and dream.

Funders can then support the project in up to two ways: they can pour money in to get the entire show to a minimum viable budget, or they can spend money on parts of the project that they care about most. If I want special effects, I can kick some money into the VFX budget. If I really care about the actors, I can kick in some money so that the project can afford Hugh Laurie. Like Kickstarter, if the total pot never gets big enough, I’m never charged. Funders set the conditions under which their money is unlocked.

It may work out that out that people care more about writing and Bryan Cranston than cameras, but you know what, I’d watch a show with him that was shot and edited on an iPhone. So long as each part of the project reaches the minimum required funding, the show can be made. Writers and stars can still demand whatever salaries they like, and the crowd will decide whether or not they’re worth it. Since whatever is produced is released online, distribution costs are very very low.

This model also pushes the cost of marketing onto the audience: if I’ve put $20 into a show and want it to be great, the best thing for me to do is to convince my friends to watch and fund it too. Shows with supportive audiences would grow quickly. If you wanted to get fancy, you could even do some sort of revenue sharing so that good taste early-on is rewarded–this would really encourage people to talk up their shows to their friends. Funders could use their dollars to directly impact the content of the show.

There’s also an opportunity for marketers at the table here too. By donating wardrobe, props, equipment and the like, marketers can take cost out of the production, meaning that every fan-funded dollar goes that much further. If I knew that Mad Men was better because of Banana Republic, that increases how much I value their brand.

That’s the core idea. It’s still rough and I’ve left a lot of thinking and nuance out, but it’s still far less stupid than what we have now. For whatever it’s worth, I release this business model under the GPL, though if you do think it’s good enough to do, I hope you pay me to come talk with you.

And if the folks behind Community ever tried this, I know a bunch of people who would fund them.

So the Kony 2012 video doesn’t exactly jive with reality. There’s still some really interesting and important stuff at play here: we’re in danger of letting slacktivism appear legitimate.

It used to be that if you cared about something enough to share your thoughts with your elected representative, it took a good deal of effort to do so: you picked up the phone, wrote a letter, or visited them at their office. That’s to say, you paid for the message to be delivered with your time.

Today, and in the Kony 2012 example, the information delivery cost is basically zero: it’s not at all inconvenient to send a message to the powers to be “demanding” action. This means a whole lot more messages are going to be sent–and people will speak up about issues that they cared about, but not enough about to write a letter. Given how easy it is to write a letter, we need to be honest with ourselves about how little we actually care about most of what happens in the world.

The Kony 2012 campaign risks making slacktivism appear legitimate in two ways: politically and socially.

1. Slacktivism will be politically legitimized if politicians actually respond to the campaign and instigate military involvement. Clearly this is the goal, but given that the campaign requests going into Uganda for a guy who hasn’t even been there in six years, this kind of response would be to placate misinformed constituents rather than to actually do good. The situation overseas is far too nuanced to be solved by a populist reaction before attention drifts to the next thing.
2. No matter what happens in reality, if Kony’s caught, social media will credit itself for capturing him. If he were captured today by people not even aware of the campaign, social media users would pat themselves on the back even though their behavior had no causal link to the outcome they seek. This socially legitimizes slacktivism in the minds of the participants, meaning that we’ll see more of this behavior. It’s dangerous to incorrectly ascribe consequences to your behavior.

The instigating video itself was incredibly well produced, and the fact that a 30-minute video has been watched over 100 million times is remarkable. The problem is that stuff like this only works the first time. Invisible Children found a new formula for social media secret sauce, and soon everyone will find it tastes bland. The solution proposed by the Kony video isn’t systemic or sustainable; this one shot campaign has been used on the wrong issue.

A country only has so many resources, politically legitimized slacktivism means those resources will be at the whim of whatever issue is currently à  la mode. People want to do good and make the world better and social media is probably the second-best tool for them to do so.

Social media is a lever, not a magic wand. There’s a big difference between clicking share on facebook and actually investing in growth, like through Kiva.

Seriously, go sign up on Kiva right now, they’ll even give you $25 to get started.